Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903
Whenever I make a change, I’m a little worried that it may puzzle people. And sometimes I deliberately delay things for this reason. But after a while I find there is nothing else I can do but go ahead.
John Coltrane (from J.C. Thomas, Coltrane: Chasin’ the Trane, 1975)
John Coltrane was born on the 23rd of September, 1926. The centenary of his birth serves as the occasion – though such an occasion should not be necessary – to remember and celebrate his music, and more. For this, humbly, we cite the writing and artistry of others.
We begin with a selection from writer Fred Moten and his work, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003). We follow with Amiri Baraka’s poem “I Love Music (For John Coltrane)”. We then turn to Cornell West and his reflections on a jazz-soaked philosophy and James Baldwin on the radicalness of love, from The Fire Next Time (1962) and Toni Morrison on the immanence of love and grace, from Beloved (1987) . And we close with a link to Coltrane’s album, A Love Supreme (1965).
Fred Moten, from In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003)
Here, then, is one such disclosure, famously and infamously made by Frederick Douglass in his 1845 Narrative. By way of a set of resonant nodal points along the massive trajectory it extends, I want to think about this disclosure as an unavoidable anticipation, the prefigurative response to an epochal counterfactual, the always already belated origin of the music that ought to be understood as the rigorously sounded critique of the theory of value.
I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose. The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped the longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood clotted cowskin. I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I shall never forget it whilst I remember anything. It was the first of a long series of such out rages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and a participant. It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it. . . .
Aunt Hester had not only disobeyed his orders in going out, but had been found in company with Lloyd’s Ned; which circumstance, I found, from what he said while whipping her, was the chief offense. Had he been a man of pure morals himself, he might have been thought interested in protecting the innocence of my aunt; but those who know him will not suspect him of any such virtue. Before he commenced whipping Aunt Hester he took her into the kitchen, and stripped her from neck to waist, leaving her neck, shoulders, and back entirely naked. He then told her to cross her hands, calling her at the same time a d——d b——h. After crossing her hands, he tied them with strong rope, and led her to a stool under a large hook in the joist, put in for the purpose. He made her get upon the stool, and tied her hands to the hook. She now stood fair for the infernal purpose. Her arms were stretched up at their full length, so that she stood upon the ends of her toes. He then said to her, “Now, you d——d b——h, I’ll learn you how to disobey my orders!” and after rolling up his sleeves, he commenced to lay on the heavy cowskin, and soon the warm, red blood (amid heart-rending shrieks from her, and horrid oaths from him) came dripping to the floor. I was so terrified and horror-stricken at the sight, that I hid myself in a closet, and dared not venture out till long after the bloody transaction was over. I expected it would be my turn next. It was all new to me. I had never seen anything like it before. . . .[1]
Now consider that passage’s relation to an almost equally well-known one that closely follows it:
The slaves selected to go to the Great House Farm, for the monthly allowance for themselves and their fellow slaves, were peculiarly enthusiastic. While on their way, they would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness. They would compose and sing as they went along, consulting neither time nor tune. The thought that came up, came out—if not in the word, in the sound;—and as frequently in the one as in the other. They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone. Into all of their songs they would manage to weave something of the Great House Farm. Especially would they do this, when leaving home. They would sing most exultingly the following words:—
“I am going away to the Great House Farm!Oh, yea! O, yea! O!”
This they would sing, as a chorus, to words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves. I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do.
I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathy for my brethren in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him in silence analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul;—and if he is not impressed, it will only be because “there is no flesh in his obdurate heart.”[2]
What does it mean to move in the tradition of these passages, a tradition of devotion both to the happy and the tragic possibilities embedded in passionate utterance and response? Passionate utterance and response together take the form of an encounter, the mutual, negative positioning of master and slave. This encounter is appositional, is shaped by a step away that calls such positions radically into question. In this sense utterance and response, seen together as encounter, form a kind of call wherein Hester’s shrieks improvise both speech and writing. What they echo and initiate in their response to the oaths—that must be heard as the passionate utterance or call—of the master helps to constitute a questioning, musical encounter.
Having been called by call and response back to music, let’s prepare our descent: let the call of call and response, passionate utterance and response—articulated in the scene Douglass identifies as “the blood stained gate” through which he entered into subjection and subjectivity; articulated, more precisely, in the phonography of the very screams that open the way into the knowledge of slavery and the knowledge of freedom—operate as a kind of anacrusis (a note or beat or musicked word improvised through the opposition of speech and writing before the definition of rhythm and melody). Gerard Manley Hopkins’s term for anacrusis was encountering. Let the articulation of appositional encounter be our encountering: a nondetermining invitation to the new and continually unprecedented performative, historical, philosophical, democratic, communist arrangements that are the only authentic ones.
In the long advent of a movement called “free jazz”—a beginning as long as the tradition it extends—Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, and Oscar Brown Jr. collaborated in making a recording/performance called “Protest.” Lincoln hums and then screams over Roach’s increasingly and insistently intense percussion, moving inexorably in a trajectory and toward a location that is remote from—if not in excess of or inaccessible to—words. You cannot help but hear the echo of Aunt Hester’s scream as it bears, at the moment of articulation, a sexual overtone, an invagination constantly reconstituting the whole of the voice, the whole of the story, redoubled and intensified by the mediation of years, recitations, auditions. That echo haunts, say, Albert Ayler’s “Ghosts” or the fractured, fracturing climax of James Brown’s “Cold Sweat.” It’s the re-en-gendering haint of an old negation: Ayler always screaming secretly to the very idea of mastery, “It’s not about you”; Brown paying the price of such negation, a terrible, ecstatic, possessive, dispossessive inability to stop singing; both performing historical placement as a long transfer, a transcendental fade, an interminable songlike drag disrupting song. The revolution embedded in such duration is, for a moment, a run of questions: What is the edge of this event? What am I, the object? What is the music? What is manhood? What is the feminine? What is the beautiful? What will blackness be?[3]
Where shriek turns speech turns song—remote from the impossible comfort of origin—lies the trace of our descent. That place— locus of an ongoingly other recording of event, object, music—is Abbey Lincoln’s narrative. This is a recording, an improvisation, of her words, troubled by the trace of the performance of which she tells and the performance of which that performance told.
I was born the tenth of twelve children . . . /I visited a psychiatric hospital ’cause Roach said there was madness in the house. He said it wasn’t him, so I Wgured it must be me/They had me hollering and screaming like a crazy person; I ain’t hollering and screaming for my freedom. The women I come from will take something and knock you . . . /Monk whispered in my ear, “Don’t be so perfect.” He meant make a mistake; reach for something/I didn’t think a scream was part of the music/We were rid ing in the car with my nephew who was eight years old and who said, “The reason I can scream louder than Aunt Abbey is ’cause I’m a little boy/Went all over the world hollering and screaming; it increased my depth as an actress and a singer/I didn’t write it, I didn’t conceive it; I’m just the singer on it/I got rid of a taboo and screamed in everybody’s face/We had to go to court; somebody thought Roach was killing me in the studio/My instrument is deepening and widening; it’s because I’m possessed of the spirit/I learned it from my mother—the preacher, that’s what they called her/Betty Carter: we came to the stage about the same time; it was a great surprise when she died; she was a year older than me and I’ve been feeling frail ever since . . . It’s easy for me to cry; I’m an actress/You gotta sing a song; you can’t sing jazz/When Bird was around he knew he wasn’t playing jazz. He was playing his spirit. And I think that’s the problem for a lot of the musicians on the scene now. They think that they’re playing jazz. But there’s no such thing, really/I’m possessed of my own spirit/This is the music of the African muse/I just want to be of use to my ancestors/It’s holy work and it’s dangerous not to know that ’cause you could die like an animal down here.[4]
[1] Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. In The Classic Slave Naratives (New York: Mentor Books, 1987), 259. [note 18 in the original]
[3] For a more elaborate reading of Brown’s relation to Douglass, see my “Bridge and One,” in Performing Hybridity, ed. May Joseph and Jennifer Fink (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). [note 20 in the original]
[4] These are notes taken during a presentation by Abbey Lincoln at the Ford Foundation Jazz Study Group, Columbia University, November 1999. [note 21 in the original]
Amiri Baraka, Leroi Jones With David Murray And Steve McCall, New Music – New Poetry, India Navigation,
The following is a transcript of Amari Baraka’s reading of “I Love Music (For John Coltrane)” at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, October 8, 1980.
Transcript:
It’s a poem for John Coltrane. The title is “I Love Music.” John Coltrane, of course, one of the outstanding musicians, composers in black music. It begins with a quote from John Coltrane.
“I want to be a force for real good. In other words, I know that there are bad forces, forces that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good.” Trane Trane Trane said, A force for real good, trane. In other words, February ’67 By july he was dead. By july. he said in other words he wanted to be the opposite but by july, he was dead, but he is, offering, expression a love supreme, afro blue in me singing it all because of him can be screaming beauty can be afroblue can be you leave me breathless can be Alabama I want to talk to you my favorite things like Sonny can be life itself, fire can be, heart explosion, soul explosion, brain explo sion. can be. can be. can be. can be. can be aggeeewheewheeagg eeeee. aggeeouhy deep deep deep expression deep, can be capitalism dying, can be all, see, agggggeeeeooooo aggrggrrgeeeoouuuu. full, full, full can be empty, too. nightfall agggggeeeeooooo aggrggrrgeeeoouuuu nightfall by water round moon over slums shit in a dropper soft face under fingertips trembling can be can be can be, trane, can be, trane, because of trane, because world world world world can be sean ocasey in Ireland can be, lu hsun in china can be, brecht wailing gorky riffing langston hughes steaming can be trane bird’s main man can be big maybelle can be workout workout workout workout expression ogunde afroblue can be all of it meaning, essence revelation, everything together, wailing in unison a terrible wholeness.
[Applause]
Thank you.
(Creative Black Music at the Walker, 1960s–1980s: Selections from the Archives “I Love Music (For John Coltrane)” by Amiri Baraka)
Jazz-soaked philosophy for our catastrophic times: from Socrates to Coltrane
Cornell West
“Since the blues is rooted in catastrophe and swing is rooted in different forms of time and timing, and improvisation is rooted in making the right choices and judgements in practical wisdom, I think that it leads directly to philosophy because philos-sophia means love of wisdom.
“You can’t talk about what it means to be human, as a wisdom lover, without talking about catastrophe in one’s life. The death of one’s parents; the betrayal of one’s friends; any sickness or despair and so forth.
“These are issues that every human being has to come to terms with, and every human being has to have some kind of practical wisdom in terms of improvisational skills, knowing what to say, what to do, and how to act at particular moments.
So what happens is that now we shift from music as just a form of entertainment to music as a particular human response to catastrophe, to time feeling as if it is closed in upon us, to what kind of improvisational modes do we have of acting and doing, and that takes us right back to Plato and Socrates, right back to Erasmus, to Vico, through the philosophical tradition.”
…
“As someone who has been shaped and moulded in the American Experiment and the American Empire, if American politics were one tenth as wise and caring as American music, we would have a different kind of society. It would be more egalitarian, there would be more of an embrace of each other and our humanity at the deepest level.”
…
“And this is true for human beings all around the world. Everybody is wrestling with forms of catastrophe. Everybody is wrestling with ways that they have been traumatized. So, there are all these different forms, and it all has to do with what? Our deep, common humanity, as various as it is. And in a certain sense I think a jazz-soaked philosophy is a profoundly humanistic philosophy, that’s really what it comes down to.”
Cornel West, the 2024 Gifford Lecture Series at the University of Edinburgh, titled “A Jazz-soaked Philosophy for our Catastrophic Times: From Socrates to Coltrane”. This is the last of six lectures, titled “A Love Supreme (A Way Through)”.
James Baldwin, from The Fire Next Time (1963)
White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want. And this assumption—which, for example, makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negroes accept and adopt white standards—is revealed in all kinds of striking ways, from Bobby Kennedy’s assurance that a Negro can become President in forty years to the unfortunate tone of warm congratulation with which so many liberals address their Negro equals. It is the Negro, of course, who is presumed to have become equal—an achievement that not only proves the comforting fact that perseverance has no color but also overwhelmingly corroborates the white man’s sense of his own value. Alas, this value can scarcely be corroborated in any other way; there is certainly little enough in the white man’s public or private life that one should desire to imitate. White men, at the bottom of their hearts, know this. Therefore, a vast amount of the energy that goes into what we call the Negro problem is produced by the white man’s profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white, not to be seen as he is, and at the same time a vast amount of the white anguish is rooted in the white man’s equally profound need to be seen as he is, to be released from the tyranny of his mirror. All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes o the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth. And I submit, then, that the racial tensions that menace Americans today have little to do with real antipathy—on the contrary, indeed—and are involved only symbolically with color. These tensions are rooted in the very same depths as those from which love springs, or murder. The white man’s unadmitted— and apparently, to him, unspeakable—private fears and longings are projected onto the Negro. The only way he can be released from the Negro’s tyrannical power over him is to consent, in eect, to become black himself, to become a part of that suffering and dancing country that he now watches wistfully from the heights of his lonely power and, armed with spiritual traveller’s checks, visits surreptitiously after dark.
Toni Morrison, from Beloved (1987)
IT WAS TIME to lay it all down. Before Paul D came and sat on her porch steps, words whispered in the keeping room had kept her going. Helped her endure the chastising ghost; refurbished the baby faces of Howard and Buglar and kept them whole in the world because in her dreams she saw only their parts in trees; and kept her husband shadowy but there–somewhere. Now Halle’s face between the butter press and the churn swelled larger and larger, crowding her eyes and making her head hurt. She wished for Baby Suggs’ fingers molding her nape, reshaping it, saying, “Lay em down, Sethe. Sword and shield. Down. Down. Both of em down. Down by the riverside. Sword and shield. Don’t study war no more. Lay all that mess down. Sword and shield.” And under the pressing fingers and the quiet instructive voice, she would. Her heavy knives of defense against misery, regret, gall and hurt, she placed one by one on a bank where dear water rushed on below.
Nine years without the fingers or the voice of Baby Suggs was too much. And words whispered in the keeping room were too little. The butter-smeared face of a man God made none sweeter than demanded more: an arch built or a robe sewn. Some fixing ceremony. Sethe decided to go to the Clearing, back where Baby Suggs had danced in sunlight.
Before 124 and everybody in it had closed down, veiled over and shut away; before it had become the plaything of spirits and the home of the chafed, 124 had been a cheerful, buzzing house where Baby Suggs, holy, loved, cautioned, fed, chastised and soothed. Where not one but two pots simmered on the stove; where the lamp burned all night long. Strangers rested there while children tried on their shoes. Messages were left there, for whoever needed them was sure to stop in one day soon. Talk was low and to the point–for Baby Suggs, holy, didn’t approve of extra. “Everything depends on knowing how much,” she said, and “Good is knowing when to stop.”
It was in front of that 124 that Sethe climbed off a wagon, her newborn tied to her chest, and felt for the first time the wide arms of her mother-in-law, who had made it to Cincinnati. Who decided that, because slave life had “busted her legs, back, head, eyes, hands, kidneys, womb and tongue,” she had nothing left to make a living with but her heart–which she put to work at once. Accepting no title of honor before her name, but allowing a small caress after it, she became an unchurched preacher, one who visited pulpits and opened her great heart to those who could use it. In winter and fall she carried it to AME’s and Baptists, Holinesses and Sanctifieds, the Church of the Redeemer and the Redeemed. Uncalled, unrobed, un anointed, she let her great heart beat in their presence. When warm weather came, Baby Suggs, holy, followed by every black man, woman and child who could make it through, took her great heart to the Clearing–a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what at the end of a path known only to deer and whoever cleared the land in the first place. In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees.
After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs bowed her head and prayed silently. The company watched her from the trees. They knew she was ready when she put her stick down. Then she shouted, “Let the children come!” and they ran from the trees toward her.
“Let your mothers hear you laugh,” she told them, and the woods rang. The adults looked on and could not help smiling.
Then “Let the grown men come,” she shouted. They stepped out one by one from among the ringing trees.
“Let your wives and your children see you dance,” she told them, and groundlife shuddered under their feet.
Finally she called the women to her. “Cry,” she told them. “For the living and the dead. Just cry.” And without covering their eyes the women let loose.
It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart. She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more.
She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure.
She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.
“Here,” she said, “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ’cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you! And no, they ain’t in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they don’t love your mouth. You got to love it. This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you. And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they’d just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver–love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.” Saying no more, she stood up then and danced with her twisted hip the rest of what her heart had to say while the others opened their mouths and gave her the music. Long notes held until the four-part harmony was perfect enough for their deeply loved flesh.
Suggested Reading:
Ammar Kalia, “100 years after John Coltrane’s birth, secret tapes are emerging. What can they tell us about jazz’s great rulebreaker?”, The Guardian, 11/09/2026
Remembering John Coltrane (1926-1967)
Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903
Whenever I make a change, I’m a little worried that it may puzzle people. And sometimes I deliberately delay things for this reason. But after a while I find there is nothing else I can do but go ahead.
John Coltrane (from J.C. Thomas, Coltrane: Chasin’ the Trane, 1975)
John Coltrane was born on the 23rd of September, 1926. The centenary of his birth serves as the occasion – though such an occasion should not be necessary – to remember and celebrate his music, and more. For this, humbly, we cite the writing and artistry of others.
We begin with a selection from writer Fred Moten and his work, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003). We follow with Amiri Baraka’s poem “I Love Music (For John Coltrane)”. We then turn to Cornell West and his reflections on a jazz-soaked philosophy and James Baldwin on the radicalness of love, from The Fire Next Time (1962) and Toni Morrison on the immanence of love and grace, from Beloved (1987) . And we close with a link to Coltrane’s album, A Love Supreme (1965).
Fred Moten, from In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003)
Here, then, is one such disclosure, famously and infamously made by Frederick Douglass in his 1845 Narrative. By way of a set of resonant nodal points along the massive trajectory it extends, I want to think about this disclosure as an unavoidable anticipation, the prefigurative response to an epochal counterfactual, the always already belated origin of the music that ought to be understood as the rigorously sounded critique of the theory of value.
I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose. The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped the longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood clotted cowskin. I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I shall never forget it whilst I remember anything. It was the first of a long series of such out rages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and a participant. It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it. . . .
Aunt Hester had not only disobeyed his orders in going out, but had been found in company with Lloyd’s Ned; which circumstance, I found, from what he said while whipping her, was the chief offense. Had he been a man of pure morals himself, he might have been thought interested in protecting the innocence of my aunt; but those who know him will not suspect him of any such virtue. Before he commenced whipping Aunt Hester he took her into the kitchen, and stripped her from neck to waist, leaving her neck, shoulders, and back entirely naked. He then told her to cross her hands, calling her at the same time a d——d b——h. After crossing her hands, he tied them with strong rope, and led her to a stool under a large hook in the joist, put in for the purpose. He made her get upon the stool, and tied her hands to the hook. She now stood fair for the infernal purpose. Her arms were stretched up at their full length, so that she stood upon the ends of her toes. He then said to her, “Now, you d——d b——h, I’ll learn you how to disobey my orders!” and after rolling up his sleeves, he commenced to lay on the heavy cowskin, and soon the warm, red blood (amid heart-rending shrieks from her, and horrid oaths from him) came dripping to the floor. I was so terrified and horror-stricken at the sight, that I hid myself in a closet, and dared not venture out till long after the bloody transaction was over. I expected it would be my turn next. It was all new to me. I had never seen anything like it before. . . .[1]
Now consider that passage’s relation to an almost equally well-known one that closely follows it:
The slaves selected to go to the Great House Farm, for the monthly allowance for themselves and their fellow slaves, were peculiarly enthusiastic. While on their way, they would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness. They would compose and sing as they went along, consulting neither time nor tune. The thought that came up, came out—if not in the word, in the sound;—and as frequently in the one as in the other. They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone. Into all of their songs they would manage to weave something of the Great House Farm. Especially would they do this, when leaving home. They would sing most exultingly the following words:—
“I am going away to the Great House Farm! Oh, yea! O, yea! O!”
This they would sing, as a chorus, to words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves. I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do.
I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meaning of those rude and incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones loud, long, and deep; they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit, and filled me with ineffable sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them. The mere recurrence to those songs, even now, afflicts me; and while I am writing these lines, an expression of feeling has already found its way down my cheek. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathy for my brethren in bonds. If any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing effects of slavery, let him go to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, and, on allowance-day, place himself in the deep pine woods, and there let him in silence analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of his soul;—and if he is not impressed, it will only be because “there is no flesh in his obdurate heart.”[2]
What does it mean to move in the tradition of these passages, a tradition of devotion both to the happy and the tragic possibilities embedded in passionate utterance and response? Passionate utterance and response together take the form of an encounter, the mutual, negative positioning of master and slave. This encounter is appositional, is shaped by a step away that calls such positions radically into question. In this sense utterance and response, seen together as encounter, form a kind of call wherein Hester’s shrieks improvise both speech and writing. What they echo and initiate in their response to the oaths—that must be heard as the passionate utterance or call—of the master helps to constitute a questioning, musical encounter.
Having been called by call and response back to music, let’s prepare our descent: let the call of call and response, passionate utterance and response—articulated in the scene Douglass identifies as “the blood stained gate” through which he entered into subjection and subjectivity; articulated, more precisely, in the phonography of the very screams that open the way into the knowledge of slavery and the knowledge of freedom—operate as a kind of anacrusis (a note or beat or musicked word improvised through the opposition of speech and writing before the definition of rhythm and melody). Gerard Manley Hopkins’s term for anacrusis was encountering. Let the articulation of appositional encounter be our encountering: a nondetermining invitation to the new and continually unprecedented performative, historical, philosophical, democratic, communist arrangements that are the only authentic ones.
In the long advent of a movement called “free jazz”—a beginning as long as the tradition it extends—Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, and Oscar Brown Jr. collaborated in making a recording/performance called “Protest.” Lincoln hums and then screams over Roach’s increasingly and insistently intense percussion, moving inexorably in a trajectory and toward a location that is remote from—if not in excess of or inaccessible to—words. You cannot help but hear the echo of Aunt Hester’s scream as it bears, at the moment of articulation, a sexual overtone, an invagination constantly reconstituting the whole of the voice, the whole of the story, redoubled and intensified by the mediation of years, recitations, auditions. That echo haunts, say, Albert Ayler’s “Ghosts” or the fractured, fracturing climax of James Brown’s “Cold Sweat.” It’s the re-en-gendering haint of an old negation: Ayler always screaming secretly to the very idea of mastery, “It’s not about you”; Brown paying the price of such negation, a terrible, ecstatic, possessive, dispossessive inability to stop singing; both performing historical placement as a long transfer, a transcendental fade, an interminable songlike drag disrupting song. The revolution embedded in such duration is, for a moment, a run of questions: What is the edge of this event? What am I, the object? What is the music? What is manhood? What is the feminine? What is the beautiful? What will blackness be?[3]
Where shriek turns speech turns song—remote from the impossible comfort of origin—lies the trace of our descent. That place— locus of an ongoingly other recording of event, object, music—is Abbey Lincoln’s narrative. This is a recording, an improvisation, of her words, troubled by the trace of the performance of which she tells and the performance of which that performance told.
I was born the tenth of twelve children . . . /I visited a psychiatric hospital ’cause Roach said there was madness in the house. He said it wasn’t him, so I Wgured it must be me/They had me hollering and screaming like a crazy person; I ain’t hollering and screaming for my freedom. The women I come from will take something and knock you . . . /Monk whispered in my ear, “Don’t be so perfect.” He meant make a mistake; reach for something/I didn’t think a scream was part of the music/We were rid ing in the car with my nephew who was eight years old and who said, “The reason I can scream louder than Aunt Abbey is ’cause I’m a little boy/Went all over the world hollering and screaming; it increased my depth as an actress and a singer/I didn’t write it, I didn’t conceive it; I’m just the singer on it/I got rid of a taboo and screamed in everybody’s face/We had to go to court; somebody thought Roach was killing me in the studio/My instrument is deepening and widening; it’s because I’m possessed of the spirit/I learned it from my mother—the preacher, that’s what they called her/Betty Carter: we came to the stage about the same time; it was a great surprise when she died; she was a year older than me and I’ve been feeling frail ever since . . . It’s easy for me to cry; I’m an actress/You gotta sing a song; you can’t sing jazz/When Bird was around he knew he wasn’t playing jazz. He was playing his spirit. And I think that’s the problem for a lot of the musicians on the scene now. They think that they’re playing jazz. But there’s no such thing, really/I’m possessed of my own spirit/This is the music of the African muse/I just want to be of use to my ancestors/It’s holy work and it’s dangerous not to know that ’cause you could die like an animal down here.[4]
[1] Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. In The Classic Slave Naratives (New York: Mentor Books, 1987), 259. [note 18 in the original]
[2] Ibid., 262–63. [note 19 in the original]
[3] For a more elaborate reading of Brown’s relation to Douglass, see my “Bridge and One,” in Performing Hybridity, ed. May Joseph and Jennifer Fink (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). [note 20 in the original]
[4] These are notes taken during a presentation by Abbey Lincoln at the Ford Foundation Jazz Study Group, Columbia University, November 1999. [note 21 in the original]
The following is a transcript of Amari Baraka’s reading of “I Love Music (For John Coltrane)” at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, October 8, 1980.
Transcript:
It’s a poem for John Coltrane. The title is “I Love Music.” John Coltrane, of course, one of the outstanding musicians, composers in black music. It begins with a quote from John Coltrane.
“I want to be a force for real good.
In other words, I know that there are bad forces,
forces that bring suffering to others and misery to the world,
but I want to be the opposite
force. I want to be the force which is truly
for good.”
Trane
Trane
Trane said,
A force for real good, trane. In other words, February ’67
By july he was dead.
By july. he said in other words
he wanted to be the opposite
but by july, he was dead, but he is, offering,
expression a love supreme, afro blue in me singing
it all because of him
can be
screaming beauty
can be
afroblue can be
you leave me breathless
can be
Alabama
I want to talk to you
my favorite things
like Sonny
can be
life itself, fire can be, heart explosion, soul explosion, brain explo
sion. can be. can be. can be. can be. can be aggeeewheewheeagg eeeee. aggeeouhy
deep deep deep
expression deep, can be
capitalism dying, can be
all, see, agggggeeeeooooo aggrggrrgeeeoouuuu. full, full, full can be
empty, too.
nightfall agggggeeeeooooo aggrggrrgeeeoouuuu
nightfall by water
round moon over slums
shit in a dropper
soft face under fingertips trembling
can be
can be
can be, trane, can be, trane, because of trane, because
world world world world
can be
sean ocasey in Ireland
can be, lu hsun in china
can be,
brecht wailing
gorky riffing
langston hughes steaming
can be
trane
bird’s main man
can be
big maybelle can be
workout workout workout workout
expression
ogunde
afroblue can be
all of it meaning, essence revelation, everything together, wailing in unison
a terrible wholeness.
[Applause]
Thank you.
(Creative Black Music at the Walker, 1960s–1980s: Selections from the Archives “I Love Music (For John Coltrane)” by Amiri Baraka)
Jazz-soaked philosophy for our catastrophic times: from Socrates to Coltrane
Cornell West
“Since the blues is rooted in catastrophe and swing is rooted in different forms of time and timing, and improvisation is rooted in making the right choices and judgements in practical wisdom, I think that it leads directly to philosophy because philos-sophia means love of wisdom.
“You can’t talk about what it means to be human, as a wisdom lover, without talking about catastrophe in one’s life. The death of one’s parents; the betrayal of one’s friends; any sickness or despair and so forth.
“These are issues that every human being has to come to terms with, and every human being has to have some kind of practical wisdom in terms of improvisational skills, knowing what to say, what to do, and how to act at particular moments.
So what happens is that now we shift from music as just a form of entertainment to music as a particular human response to catastrophe, to time feeling as if it is closed in upon us, to what kind of improvisational modes do we have of acting and doing, and that takes us right back to Plato and Socrates, right back to Erasmus, to Vico, through the philosophical tradition.”
…
“As someone who has been shaped and moulded in the American Experiment and the American Empire, if American politics were one tenth as wise and caring as American music, we would have a different kind of society. It would be more egalitarian, there would be more of an embrace of each other and our humanity at the deepest level.”
…
“And this is true for human beings all around the world. Everybody is wrestling with forms of catastrophe. Everybody is wrestling with ways that they have been traumatized. So, there are all these different forms, and it all has to do with what? Our deep, common humanity, as various as it is. And in a certain sense I think a jazz-soaked philosophy is a profoundly humanistic philosophy, that’s really what it comes down to.”
(Source: The Royal Society of Edinburgh, 17/05/2024)
Cornel West, the 2024 Gifford Lecture Series at the University of Edinburgh, titled “A Jazz-soaked Philosophy for our Catastrophic Times: From Socrates to Coltrane”. This is the last of six lectures, titled “A Love Supreme (A Way Through)”.
James Baldwin, from The Fire Next Time (1963)
White Americans find it as difficult as white people elsewhere do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want. And this assumption—which, for example, makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negroes accept and adopt white standards—is revealed in all kinds of striking ways, from Bobby Kennedy’s assurance that a Negro can become President in forty years to the unfortunate tone of warm congratulation with which so many liberals address their Negro equals. It is the Negro, of course, who is presumed to have become equal—an achievement that not only proves the comforting fact that perseverance has no color but also overwhelmingly corroborates the white man’s sense of his own value. Alas, this value can scarcely be corroborated in any other way; there is certainly little enough in the white man’s public or private life that one should desire to imitate. White men, at the bottom of their hearts, know this. Therefore, a vast amount of the energy that goes into what we call the Negro problem is produced by the white man’s profound desire not to be judged by those who are not white, not to be seen as he is, and at the same time a vast amount of the white anguish is rooted in the white man’s equally profound need to be seen as he is, to be released from the tyranny of his mirror. All of us know, whether or not we are able to admit it, that mirrors can only lie, that death by drowning is all that awaits one there. It is for this reason that love is so desperately sought and so cunningly avoided. Love takes o the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth. And I submit, then, that the racial tensions that menace Americans today have little to do with real antipathy—on the contrary, indeed—and are involved only symbolically with color. These tensions are rooted in the very same depths as those from which love springs, or murder. The white man’s unadmitted— and apparently, to him, unspeakable—private fears and longings are projected onto the Negro. The only way he can be released from the Negro’s tyrannical power over him is to consent, in eect, to become black himself, to become a part of that suffering and dancing country that he now watches wistfully from the heights of his lonely power and, armed with spiritual traveller’s checks, visits surreptitiously after dark.
Toni Morrison, from Beloved (1987)
IT WAS TIME to lay it all down. Before Paul D came and sat on her porch steps, words whispered in the keeping room had kept her going. Helped her endure the chastising ghost; refurbished the baby faces of Howard and Buglar and kept them whole in the world because in her dreams she saw only their parts in trees; and kept her husband shadowy but there–somewhere. Now Halle’s face between the butter press and the churn swelled larger and larger, crowding her eyes and making her head hurt. She wished for Baby Suggs’ fingers molding her nape, reshaping it, saying, “Lay em down, Sethe. Sword and shield. Down. Down. Both of em down. Down by the riverside. Sword and shield. Don’t study war no more. Lay all that mess down. Sword and shield.” And under the pressing fingers and the quiet instructive voice, she would. Her heavy knives of defense against misery, regret, gall and hurt, she placed one by one on a bank where dear water rushed on below.
Nine years without the fingers or the voice of Baby Suggs was too much. And words whispered in the keeping room were too little. The butter-smeared face of a man God made none sweeter than demanded more: an arch built or a robe sewn. Some fixing ceremony. Sethe decided to go to the Clearing, back where Baby Suggs had danced in sunlight.
Before 124 and everybody in it had closed down, veiled over and shut away; before it had become the plaything of spirits and the home of the chafed, 124 had been a cheerful, buzzing house where Baby Suggs, holy, loved, cautioned, fed, chastised and soothed. Where not one but two pots simmered on the stove; where the lamp burned all night long. Strangers rested there while children tried on their shoes. Messages were left there, for whoever needed them was sure to stop in one day soon. Talk was low and to the point–for Baby Suggs, holy, didn’t approve of extra. “Everything depends on knowing how much,” she said, and “Good is knowing when to stop.”
It was in front of that 124 that Sethe climbed off a wagon, her newborn tied to her chest, and felt for the first time the wide arms of her mother-in-law, who had made it to Cincinnati. Who decided that, because slave life had “busted her legs, back, head, eyes, hands, kidneys, womb and tongue,” she had nothing left to make a living with but her heart–which she put to work at once. Accepting no title of honor before her name, but allowing a small caress after it, she became an unchurched preacher, one who visited pulpits and opened her great heart to those who could use it. In winter and fall she carried it to AME’s and Baptists, Holinesses and Sanctifieds, the Church of the Redeemer and the Redeemed. Uncalled, unrobed, un anointed, she let her great heart beat in their presence. When warm weather came, Baby Suggs, holy, followed by every black man, woman and child who could make it through, took her great heart to the Clearing–a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what at the end of a path known only to deer and whoever cleared the land in the first place. In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees.
After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs bowed her head and prayed silently. The company watched her from the trees. They knew she was ready when she put her stick down. Then she shouted, “Let the children come!” and they ran from the trees toward her.
“Let your mothers hear you laugh,” she told them, and the woods rang. The adults looked on and could not help smiling.
Then “Let the grown men come,” she shouted. They stepped out one by one from among the ringing trees.
“Let your wives and your children see you dance,” she told them, and groundlife shuddered under their feet.
Finally she called the women to her. “Cry,” she told them. “For the living and the dead. Just cry.” And without covering their eyes the women let loose.
It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart. She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more.
She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure.
She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it.
“Here,” she said, “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ’cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you! And no, they ain’t in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they don’t love your mouth. You got to love it. This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you. And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they’d just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver–love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.” Saying no more, she stood up then and danced with her twisted hip the rest of what her heart had to say while the others opened their mouths and gave her the music. Long notes held until the four-part harmony was perfect enough for their deeply loved flesh.
Suggested Reading:
Ammar Kalia, “100 years after John Coltrane’s birth, secret tapes are emerging. What can they tell us about jazz’s great rulebreaker?”, The Guardian, 11/09/2026