India, Oct. 11 -- When writing about protest music, it is customary to refer to names that are nearly cliches. Singers such as Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez, and Nina Simone; or, more recently, The Clash, Public Enemy, Rage Against the Machine, or Kneecap. All these names have one thing in common: lyrics. That is probably why jazz is not a genre that springs to mind; jazz is often instrumental. There is an unambiguous clarity to the spoken word. It tells us exactly where to stand, what to march for. Because of this, jazz gets skipped over, treated as too abstract, too passive, or perhaps just too beautiful to be political. A recent episode of the Track Star podcast showed how wrong that can be. Saxophonist Ravi Coltrane sat down with host Jack Coyne to dissect the oeuvre of his legendary father, John Coltrane, whose 100th birth centenary was in September. Ravi broke down the dynamics of John Coltrane's 1963 masterpiece, Alabama. The track, he reminded us, was recorded following a bombing by the Ku Klux Klan of a church in Birmingham, killing four black girls. No vocals. No words. But, as he explained, Coltrane played notes on his sax that seemed to match the cadence of Martin Luther King Jr's tribute to the victims. In the genre of jazz, the lack of words is not a limitation. In fact, it can strengthen the genre's profound power of defiance. Jazz's tradition of challenging the status quo stretches back to the early days of the genre. Long before the Civil Rights Movement found its footing in the 1960s, jazz innovators were using their art to infuse dangerous truths into mainstream spaces. Consider Billie Holiday's 1939 recording of Strange Fruit, written by Abel Meeropol, a high-school teacher, after seeing horrific photos of southern lynchings. When Holiday sang it, she threw out the soothing delivery expected of big-band vocalists of the era. She slowed it down and spat out the words with devastating starkness. Holiday famously fought her own record label to release it. A few years later, Duke Ellington would release his 1943 masterpiece, Black, Brown and Beige. By 1959, bassist and composer Charles Mingus wrote Fables of Faubus, a scathing strike against Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, who had deployed the National Guard to block nine Black students from integrating Little Rock Central High School. Then Nina Simone took the stage, fusing the improvisational brilliance of jazz with revolutionary anger. Triggered by both the Birmingham church bombing and the assassination of activist Medgar Evers, Simone released Mississippi Goddam in 1964. An even-more-radical vocal expression can be found on drummer Max Roach's 1960 landmark album We Insist! Freedom Now Suite. On the track Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace, vocalist Abbey Lincoln abandons traditional lyrics and melodies entirely. For over a minute of the Protest segment, she unleashes a torrent of raw, wordless shrieks, screams and gasps, matched by Roach's chaotic, frantic drumming. This lineage of activism continued to evolve. On his 1986 album, Tutu, Miles Davis's track, Full Nelson, is an anti-apartheid tribute to Nelson Mandela, using the era's aggressive electro-funk synthesisers and heavy drum-machine beats. More recently, when saxophonist Kamasi Washington released his magnum opus Epic in 2015, it held the track Malcolm's Theme, a tribute to the legacy of civil-rights leader Malcolm X. It ends with a clip from a speech by Malcolm X. The piece captures the revolutionary urgency of the modern Black Lives Matter movement. Listening to it again, I find that it builds a bridge right back to John Coltrane's mourning sax on Alabama. To exclude jazz from American protest music is to tear whole chapters out of a history book. As Ravi Coltrane said, the emotional truth of a tragedy like the Birmingham bombing needn't be laid out in a verse-chorus structure in order to touch the listener. Whether through a wordless horn, a satirical bassline or a voice pushed to the edge of a Munch-like scream, jazz has documented cracks in the American experiment. It's about time we listened....