Alabama

Artist

John Coltrane

Album

Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary (Original Soundtrack)

Genre

Jazz

John Coltrane recorded "Alabama" on November 18, 1963, at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Two months earlier, a bomb had gone off beneath the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham on a Sunday morning, as parishioners gathered for services. It killed Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, all 14, and Carol Denise McNair, who was 11. The piece has no lyriics. Coltrane said very little about it. Impulse! producer Bob Thiele asked him whether the title had "any significance to today's problems." Coltrane answered: "It represents, musically, something that I saw down there translated into music from inside me." LeRoi Jones, who later took the name Amiri Baraka, wrote that exchange down in his liner notes for Coltrane Live at Birdland, the album that carried the track when Impulse! released it on January 9, 1964. Baraka got nothing further out of him. In the notes he hedged about whether the real Alabama was the catalyst at all. Coltrane never publicly said he wrote the piece in response to the bombing. The scholar Lewis Porter, who has spent decades on this recording, knows of no instance where he did. Listeners have long heard Dr. King's eulogy for the four girls in the shape of the melody, and Porter argues the connection is there in the notes themselves. That reading belongs to the people who made it. What Coltrane left is the title, the date and the record.