WAY DOWN IN THE HOLE:

The John Coltrane Quartet's "Alabama" is a strange song, incongruous with the rest of the album on which it appears. Inserted into Coltrane's 1964 album Live at Birdland, it's a studio track that confounds the virtuosic post-bop bliss of the album's first three tracks, live recordings that include a jittery rendition of Mongo Santamaria's "Afro Blue." All of that collapses when we reach the sunken melancholy of "Alabama." We are far, now, from the cascades of sound that Coltrane introduced us to in "Giant Steps," far from the sonic innovations and precise phrasing he refined in this album's live recordings. Here, Coltrane's saxophone sounds hoarse and enfeebled, until it collapses on the threshold of a hole in the ground.

In "Alabama," Coltrane asks us to bear witness to this hole in the ground, which is also a hole in America's story, which is also a hole in the heart of black Americans. He wants us to grieve alongside him at this absence. The quartet recorded the track in November 1963, two months after the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, made an absence of four little black girls. When I listen to Coltrane playing over Tyner's piano I hear smoke rising up from a smoldering crater, mingling with the voices of the dead. He asks us to peer down into the hole, to toss ourselves over into this absence. Just past the one-minute mark, even this funeral dirge collapses in on itself, as Coltrane's saxophone sinks into a descending arpeggio, coaxing us in.

Then Elvin Jones's drums enter the fray and Jimmy Garrison begins playing the bass; suddenly we're on a brisk jaunt that slightly recalls the virtuosity that preceded this track, even though all Coltrane's sax can muster is squeaking and croaking. We hear Jones mumbling (in delight? Disconcertion?) in the background as if to answer that croak. It all sounds like someone working up a smile in the midst of immense pain, so that he doesn't disturb the comfort of those around him. And it almost works: we swing and swing until the jaunt comes to an abrupt end, as if the players have remembered why they gathered in the studio that day. We get a second of silence before we find ourselves dropped back down at the beginning of the song, with Tyner's tremulous keys and Coltrane's meandering horn. Jones's and Garrison's playing disarticulates until they mirror Jones's mumbling from only a few seconds ago. We're back at the beginning.

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