Hard Bop, Free Jazz, and Islam

Abstract

Chapter 4 examines the shared goals and values of jazz and Islam through the wider lens of Sunni Islam, the Nation of Islam, and the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, and the militant aesthetic of hard bop and free jazz in the late 1950s and 1960s. The chapter tells the story of jazz artists who played their music in Third World Muslim countries during the Cold War. Black internationalists saw a contemporaneous emergence of black American and African freedom struggles across the black Atlantic world during this period. Malcolm X’s and John Coltrane’s meditations on Islam, jazz, and Pan-Africanism resonated with the spirit of the civil rights and Black Power era in the 1960s.