For Dr.King: Coltrane, Hidden Texts, and "Alabama," 1—Background Information

It’s been over 60 years since Coltrane’s profound recording of “Alabama,” and in recent years I have made some progress toward understanding it. As you’ll see in today’s essay and in Parts 2 and 3, I believe that I have “cracked the code” of this piece. I have not fully deciphered it, but I can now show how this piece is connected with the words of Dr. King.

Coltrane did not like to express his political opinions publicly. For example, in August 1966, when pressed by historian Frank Kofsky, on tape, about seeing Malcolm X speak, Coltrane would only say that he was “quite impressed.” So the fact that he recorded his piece just about two months after the shocking 1963 church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama is significant. Still, he was not ready to express his feelings verbally, and in fact I do not know of a single instance where he said that he wrote the piece in response to the bombing.

Even the Black activist Amiri Baraka, who wrote the notes for the original release when he was still known by his birth name, Leroi Jones, could not get a political statement out of Coltrane. Baraka even compared “Alabama” to the serenity of “Slow Dance” or “After The Rain.” Then he said, “I didn't realize until now what a beautiful word ‘Alabama’ is.” So, at first he was suggesting that it was another serene, meditative number. But then, about the song’s political connection, Baraka wrote:

[The producer] Bob Thiele asked Trane if the title "had any significance to today's problems." I suppose he meant literally. Coltrane answered, "It represents, musically, something that I saw down there translated into music from inside me." …The whole is a frightening emotional portrait of some place, in these musicians' feelings. If that "real" Alabama was the catalyst, more power to it, and may it be this beautiful, even in its destruction.

Notice that Baraka says “if” this piece is inspired by the real “Alabama”—he’s not certain, because Coltrane hadn’t confirmed that. But he understands that the piece communicates not only serenity, but also has a frightening and destructive aspect.

It might seem that instrumental music, lacking words, would not be the most effective medium for a statement of outrage. But, to most of us, Coltrane’s message came through loud and clear. For example, in June 2020, Ismail Muhammad, a critic from Oakland, California, wrote in The Paris Review that he totally “gets” the saxophone scream at the end of the recording, and Coltrane’s reluctance to make a verbal statement: “Sometimes, you’d rather scream and storm than have to explain anything at all.”

Ever since it became known, partly through my work, that on “Psalm,” Coltrane is reading his poem “A Love Supreme” on the saxophone (as I have detailed again, with new information, in my series about that album), people have been trying to find words to other pieces of his. And as we’ll see, “Alabama” is the top candidate for that. But in searching for words to Coltrane’s compositions, people have often confused three different musical situations, which I call Songs with Lyrics, Pieces Inspired by Words, and Pieces with Hidden Texts:

Songs with Lyrics are the most straightforward. Every song on the Ballads album, for instance, originally had lyrics. Every song from every Broadway show has lyrics. And so on. One could say that “Psalm” is a little like the common practice of playing a Broadway song as an instrumental, keeping the words in mind and phrasing the melody as though one were singing. Lester Young famously was the first to stress this, when he told Nat Hentoff: “A musician should know the lyrics of the songs he plays, too.” There are hundreds of jazz performances that do this, as did Coltrane himself on, for example, the album Ballads. But “Psalm” is a special case.

Pieces Inspired by Words: The late French journalist Michel Delorme, having seen Coltrane’s poem in the liner notes to A Love Supreme, asked him, “Do you often write poems?” Coltrane replied (in my translation): “From time to time; I try. This is the longest one that I ever wrote but certain pieces on the album Crescent are also poems… I sometimes proceed in this manner because it’s a good approach to musical composition.”

This is interesting. I take it that Coltrane means he likes to “proceed” from the poem to the music — that is, to write the poem first, as he did for “Psalm.” And he finds that to be a “good approach” to composing, because instead of abstractly poking around and waiting for a melody to hit you, a poem can lead in several ways to a piece of music. For example, as in “Psalm,” the music can be a syllabic setting of the poem. Or a poem can indeed become the lyrics for a song.

There are also pieces somewhere between the above two options: music that follows the mood or flow or phrasing of the words, but that makes no attempt to represent the words one syllable at a time, nor breaks into full-blown song. Without knowing the texts involved, how can one determine the likely relationship between text and music? The answer is simple: by listening!

The lyrical, wide ranging melody of “Wise One,” to choose one example, is nothing like the chanting back and forth on a few notes found in “Psalm,” and he plays it differently the second time (starting at 1:37). So even though we don’t know the text of “Wise One” — and as we’ll see shortly, according to Coltrane, there was one — we can feel sure in saying it’s not a syllabic setting of a poem, that is, not one note per syllable.

Is it worthwhile hunting around to find the poem that inspired “Wise One”? Probably not, for two significant reasons: First, as we’ll explore here, “Alabama” is the only known instance where Coltrane took someone else’s poem or text and played it on his saxophone. He said that he liked to write his own poems, and he meant it. The poem had to be personal to him, to be truly one with the music he was writing — not from someone else’s experience.

Second, with pieces in this middle area — inspired by words, but not chanting them one syllable at a time— there are literally thousands of texts that might seem to vaguely fit. Without knowing the poem that Coltrane intended, one cannot possibly guess at the text.

Pieces with Hidden Texts: The third category concerns pieces that involve “reading” words, like “Psalm,” with a one-syllable-at-a-time chanting style. Besides “Psalm,” are there in fact other examples of Coltrane “speaking words” to us on the saxophone? The answer is Yes! But we don’t have the texts. That’s why I call these “Pieces with Hidden Texts.”

As with so many things, Duke Ellington did this earlier, or at least something like it. In the 1957 suite Such Sweet Thunder, which he and Billy Strayhorn co-wrote, there is a piece entitled “"Up and Down, Up and Down (I Will Lead Them Up and Down) {Puck}.” On this, Clark Terry plays on the trumpet Puck’s line “Lord, what fools these mortals be.” You can clearly hear those words. Terry plays this sentence near the beginning of the piece (you can even tell that he “says” “Lord” twice), and then in a squeaky “voice” at the end. Here are both of them:

Also, in my series here on this suite, I shared with you the information that Such Sweet Thunder has four movements called “Sonnets,” which follow the rhythms of Shakespeare’s sonnets. However, since all the sonnets use the same rhythms, these pieces would fit any of the sonnets and are not tied to specific poems. (As I showed there, it was John Dankworth who took one of Duke’s melodies and set it to an entire Shakespeare sonnet, just as lyrics are set to a song.)

Now, returning to the interview where our late friend Delorme asked John about poems, his full response was, “…certain pieces on the album Crescent are also poems, like ‘Wise One,’ ‘Lonnie’s Lament,’ ‘The Drum Thing.’” (These were all recorded in April 1964.)

“Wise One,” which we’ve already discussed, and “Lonnie’s Lament” are both beautiful ballads, actually quite similar to each other in mood. But these are not “readings” of poems, so I would put them in the middle category, Pieces Inspired by Words.

However, on the third piece, I distinctly hear Coltrane say on his saxophone “The drum thing” at the end of the opening (2:07) and closing (7:08). And the entire sax part sounds like a chant. And—this is a key point—he plays it the same way at the beginning and the end. So I believe there is a hidden text for this one. Let’s listen to the last seconds of the opening statement, ending with three notes, “the drum thing”:

And here, at the end of the piece, he plays exactly the same thing:

Do you hear what I mean? It’s not a “tune”—it’s a chant. And it’s not an improvisation—it’s planned and memorized.

And, from August 1965, “Attaining” is perhaps the closest to “Psalm” of any piece I know. The last three notes at 1:19 and 2:43 and 8:59 say “Attaining.” Here are all three moments:

Here are two more excerpts from “Attaining.” Each one starts with the same five notes, followed by “Thank you Lord” and “Amen.” The first is from the end of the opening statement (2:47), and the second is at the end of the closing statement of the piece (10:26). Notice how similar they are. This is not free improvising—he is chanting the specific words:

After the last “Amen,” he improvises freely. I’m going to play that last “Amen” again, but I’ll let the recording continue this time. Please listen carefully and notice the difference between his “chanting” and his free improvising. Remember, after the three notes of “Amen,” this one is not a chant:

In general, when Coltrane is playing fast notes, or quick little embellishments, we can assume that he’s not thinking of words. On the other hand, when he plays slowly and stays within a range of a few notes, he often is reciting a text—especially if he repeats it the same way at the end, which shows that he’s not simply improvising.

There are a few more cases where Coltrane is chanting “hidden” texts, that is, texts that are unknown to us. For example, it sounds to me like Coltrane is chanting something on “Song of Praise.” Let’s listen to the beginning of the short version that was recorded in 1964 but only issued many years later. (Significantly, it was recorded at the same sessions as most of Crescent, where he said he had poems in mind.)

He plays exactly the same chant at the end of this short version. And he also plays the same chant on the originally released long version after the long solo bass introduction. That is the one that was recorded in May 1965, and released on The John Coltrane Quartet Plays. Here I have combined those two studio versions—you will hear the 1965 version on the left channel and the 1964 recording on the right:

It’s absolutely clear that he’s playing the same thing, the same unknown text. There is only a note or two different (at the end)—even though these were recorded a year apart. But, typical of his approach to performances, on the “live” 1965 radio broadcast of “Song of Praise,” he improvises freely, only chanting a little bit here and there.

And I mentioned earlier, in my series on A Love Supreme, that the opening of his tenor sax solo on “Acknowledgement” is similar from take to take, and that that makes me think that he had words in mind—say, from 1:02 to 1:20 on the original album version. But after that beginning, the style is not the chanting style.

So, let’s add “The Drum Thing,” “Attaining,” “Song of Praise” and possibly the beginning of “Acknowledgement” to the list of pieces where Coltrane chants his poetry on the saxophone. But please don’t waste your time trying to fit existing poems to this music. Unless Coltrane’s son, the noted saxophonist Ravi, discovers clearly titled, handwritten pieces of paper with these poems, we will never ever know all the words Coltrane had in mind for these pieces.

I hope all of this background is of interest to you for its own sake. But it’s also relevant—because in the next essay, we’ll apply all this information to take a close look at “Alabama,” Dr. King, and Coltrane. It will be online in a few days.

All the best,
Lewis

P.S. A different version of this essay was originally posted at WBGO.org in 2020. For their help with that post, I would like to thank my editor there, Nate Chinen, and the following kind people: Meghan Weaver, Research Assistant at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University; Steve Rowland, co-producer (with Larry Abrams) of the award-winning 5-hour radio series Tell Me How Long Trane’s Been Gone; and Medd Typ Persson for our online discussion.