JOHN COLTRANE Alabama

Alabama John Coltrane (tenor sax) On Sunday, September 15, 1963, a bomb exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls and injuring 22 other worshippers. The incident had a profound effect on many Americans. One of them was John Coltrane, one of the leading Jazz saxophonists in the 1950s and 60s, when American Jazz was at its commercial peak. Coltrane composed and performed “Alabama” that same year in response to the 16th Street bombing. The song is an instrumental, with no words. Music historian Craig Werner describes it this way: “Coltrane patterned his saxophone lines on the cadences of Martin Luther King’s oration at the funeral of the four girls who died. Midway through the song, mirroring the part of the sermon where King transforms mourning into a statement of renewed determination, Elvin Jones’s drums rise up from a whisper to a tumult of directed anger. Propelled by the rhythms, Coltrane’s sax summons the people to what can only be understood as a unified assault on Pharaoh’s palace.”