The Wire

John Coltrane: Divine Wind

It was a warm August evening almost 40 years ago when I heard John Coltrane live at the peak of his powers, and I didn’t know what to make of him. A thick-set man wearing a tight fitting sharkskin suit, beaming a relentless stream of notes from the horn of his saxophone, surrounded by a motley gaggle of musicians shaking and beating a variety of hand percussion; another saxophonist standing nearby; a rhythm section roiling away for half an hour without a pause. All of this without announcements or introductions, and all taking place just 100 yards away on a stage set up at the far end of a vast outdoor stadium. The group was playing to maybe 7000 listeners in a section of concrete bleachers that could have held at least twice as many. Vendors walked through the stands hawking Coke and ice cream.

The occasion was on 15th August 1965, at the Down Beat Jazz Festival in Chicago’s lakefront Soldier Field, where years later I would review the likes of The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and Peter Frampton for a daily newspaper. On those occasions the entire place was full to its capacity, topped out at 50,000 people. For the jazz festival, attendance was spotty. But the music certainly had enduring power.

A full afternoon of jazz had already passed, and there was more to come. Listeners came and went during the day-long programme, which featured Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Dave Brubeck, Stan Getz, the Woody Herman Band, Gerry Mulligan, singer Joe Williams and Thelonious Monk’s Quartet besides Coltrane, who had been scheduled to appear with his regular quartet partners Jimmy Garrison, Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner. I recognised Brubeck’s “Take Five” and was excited by
“Blue Rondo Ă La Turk”; I liked Getz, who played bossanovas; and Monk, though I was impatient with Charlie Rouse’s sax blowing. I was a precocious little brat, and turned up my nose at Herman’s and Mulligan’s sets. Wasn’t jazz supposed to be a black thing?

I was 14 years old, attending a concert with a school pal, for the first time without anyone’s mother or father as a chaperone. According to Yasuhiro Fujioka’s John Coltrane: A Discography And Musical Biography the classic quartet performed “Nature Boy” and “Blue Valse” for 36 minutes, with Archie Shepp guesting a second soloist. I was never clear about what happened or how the music gained its oversized impact, but I knew immediately that Coltrane’s set was unlike anything else on the bill. In the 90s, saxophonist Dave Liebman sent me a cassette of his performance, and no wonder it had mystified me: it was way beyond my experience. Shepp was ripping with a fierce growl through an extended uptempo improvisation that veered far from the main themes of either “Nature Boy” or “Blue Valse”. He and Coltrane were supported by a seemingly random clatter of shakers and tambourines; the pianist dropped out of the discernible action soon after the pieces had got off the ground.

Back then I’d been digging some of the quirkier R&B radio hits such as Gene Chandler’s “Duke of Earl”. The Capitols’ “Cool Jerk”, and Ramsey Lewis’s funky piano trio instrumental, “The In Crowd”. The hipster parents of another friend had introduced me to mid-50s Miles Davis quintet recordings including “Round Midnight” (on the album ‘Round About Midnight), on which Coltrane made a dramatic tenor entrance, and I had been obsessively spinning a compilation of big band tracks that my folks had received as a cigarette company promotion. I was old enough to realise something momentous was happening between Chicago’s white and black populations, but didn’t grasp all the implications of the Civil Rights struggle. I was friendly towards the kids at school who didn’t live in the same neighbourhood as my friends and I. Not having any athletic interests, jazz seemed like the good, safe, entertaining thing we might share.
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But John Coltrane’s post-1965 music, from the blazing assemble free-for-all of Ascension, through the exotic fug of mystic works like Om and Kulu Sé Mama, to the superhuman endurance feats he was achieving on his live dates (eventually to be documented on the double album Live In Seattle and the quadruple CD Live in Japan), wasn’t an easy vehicle for traversing common ground. Jazz already had the curse of being an adult music, abstract and somehow uncomfortably funny. When I slipped jazz on the record player at parties or hangout sessions it drew giggles and guffaws: it was as if someone had started lecturing earnestly in a foreign language. Soul music, especially Motown, was cool; everyone loved Aretha Franklin and Dionne Warwick, The Temptations and Smokey Robinson, Little Stevie Wonder, Martha And The Vandellas, The Supremes and Marvin Gaye. The blues, for which Chicago was becoming famous had some credibility with my cohorts thanks to local heroes like Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield, if not Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf – like jazz perhaps, black blues was at once too close to home and too alien to be fully embraced. Fear of the Other prevailed in and around Chicago; to trek to the black South Side blues clubs was an adventure declined by most of my high school classmates. Exploring avant garde jazz, even on LP in the comfort of one’s living room, was an equally remote inclination.

And yet John Coltrane was no stranger to jazz-oriented Midwesterners. Drummer Jack DeJohnette and saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell, both from Chicago, sat in with the saxophonist at his March 1966 gig at the Plugged Nickel – though at that point neither of them were familiar to most young white wannabes of the era; and the legal drinking age of 21 precluded teenagers from getting into the club. I would occasionally cajole a friend or escort a date to a contact at University of Chicago or Northwestern, or to a coffee house or art gallery, to hear the richly expressive music of Lester Bowie, Joseph Jarman, Muhal Richard Abrams, Henry Threadgill, Leroy Jenkins, Anthony Braxton, Kalaparusha Ara Difda, Fred Anderson and other AACM members but hardly anyone would go with me a second time. The long collective improvisations typified by saxophone histrionics and other instrumental extremes, the diffused rhythms and dissonant atonal or a-melodic backdrops, the eerie air of African-American spirituality and the rampant rhetoric of black nationalism put off more of my generation than were attracted.

During 1966, though a few trendsetters at my upscale suburban high school began to flaunt their copies of A Love Supreme. Its black and white jacket conveyed the bearer’s integrationist allegiance, almost as if one was walking down the hall arm in arm with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. There was nothing comical about Coltrane’s halftone portrait on the front cover; it represented him as a man of heroically modest stature, a grown-up caught off-guard, thinking of something bigger than posing for an album cover photo. The prayer Coltrane wrote for the inner sleeve was dismissably exotic to most of us, and suitably sombre in keeping with our mission to appear elevated. Then there was the matter of the music itself, into which we could genuinely relax.

We heeded the saxophone call with which Coltrane opened “Acknowledgement”, were soothed by the warmth of his tone and chided by his occasional gruffness. We were cradled by Jimmy Garrison’s bass ostinato, rocked by McCoy Tyner’s piano chords, stirred by the waves of Elvin Jones’s drums, grounded by the musicians’ chant. The subdued mood of “Acknowledgement” flattered our adolescent despondencies, before the turnaround of “Resolution” saved us from the slough of despair. Tyner’s solo was readily comprehensible and Coltrane’s variations were hypnotic, though he would often deliberately break the spell with a splintered cry at the peak of a phrase. Jones’s minute and a half intro to “Pursuance” kicked the ass of any drumming we had ever heard; Coltrane’s theme was fast and Tyner’s break was pretty. Upon his return the saxophonist and the drummer locked in to one of those driving movements that silenced any doubters, allowing us to indulge Garrison’s flamenco flourish of a bass solo. Finally, “Psalm” let us float out of time, with the sense of being older and wiser for having sat through a Coltrane Quartet masterpiece. 33 minutes was not too much time to trade for such righteous gratification.
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A certain solipsism affects each jazz lover’s listening history. We grow in steps marked not by the actual history of the artists who influence us, but rather by the order in which we are exposed to their works, whenever they were created. And so for me, Coltrane’s advance (and mine) after A Love Supreme has nothing to do with his addition of bassist Art Davis to his quartet for expansive versions of Nat ‘King’ Cole’s “Nature Boy” and Mary Poppins waltz “Chim Chim Cheree”; nor the summer 65 rendition of “A Love Supreme” at the Antibes Jazz Festival (12 minutes longer than the studio version); nor his final suite, Meditations, recorded with second saxophonist and second drummer in September of that year. Instead my next impression arrived as a perk with my first subscription to Down Beat in the autumn of 66. The free gift was Coltrane’s Live At The Village Vanguard Again! documenting the relatively recent events of the night of 28 May.

The album cover depicted Coltrane’s mostly new supporting cast in front of the club on the afternoon of the gig, in a snapshot by the redoubtable photographer Charles ‘Chuck’ Stewart, Bassist Garrison, a veteran of Coltrane’s classic quartet, looked like a Caribbean cricket player in a madras short sleeve shirt, shorts and white socks up to his calves. Pianist Alice McLeod wore a pink skirt, white top, open raincoat and dark hose; she was holding Jimmy’s hand but looking at Coltrane, the father of her two sons (they married the following August), who stood next to her under a white snap-brimmed cap, his dark tie askew and his gaze fixed on something out of the frame. Pharoah Sanders stood stiff with a glazed grin, carrying a soprano saxophone case. He wore a black suit like Coltrane’s but with brown shoes and his sax strap around his neck. Drummer Rashied Ali, black suited and brown-turtlenecked, stood at the picture’s edge, slightly bent as if ready to step into action. But the group’s casual pose was completely belied by the contents of the recording, which listed only two tunes on the turquoise reverse of its jacket: “Naїma” and “My Favourite Things”.

I remember eagerly slipping the album on, sitting down to read my Down Beat, and being immediately distracted from the print, astonished. I tried “My Favourite Things” first, and never having heard Coltrane’s bestselling Atlantic version, I couldn’t find the Richard Rodgers melody anywhere in it (my error: it emerges about five minutes into Coltrane’s initial soprano solo, and Pharoah quotes it, too). Nor could I recognise a steady beat, or any plan that guided the pianist’s chordal accompaniment (though now I believe it’s Alice’s most rangy, nuanced, secular recording). Even after a second listening, and a third, fourth, fifth, I wasn’t sure how many horn players there were. Coltrane and Sanders created a storm that struck me as more intense than only two could construe. There was a flute, identified by Nat Hentoff in his liner notes as being played by “Pharoah”: he also wrote that Coltrane played bass clarinet during their “dialogues”. I still can’t hear that – and when Coltrane re-enters on soprano after Pharoah’s tenor solo, I still hear more than two horns. As Lewis Porter reports in John Coltrane: His Life And Music that Eric Dolphy’s mother gave her late son’s instruments to Coltrane, and since Dolphy was such an incisive presence throughout Coltrane’s original Village Vanguard sessions, can we assume his spirit is at least evoked, if not summoned, by his maelstrom?

I flipped the LP to side one and listened to “Naїma”, which was beauteous and lyrical – intimate and intense, giving me the image of a full-bodied woman wrapped in jungle vines. Again Alice’s chords provided a backdrop more like a beaded curtain caught by a breeze than conventionally propulsive comping; again, Ali swirled up rhythms as if attending to several simmering pots. Someone plays a lot of tambourine. Garrison didn’t ‘walk’ on the bass, he throbbed with it. After "Naїma", he set up side two with a five minute bass solo, again testing my patience. So I used to skip to the ensemble “My Favourite Things”. But I still didn’t hear it as I do today.

At what point did the later Coltrane efforts cohere for me? I might date it from the season I became immersed in Meditations, the more tempestuous long-form follow-up to A Love Supreme, coming to understand the logic that meant the sumptuous, sensuous movement “Love” could only issue after the scourge of ”The Father And The Son And The Holy Ghost” and the rigours of “Compassion”. Yes, it took a while more – but what does it matter? I was a kid, my reactions weren’t well-informed, and I didn’t consider myself part of Coltrane’s target audience, even though Impulse! Records producer Bob Thiele may have figured it was kids like me who, by 1970, would make A Love Supreme a gold record, with retail sales of 500,000.
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And if that were the case, why not? Coltrane was an inclusionary humanist, making it increasingly, specifically clear through his interviews that he had ambitious spiritual goals. By referencing Indian, Brazilian, Latin and European classical musics, he also indicated that he was now open to all the world’s culture. Thiele did well to target the burgeoning youth market, which was buying records as no generation had before. He must have been aware that his figurehead artist’s new music was losing some of his core followers, including those musicians who had supported his career from his early days in Philadelphia through his ascendancy with Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk.

Jimmy Heath, for instance – with whom Coltrane had shared the lead alto chair in Dizzy Gillespie’s group in the late 40s, said in a 1990 interview for the video documentary The Coltrane Legacy, “I liked the Coltrane who played melodies, because he had a quality of sound that was like no other saxophonist before him or after. I didn’t think he needed any other saxophone players. When he added Eric Dolphy, and Pharoah and Archie, I didn’t think that was necessary. I thought it was too much. Because he played enough saxophone for 100 guys himself.”

So why did Coltrane take that route? “Well, he was trying to break away from using the chords,” Heath proposed, “and he found that some of the younger musicians were more daring and had fewer ties to conventional harmonies. They were freer, and he chose that direction to go in… So some of the things he did I didn’t particularly like. One record that comes into mind, that I never played but once, was Ascension. I forget how many people were all playing at once on it! They were supposed to be listening to each other, but I had heard New Orleans music with people playing collective improvisation, and it sounded better. When I heard this, I didn’t take to it.”

Frank Foster, the tenor saxophonist who brought bebop modernism to the mid-50s Count Basie band, felt likewise. As quoted in Ashley Kahn’s forthcoming book A Love Supreme, Foster says “I thought Ascension was a little extreme, but he [Coltrane] was always my man. I agreed with some who said, ‘Coltrane’s experimenting. He’s done just about everything that can be done with a tenor saxophone so now he’s trying to reach out for something else’.”

Coltrane’s experimentalism, driven by his determination to reach beyond what he had found to ever higher ground, was not confined to his music, although that aspect of his character found its greatest public fulfilment and expression there. Ascension, recorded in June 1965, was an explicitly transcendental effort, through which he hoped to lift off from his own limits by drawing on the energies of others. Besides convening Sanders, Shepp and bassist Art Davis, all of whom had previously supplemented Tyner, Garrison and Jones in studio and live performances, Coltrane enlisted alto saxophonists Marion Brown and John Tchicai and trumpeters Freddie Hubbard and Dewey Johnson for two 40 minute extrapolations of a simple theme, marathons which his traditionalist fans regarded as chaotic free-for-alls.
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The structure for Ascension was indeed without elaborate melodic or harmonic directions; it was merely an outline that even encouraged each participant to contribute directly from their deepest aspirations, without presenting any demands that might compromise their spontaneity or individuality. By sheer weight and volume of the air the 11 men moved, Ascension struck many of us not overly invested in song-derived standards as monumental. The recording’s density, though, rendered it virtually opaque. How could a listener pierce the many levels of activity, and achieve an overview of the collective’s contradictory impulses?

The easy answer was to use drugs. Of course dope, a prevalent recreation among 60s rebels, had long been associated with jazz and seemed to offer some enhancement of the listening experience, whether by intensifying perceptions or focusing attentions it’s never been clear. Heroin use, which had decimated the bebop generation and been conquered by Coltrane in the 50s, did not hold broad appeal for the collegiate types who would delve into extreme dissonance in hopes of enlightenment. LSD, on the other hand, had been famously celebrated as a key to unlock the Doors of Perception.

“Trane took acid. No doubt about it,” shrugs his biographer Lewis Porter. “Plenty of people talked to me about his heroin and alcohol use, though all four who talked to me confirming his acid experience wanted it off the record. I don’t know why that’s so scary. JC Thomas [author of Chasin’ The Trane, the first published book-length biography] wrote that he was tripping either at the time or around the time that he recorded Om [6 October 1965]. Apparently he did a lot of LSD during the last period of his life. Some people have used that against him – that explains why his late music is so crazy. But that’s one of the reasons I wanted to analyze “Venus” [from Interstellar Space, recorded 22 February 1967] in my last chapter. Coltrane was too accomplished a musician for all his history to disappear.”

As Coltrane’s skills had not been irredeemably dulled during the depths of his heroin dependency (when Thelonious Monk had shouted “Coltrane! Coltrane! at the end of his own “Epistrophy” solo on Monk’s Music it was to awaken the saxophonist from a nod, and elicited an exciting, solid Coltrane chorus), neither was his technical facility evidently blunted by LSD. In one of my own isolated attempts as a university student to lead a free jam while tripping on misapprehension of having much more than my usual limited musical abilities at my command. Imagine what saxophone speed and control Coltrane, a compulsive practiser, might have believed he had at his fingertips. Consider what harmonies he might have discovered in what others perceive as dissonance, what shapeliness he may have distinguished in sounds commonly identified as disorderly, what underlying pulses he could have sensed uniting ostensibly unconnected incidents.

Concentration under the influence of psychedelics can be problematic. Yet LSD does a number on the listener’s time sense as well as the musician’s. It is not inconceivable that exposure to Ascension or any other of Coltrane’s open-form later productions (Om, Selflessness, Expression, Cosmic Music) after ingesting acid might seem to offer insights that are less accessible to the untreated mind.
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Still, the self-absorption accentuated by drug use-and emblematic of any spiritual quest – is counterproductive to making things happen in spheres outside the self. Although Coltrane titled compositions both prior to and after A Love Supreme for events and individuals linked to the American Civil Rights movement, it may not be coincidental that at its height, when established jazz musicians including Max Roach and Charles Mingus had gone explicitly political and the avant garde was being identified by poet/critic Amiri Baraka’s phrase “black music”, Coltrane’s New Thing didn’t endear him to mainstream jazz’s black audiences.

Porter’s Coltrane biography cites an incident in a Newark nightclub late in 66, during which “the [black] audience and manager became hostile and insisted that he play some of his old standards… the gig was actually cancelled after the first night. “According to Nat Hentoff, this problem affected not just Trane, but the growing school of free stylists – represented by Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman – that he championed. “Their predecessors, at the start of their [bebop] revolution, at least were able to work in urban Negro [sic] neighbourhoods,“ Hentoff wrote in an article published in May 1965. “But the current avant garde, also predominately Negro, has stirred minimal interest in Negro nightclubs. Thus the present revolutionaries have even fewer places in which to play than did Monk and Parker.“

In response, Coltrane – like Ornette Coleman, Sam Rivers and others – relied increasingly on engagements outside the club circuit, taking his music to campuses, festivals, lofts, churches and community centres. But even musicians who these days thrive in just such venues as avatars of the avant garde then questioned Coltrane’s approach. “You can get almost as avant garde as you want to be, as long as you keep that steady pulse,” says saxophonist David S Ware, who in '66 regularly travelled to Manhattan from his home in New Jersey to hear Coltrane. “Coltrane lost a lot of people when he broke time, and went into the other world and started messing with that multi-directional time.”

Rashied Ali’s drum concept, first described as “multi-directional” by Coltrane himself, can today be understood as a natural outgrowth of the polyrhythmic accomplishments of Elvin Joes and Sunny Murray. Though it’s hard to distinguish Ali’s contributions from Jones’s on Meditations, his fast hands, fine touch and collaborative sensitivity to Coltrane’s playing are readily apparent on Interstellar Space, their unprecedented album of duets. Coltrane didn’t need other saxophonists, trumpeters, extra bassists or anything but a trap kit to complete his vision. Interstellar Space stands as music from on high, sent back to Earth from some place elemental, mysterious and grand.

“Mars”, “Venus”, “Jupiter” and “Saturn”, the four tracks initially released on LP (two more, “Leo” and “Jupiter Variation”, were included in the 1991 reissue on GRP/Impulse!) comprise a very loose suite, linked by the two men’s investigations of motifs relating to those planets’ distances from the sun, and the zodiac attributes of Roman gods for whom they’re named (respectively, from the linter notes: “battlefield of the cosmic giants, love, supreme wisdom, joy”). Coltrane’s tenor sax dominates, howling with enormous urgency across light years of space/ time, conveying a human heart at the core of it all. Ali rises to every opportunity, projecting a fluid pace and compressed hyperactivity from the start, going his own way boldly or shadowing Coltrane closely (as when using brushes on the balladic “Venus”) but never forcing him into a pattern or a tempo. Together the two of them have the force and authority of an orchestra.
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“The way he plays allows the soloist maximum freedom” Coltrane famously said of Ali to free jazz polemicist Frank Kofsky. “He’s laying down multi-directional rhythms all the time.” There’s no slackening of dynamic tension, either, when Ali solos as ion the two and a half minute intro to “Saturn”, Interstellar’s 11 minute climactic track.

Then as now, Ali churned up abstractions – far-flung tangents in a near-chaotic galaxy – as well as continuous propulsion disdaining regularities, without completely abandoning the heartbeat. Ali’s centre of sonic gravity was higher than that of Jones, pinned to the cymbals and snare more than bass drum and toms. He would swing in the classic sense if Coltrane gave him reason to do so, and he could dig an explicit pocket, though he seldom instituted a conventional tattoo or cliché. During his two year tenure with Coltrane, obviously a time of enormous challenge and consequent accelerated growth, he ventured into a universe or possibilities, offering his mentor flat-out vigour, stimulation and instant response.
“Trane was bigger than life” Ali says now, “and whatever he stepped into he would command. Me, I was playing with my idol, and I had more confidence in my ability than in my conception. I felt not unprepared but apprehensive.

“I never knew what Trane was going to do, and he never told me what to do, so I did what I could to make it comfortable. I drew from the straightahead conceptions, yes, and I can’t forget Elvin because I got so much from him. Elvin brought so much to the music, without Elvin there wouldn’t have been no Trane. I was like an extension of Elvin. I had to move on from what he did, though, same way that in my straightahead stuff I was always trying to find something else to do.

“I wasn’t always sure of what I did then, because I didn’t get a chance to sit down and listen to the playbacks. We’d record and that was the last time I’d hear it. I’d damn near forget it until I’d hear it again,” he admits. “But sometimes now I listen to some Trane before I go to a gig a remind myself of something I used to do. Yeah, I’m still working from that stuff I wasn’t even sure of.”

In that, Ali’s not alone. He and Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, Pharoah Sanders Archie Shepp and Alice Coltrane are only the most obvious veterans of the saxophonist’s late, great monuments who are still dealing with that experience. All subsequent saxophonists travel in Coltrane’s wake, as do most serious instrumentalists pursuing virtuosity. Almost every subgenre of jazz and improvisational music has been changed by endeavours. Probably everyone who ever heard A Love Supreme, and the music Coltrane made after it, listens differently than they did before.
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“I didn’t know he was sick,” Rashied Ali says ruefully of the saxophonist’s final months. “I had no idea. I knew he was drinking juices and stuff, but he was not the kind of person that complained – not to me anyway – about being sick or anything. I just couldn’t see him being sick at all, the way he played on the stage and as much power as he used to play the saxophone. I have pictures of him where he had his hands on his liver at times, he was getting pains there, and he complained sometimes about being tired, you know, being not as energetic as he usually was. But I was totally in shock when I heard that he had died that morning, 17 July 1967. We had just played at Olatunji’s about two weeks before. And he was playing strong, but I noticed he was sitting down in a chair so I guess he was a little tired… The liver robs you of a lot of energy when it goes on the blink. And, that’s all, you know. I just never really realised that he was sick enough to pass.”

Actually, Coltrane’s final performance had been three months earlier, but as demonstrated on The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording (released in time to celebrate what would have been his 75th birthday, 23 September 2001) there’s no hint of the cancer that ended his life at age 40. Ali, Alice Coltrane and the eternally loyal Garrison delve with an unbowed Coltrane into the moment on lengthy versions of “Ogunde” and “My Favourite Things” (on which he plays soprano, naturally), whilst Sanders burns alongside him with blistering heat. Their passion is undiminished after 45 years.

I don’t remember where I was on 17 July, but a couple of days later I was travelling by elevated train to work at Wrigley Field, the home of the inept Chicago Cubs baseball team. I was a vendor selling Fresca, a lemon-lime carbonated diet drink, which I’d push on whatever secretaries took a day off to sit in the ballpark. It was a good job for a teenager: arrive around 10:30am, sit around until noon, walk the stands selling until about 3:30, home by 4pm with $50 cash in hand. But just as the train pulled into the stop where I would get off, I turned to my newspaper’s obituary page. There was the notice of John Coltrane’s death. I couldn’t believe it so I read the article twice, then walked downstairs, crossed the station and walked back upstairs, to take the day off and return home, where I listened to Coltrane for hours.

For help with this feature, thanks to Ashley Kahn

© The Wire 2010