{"id":64,"date":"2007-04-27T13:15:33","date_gmt":"2007-04-27T17:15:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/?p=64"},"modified":"2007-04-27T13:15:33","modified_gmt":"2007-04-27T17:15:33","slug":"a-love-supreme-spoken-word","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/?p=64","title":{"rendered":"A Love Supreme (spoken word)"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

A Love Supreme<\/u>
\n<\/strong>(w\/ Excerpt from lyrics by Leon Thomas)<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 1926 the cosmos concocted
\nA cacophonic spark.
\nWhen John William Coltrane made his mark,
\nThe air was dark and heavy
\nTo the point of choking.
\nAmerica’s broken prism of idealism
\nShone in racial schisms and tokenism.
\nThe depression loomed just out of reach,
\nWould-be slaves, though free from chains,
\nWere not free in speech.
\nThe black man could teach his children,
\nJust not too much, and as long
\nAs they didn’t touch elbows with those
\nWhose clothes were newer, skin was whiter,
\nWho had a sense of veracity, or at least the capacity
\nTo hold fast to these ideals that made real
\nThe great divide.<\/p>\n

In ’51, off of a stint with Dizzy
\nTrane\u0092s veins trembled with the roar
\nOf the Dragon. For six years,
\nHeroin was his God.
\nTrane worshipped at the feet of Bird,
\nCharlie Parker, the junk-headed, smack-fueled
\nBebop savant who was so good,
\nEven Trane wanted to be like him,
\nPlay like him, shoot up like him, even die like him
\nIf it meant touching the transcendence
\nMorbidly married to Bird’s dependence<\/p>\n

By ’64, we were knee-deep in war.
\nWhile some protested, others, bare-chested,
\nPressed at the time-tested tenets of patriotism,
\nCreating another schism of American idealism.
\nThen Trane soothed the pain of ingrained,
\nEntrenched thought, his pitch drenched
\nLove-torn souls,
\nJetted in on a ray of radiance like the sun
\nTo shine on those in our midst and
\nThe still unborn in this hour of our great need.
\nHe poured down like a cleansing rain,
\nHealing pain, washing stains of red
\nFrom seas of black and white.
\nWhile King had a dream of freedom at last
\nMalcolm said justice would come to pass
\nWhen the chickens came home to roost.<\/p>\n

But Trane began to believe the power lay
\nNot in either way, but instead in music’s fray.
\nHe believed melody could heal the sick.
\nHe believed arpeggios could summon the rains.
\nHe believed that, in his tonal dissonance
\nWas a cosmic constant, a Divine being,
\nA key to nature’s geometry
\nReflecting life’s asymmetry,
\nLike the nectar from a healing tree,
\nMusic was life in a dying world.
\nA composition of the spheres,
\nTranscending the style of his years
\nTranscribing the elliptical, orbital patterns
\nThat gathered order into all matter,
\nTransposing the audible life stream
\nFrom dream to daylight,
\nFrom fantasy to true sight
\nHis second heaven was life-bread, leavened
\nBy perfect consciousness
\nOf a Love Supreme.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Love Supreme (w\/ Excerpt from lyrics by Leon Thomas) In 1926 the cosmos concocted A cacophonic spark. When John William Coltrane made his mark, The air was dark and heavy To the point of choking. America’s broken prism of idealism Shone in racial schisms and tokenism. The depression loomed just out of reach, Would-be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/christianpiatt.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}