John Coltrane: An Appreciation

As a very grown-up 18 year old (or so I thought), I traveled to New York City alone for the first time during my senior year in high school. Some 40 years later, I vaguely recall getting off a Trailways bus at the Port Authority Terminal and walking out into the teeming throngs on 42nd Street. I lunched on a freshly sliced roast beef sandwich at an Irish pub near Madison Square Garden and washed it down with my inaugural English ale. I dropped some pocket change in the open guitar case of the first street musician I’d ever encountered. I took the subway uptown to Columbia University, where I (futilely) hoped to attend college, walked across the campus green to Low Memorial Library and later window shopped along Broadway.

But what I most clearly remember was gazing in the window of a hole-in-the-wall record store a few doors from the West End restaurant and seeing John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” album staring back at me. I went inside and asked to see a copy.

This rookie didn’t know Coltrane from Colbert (as in Claudette, not Steve), but I was taken by the image of an intense looking black man blowing a horn on the dust jacket. I figured that if the title track was a cover of the Rodgers and Hammerstein waltz from “The Sound of Music” and the flip side included George Gershwin’s “Summertime,” which I knew from “Porgy and Bess,” then these were good enough reasons to pay four or five bucks (I don’t remember exactly how much) to plunge into the great musical unknown.

Besides which, buying my first modern jazz album seemed like a very sophisticated thing to do for a young man on his own for the first time in the big city. I was cool.

We celebrate what would have been John Coltrane’s 81st birthday today with the annual outpouring of tributes and remembrances. This is mine . . .

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