sitting with, through a sonic temporal rupture

Carole Robertson, a fourteen-year-old Black girl from Birmingham, Alabama, should have
performed in her first high school band concert on September 16, 1963. The previous morning, a
group of white supremacists angry about the racial integration of Birmingham City Schools placed
dynamite at the back of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Instead of playing that band concert,
Carole was murdered, alongside three other young girls whose families attended the church: Addie
Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, and Denise McNair. In the wake of slavery, the past is dynamic and
broiling—constantly posing a threat to the present. Christina Sharpe writes, “In the wake, the past
that is not past reappears, always, to rupture the present” (2016, 9). For four little girls in
Birmingham, anti-Blackness and the afterlives of slavery caused a literal rupture: an explosion, a
crack, a break in the normative progression of life from childhood to old age.

John Coltrane’s “Alabama” was recorded live at the Birdland jazz club in New York City
on October 18, 1963, one month after Martin Luther King, Jr. gave the eulogy at the funeral of the
four little girls. I argue that the piece’s large scale musical form and local level melodic phrasing
create a dynamic, fluctuating sense of time that shifts between an unmetered, free “speech” time
and a steady, metered “musical” time. My aim here is to situate the disorientation of musical time
in Coltrane’s quartet in a broader theoretical lens of Black temporality in the wake, particularly
within the climactic, rupturing ending of the recording. “Alabama” enacts the temporal cracking
of Black life’s encounters with racial violence through the rupture of musical and historical time.
Coltrane generates love and care for the four little girls within those cracks, a practice that Christina
Sharpe calls wake work. “The power of and in sitting with someone as they die” (2016, 10-11).
Ultimately, I posit that manipulations of musical time produce a space for “sitting with” victims
of racial violence across time. Postcolonial philosopher Homi K. Bhabha wrote that temporal
disjuncture produces “another time, another space…wrought from the interruptive, interrogative,
tragic experience of blackness, of discrimination, of despair.” (1991, 194). These musicians
reproduce the affective experience of being-out-of-time in the wake of slavery—crafting ‘another
space’ where radical care is possible—for themselves and for anyone who will listen.

The quartet’s pianist McCoy Tyner begins with a rumbling left hand tremolo on a C. Jimmy
Garrison plucks the double bass freely, at the edge of audibility in the recording. The piano and
bass together provide an unmetered, darkly atmospheric sonic ground upon which Coltrane begins
his tenor sax solo.

This first solo creates what I am calling “speech” time, where the unfolding of sound is
organized not by an easily discernible pulse, but the long, winding phrases of Coltrane’s breath.
On a phrase by phrase level, this solo is meditative, using the pitch collection from C natural minor
and resolving largely on C, the same note from the piano. Its range is reserved, mostly contained
within an octave. The range and tonal center make this solo easily comparable to speech, especially
the expressive tone and distinctive flow of a speaker like King. The lack of a recognizable musical
form make these repeating and winding phrases feel unending to me—it’s almost like time is
suspended as we wait for the message of the saxophone. In my own hearing, this uneasiness is
soothed by a transition, where Elvin Jones enters on the drums (1:20) and the entire ensemble plays
a figure in unison. The rumbling atmosphere has been cleared away; Coltrane no longer floats
suspended on his own. Metered or “musical” time is switching on.

The drumset begins a swing pattern, the piano plays syncopated chords, and the bass begins
a more metered, walking tempo (1:45). The solo here has many of the same melodic contours as
the opening section, but Coltrane performs them with a more predictably even rhythm. Eventually
(2:40), a moment of silence ushers us back into a slight variation of the opening “speech time.”
Soon, the transition material from before comes back, but this time it leads us somewhere
unexpected (4:10).

Here, in this defiance of our listening expectations, ‘another space’ is wrought. In this
rupture of normative time lies ‘another space’ where opportunities for radical care are possible.
The drumset jumps to the fore of the texture (4:30), taking the listener into previously unexplored
improvisatory territory. The piano enters with its C tremolo again, and the climax of the piece
occurs where my ear might have anticipated a return to metered, “musical” time. The transition
material did not follow its previous path, and as a result, the louder dynamics, active movement of
the piano glissandi, and Coltrane’s highest notes of the piece are even more stark. It is here where
Coltrane breaks open the C minor tonal world he has been operating within. The raised third scale
degree pushes from the minor mode into the major, and this, along with the increase of musical
activity in the other parts, makes this moment the most intense of the piece.

This climactic ending, I argue, is representative of two kinds of temporal rupture. First, the
earth-shattering violence of the bombing that killed the four little girls and destroyed their futures
in a single moment. Second, it is that rupture of which Sharpe speaks: the past that is not past, the
looming disaster of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Coltrane’s attempt to depict that temporal
rupture—to enact it alongside and for the little girls in Birmingham—is a kind of “wake work.”
Through manipulations of musical time, Coltrane positions himself and his listeners alongside the
four girls in their disjointed, ruptured temporality.

“It was not better to leave her as I found her. In my reading and praxis of wake work, I
have tried to position myself with her, in the wake” (Sharpe 2016, 53). “Alabama” becomes
something more than a beautiful tribute or memorial. In this performance, manipulation of musical
time is a praxis of sitting with. Of sitting together. Across time, through time.