4 Little Girls

John Coltrane - "Alabama"

“On the Sunday morning of 15 September 1963 a dozen sticks of dynamite
were planted by white racists in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church
in Birmingham, Alabama. At 10.45am the bomb went off, killing four young
black girls aged between 11 and 14.”

“Coltrane wrote the song ‘Alabama’ in response to the bombing. He patterned
his saxophone playing on Martin Luther King’s funeral speech. Midway through
the song, mirroring the point where King transforms his mourning into a
statement of renewed determination for the struggle against racism,
Elvin Jones’s drumming rises from a whisper to a pounding rage. He wanted
this crescendo to signify the rising of the civil rights movement.”