Monument Eternal: The Music of Alice Coltrane

Notes

Notes 3 Introduction 1 For instance, in Ken Burns’s popular documentary Jazz: A History of America’s Music (2000), as well as in the film The Story of Jazz (1993), the contributions of John Coltrane represent the end of jazz’s stylistic evolution. The divergent genres since the late 1960s, such as fusion and free jazz, are commonly viewed as ruptures in tradition. Post-Coltrane musicians are commonly presented outside the fold. See, for instance, Gridley 1991. 2. See James 1999, which calls attention to the radicalism of “black protofeminists ” such as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. 3. Bernice Johnson Reagon, a founding member of the musical group Sweet Honey and the Rock, has published several musicological works that explore African American vocal traditions. See Reagon 1992, 2001. 4. See James 1999, hooks 1981, and Wallace 1982. 5. Sun Ra was perhaps the only other jazz musician who had this kind of iconoclastic and otherworldly persona. For a comprehensive study of Sun Ra’s music and his mysticism, see Szwed 1997. 6. See, for example, Koskoff 2001. 7. Drawing on the concept of hegemony, Slobin calls attention to the ways in which these structures are both internalized and contested. 8. For a further account of the place of testifying in African American culture, see Smitherman 1986. 9. Historical overviews that have been crucial to my research include Jean Humez ’s edition of Jackson 1981, Andrews 1986, and Collier-Thomas 1998. 10. Haywood appropriates the term “prophesying” to describe this justiceoriented aspect of their work and defines prophesying as “a perceived mandate from God to spread his word in order to advance a conscious or unconscious political agenda” (17). 11. See Foster 1993, Braxton 1989, and Douglass Chin 2001. 12. “Womanist” is a word Alice Walker (1982) coined to refer to a bold, spiritually minded, and humanistic brand of feminism resulting from the African American experience. 111 13. See the works cited in the previous footnote, as well as Connor 1991 and Baker, Alexander, and Redmond 1991. 14. Music historians have discussed this persistent attitude toward black Christian worship. For instance, writing on the early cultural contact between whites and blacks, Eileen Southern has stated: “nowhere in the history of black experience in the United States was the clash of cultures-the African versus the European-more obvious than in the differing attitudes taken toward ritual dancing and spirit possession ” (Southern 1983, 171). For a discussion of the strategies jazz writers have used to make jazz a highbrow art, see DeVeaux 1991. 15. See, for example, Jost 1974, Dean 1992, and Litweiler 1993. 16. See, for instance, Baraka 1963 and 1970, Sidran 1971, and Kofsky 1998. 17. Scholars who have made preliminary inquiries into the political dimensions of the spiritual jazz of the sixties include Kelley 2002 and Monson 2007. 1. God’s Child in the Motor City The epigraph to this chapter quotes from my 2001 interview with Alice Coltrane. 1. See Sugrue 1996, 43, for a discussion of Detroit’s reputation as “the northernmost Southern City.” 2. These and later population figures are from the U.S. Bureau of the Census. 3. Prior to the Great Migration of blacks from the South, between 1915 and 1930, most of the roughly 6,000 blacks in Detroit belonged to what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “talented tenth.” This small upper class were educated professionals-lawyers , doctors, schoolteachers and members of the clergy-who earned a good income and lived in “well-appointed homes” (Ricks 1960, 98). By 1920, the community had changed dramatically. According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, more than 40,000 blacks lived in Detroit at that time, and most were struggling families. 4. See “Detroit is Dynamite” 1942 and Shogan and Craig 1964. 5. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, African American families shared their blocks with other European immigrant groups-predominantly Jews from various countries and Christian Poles. However, by the thirties, the white community had become competitive and hostile, perceiving the swelling numbers of poor Southern blacks as an economic and racial threat. Housing discrimination, intimidation, and episodic violence pushed the black population into densely settled areas. For a detailed explanation of this transformation over several decades, as well as specific incidents such the Ossian Sweet story, see Sugrue 1996. 6. In an interview with me, Vishnu Wood described this type of neighborhood affiliation. Bjorn and Gallert 2001 also mentions the East-West divide...