the last book I ever read (3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool, excerpt thirteen)

from 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool by James Kaplan:

“Does your religion help you in living, in playing?” the writer asked.

“It’s everything for me,” Coltrane said. “My music is a way of giving thanks to God.”

Or of addressing God. Two months after the Birmingham church bombing (and four months after his switch from Naima to Alice), he recorded, for a part-live, part-studio album, Live at Birdland, an original song dramatically different from any he had written before. “Alabama” begins with a kind of invocation, a mournful tenor prelude played over McCoy Tyner’s dramatic, almost menacing tremolo, then shifts to an oddly swinging middle section with the whole quartet, a passage packed with mixed emotions: sorrow, anger, resignation—and then returns to Coltrane’s somber tune within a tune. The total effect is devastating. “If anyone wants to begin to understand how Coltrane could inspire so much awe so quickly,” Ben Ratliff writes, “the reason is probably inside ‘Alabama.’ The incantational tumult he could raise in a long improvisation, the steel-trap knowledge of harmony, the writing—that’s all very impressive. But ‘Alabama’ is also an accurate psychological portrait of a time, a complicated mood that nobody else could render so well.”