Jazz and blues songs that, to white listeners, seemed like good fun for dancing were news reports to those who knew how to listen. From the oldest shout songs that surfaced on the Georgia coast to the spirituals that were revered after Emancipation, shared choruses documented brutality and exhorted people to resist. Listeners have connected creative leaps like Lil Baby's "The Bigger Picture" and Terrace Martin's "Pig Feet" to the hip-hop classics that challenged police violence in the 1990s and beyond, and to singular historical works like Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit." The truth, though, is that the witnessing, coded or open warnings and encouragement and political dissent communicated through today's urgent soundtrack characterize the whole of Black American music.
In recent weeks, musicians have responded to the crowning of the Black Lives Matter movement as a central force motivating social change by writing new anthems, a remarkable new chapter in protest music. That's what Coltrane created in his landmark piece, which you'll find in the middle of the list below, as part of a history that parallels American culture's development: the story of Black American music and its response to oppression, and particularly, state-sanctioned violence. Not transcendence or reconciliation – but grace, the honor of one presence, the ability to face injustice and remain whole and gain the energy to respond. The whole is a frightening emotional portrait of some place, in these musicians' feelings." Baraka is describing the transformation in art of unfathomable pain, the human response to violence, into grace. a fattening thunder, storm clouds or jungle war clouds. "What we're given is a slow delicate introspective sadness, almost hopelessness, except for Elvin, rising in the background like something out of nature. In the liner notes to John Coltrane's 1964 album Live At Birdland, Amiri Baraka (then writing as Le Roi Jones) contemplated the gift the saxophonist and his band offered with this music inspired by the horrific deaths of four Black girls in a Birmingham church bombing inspired by white supremacist hatred.
One week earlier, he released "The Bigger Picture," a song protesting police brutality. Lil Baby performs during a Juneteenth voter registration rally on Jat Murphy Park Fairgrounds in Atlanta, Ga.
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