korut:

unbornwhiskey:

MAX ROACH:
“TRIPTYCH: PRAYER, PROTEST, PEACE”

When I knew God, I knew God as John Coltrane. He made spiritual invocations the necessary bedrock, grounding us all in the thought that we play this music (both as musicians and as listeners) to traverse the unknown light, and the unknown light is God, or inner peace, or infinite space, or something in which we may feel whole for once in our fucking lives.

Five years earlier, Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln prayed. They prayed to clear the table of the nonessential and the uncommitted, because they knew when they fell into “Protest” that they’d be unearthing some essential shit that requires commitment. Like Wu-Tang Clan’s “I Can’t Go to Sleep,” “Protest” is the recognition of prison bars beyond the prison bars. Though we have escaped the initial traps (here: slavery), there exist endless peripheral ones that will oppress us unseen.

It is only through the raw telling of this pain that one reaches “Peace”—there are many screams that shake the skeleton and Lincoln commands all of them. But the peace is not Coltrane’s. This peace is unsure. This peace is frightening, and thus is not peace at all. We still see eternal fields of imprisonment, though some of its hills may only be hills of the mind. Our telling of the trauma has only served to reenact its tyranny. The unknown light only leads to hard darkness. We will never feel whole.

This is the truth. This is the truth in drum abandon.

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