The O'Zone: The Jazz Resistance
“Could You Call on Lady Day? Could You Call on John Coltrane?”
The Mourning of a Song
In the velvet dark of a 1939 night,
Lady Day leans against the piano’s curve,
a white gardenia pinned like a prayer
against the smoke of 52nd street.
The spotlight is a cold eye,
and she is the bruised reed,
trembling before the harvest.
The bass walks a funeral line
Thump, thump
like boots on Alabama red clay.
She opens her mouth and out pours the bitter crop:
the “strange fruit” swinging in the Southern breeze,
blood on the leaves, blood at the root,
the scent of magnolia choked by the stench of burning flesh.
Her voice is a slow-motion fall,
every note a jagged tear in the silk of the American air.
Years later the “Trane” pulls into the station.
John Coltrane picks up the horn where her ghost left off.
He blows a sheet of sound to cover the bodies in the field,
turning the “Alabama” soil into a cathedral of screams.
His saxophone doesn’t just play; it mourns,
it wails in a low, heavy cadence—
One, two, three, four—
echoing the four little girls lost in the Sunday blast.
The keys are black and white, but the blues are red.
Lady day sings the terror, and Coltrane prays the fury.
Between the gardenia and the tenor sax,
The song never ends—
it just hangs there,
suspended in the dark,
Waiting for the morning to finally break.
Three pillars of musical protest: Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” John Coltrane’s “Alabama,” and Gil Scott Heron’s “Lady Day and John Coltrane.”
Of the three performers, Gil Scott Heron was the most likely to write and perform art of protest. Billie Holiday was content to sing jazz classics until she heard “Strange Fruit”, a song she stubbornly refused to walk away from at great personal and professional risk.
John Coltrane was a very spiritual man, and the murder of four young girls in the 16th Street Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, was not something he could ignore. He used his spirit to reach ears that did not hear. He used the power of words and the emotional clarity of the melodies. A headline on a bandstand, glasses clink and murmuring crowd sound… Then everyone looked up from their drinks and blinked back tears.
“Strange Fruit” began as a protest poem written by Abel Meeropol, a Bronx high school teacher and social activist (under the pseudonym Lewis Allan), expressing his horror at lynchings of African Americans Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, which was captured in Lawrence Beitler’s 1930 photograph in Marion, Indiana.
Meeropol set his lyrics to music with his wife, Anne Shaffer, and the singer Laura Duncan, who performed it at New York City venues, where it made its way to Billie Holiday. Holiday tried to record it for her label, Columbia, but they refused to record it, fearing backlash from their CBS radio network. Her producer, John Hammond, also refused to record it, so she turned to her friend Milt Gabler, owner of the Commodore label, and after a couple of sessions, she had the final version of the song.
The song became closely associated with Billie Holiday, although Nina Simone recorded a very credible version of the song as well.
John Coltrane calls forth a sonic embodiment of grief and lost childhood while playing with somber defiance in his profound elegy inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s eulogy for the victims of the 16th Street Church Bombing.
Coltrane avoids his trademark “sheets of sound” and chooses a more vocal tone. McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, and Jimmy Garrison provide a hypnotic, emotional foundation that supports Trane’s restrained melodic lines in a C minor/Dorian key. It’s a direct musical response to and a harrowing reflection of racial violence, not unlike “Strange Fruit.”
This approach is no doubt part of the inspiration of Gil Scott Heron’s iconic song “Lady Day and John Coltrane” to quote because it’s so pertinent.
(Verse 1)
Ever feel kind of down and out
You don’t know just what to do?
Living all your days in darkness
Let the sun shine through
Ever feel that somehow somewhere
You lost your way?
And if you don’t get help quick
You won’t make it through the day?
(chorus)
Could you call on Lady Day?
Could you call on John Coltrane?
Now, ‘cause they’ll wash your troubles
Your troubles, your troubles, your troubles away!”
THIS speaks to hope in the face of darkness.
With so much of Black history covered in tragedy and hurt the lyric rings!
Gil Scott-Heron described “Lady Day and John Coltrane” as a tribute to how their music provided a functional “wash” to cleanse the soul from the stresses of everyday life. He pits their artistry against “plastic people with plastic minds”, suggesting their music provides soul and truth missing from a superficial society. Gil noted the haunting coincidence that They both passed away on July 17 albeit in different years. He viewed jazz and African American identity as inseparable and not just a genre.
Recorded music is the vessel of a moment in time, with these three artists living in the lands of the remembered, it’s a blessing to have their efforts to listen to in order to “wash our troubles away.”
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