I’ve posted this composition once before, back at the time of the Pulse nightclub shootings in Orlando, Florida. And yes, I’ve just updated that post, qv: here.

But, with recent events, it seems that “we need this more than ever” gets to be ever-increasingly true with each passing year, so here’s another version, the “original”, recorded in Rudy Van Gelder’s Studio on November 18, 1963, and included in the album Live at Birdland:

Also, here’s a brilliant discussion/explication of said piece, “On John Coltrane’s ‘Alabama'”, by Ismail Muhammad, writing in The Paris Review...

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Some thoughts of my own:

Although I’ve been almost terminally hesitant to try to add anything to what Ismail Muhammad has to say about Coltrane‘s “Alabama”, I did have a thought or two of my own. Here they are, for what they’re worth:

Mr Muhammad says, about the opening music, in tempo rubato (of which Coltrane was a great master, and the rest of the quartet equal masters at following his lead), that: “It winds its way toward a theme but always stops just short, repeatedly approaching something like coherence only to turn away at the last moment.” In addition to this, I’m also hearing something else: namely, more than an echo of Gregorian Chant, the most ancient and solemn sacred music for which we have good records (at least in the West…), and with which Coltrane would almost certainly have been conversant, due to his deep training in classical music. (Coltrane attended the Ornstein School of Music† for a short time, once he’d finished high school and before enlisting in the Navy*; then later, once his stint in the Navy was done, he attended the Granoff School of Music†.) And – again, for what it’s worth – to my ear at least, Gregorian Chant also has something of that searching/questing quality so often in evidence in Coltrane’s more meditative/sacred compositions.

Which in turn makes me wonder what it might have been like to hear Coltrane play solo saxophone inside Notre-Dame or some other Gothic church or cathedral, in such a huge echoing living-breathing space, where any sound is reflected by great sheets of stained glass, plus also simultaneously diffracted by the intricate carvings and sculptures embedded in the structure of stone, whose underlying design is based on sacred geometry, which in turn is based on the same numerical proportions as music itself. And maybe such a thing would have happened in due time, had Coltrane lived past the age of forty-one.

What we lost when we lost him…

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* Here is a link to Coltrane’s induction photograph. Look at his eyes. All the sorrows of the world are in those eyes…

†Both of these schools are located in Philadelphia, to which city Coltrane relocated after finishing High School in North Carolina, and to which he returned after his service in the Navy.