John Coltrane

Reflections on "A Love Supreme," artistic transformation, and the Black Arts Movement.

In the late 1960s, in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, jazz legends were playing the best music you’ve never heard.

Baldwin wrote with the knowledge that change would be hard and slow to achieve.

In the years after her husband John’s death, the harpist discovered a sound all her own, a jazz rooted in acts of spirit and will.

The saxophonist Albert Ayler revolutionized the avant-garde jazz scene, drastically altering notions of what noises qualified as music.

A roundtable discussion about David Suisman’s “Instrument of War.”

The most hypnotic piece of music released so far in 2023 was recorded forty-seven years ago in a barely adequate studio in Rockland County, New York.

A remarkable blues musician emerged from obscurity in 1959, but something about him just didn’t seem right.

Sixty years ago, a pathbreaking jazz album fused politics and art in the fight for Black liberation. Black artists are taking similar strides today.

Jazz, King declared, was the ability to take the “hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph.”