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 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 into the open guitar case of the first street musician I’d ever encountered before taking 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 from that day is gazing into 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 beckoning me inside.

This rookie didn’t know Coltrane from Colbert (as in Claudette, not Steven), but I was taken by the image of the 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 and adored, 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 took the album out of its bag several times on the return trip, I’m sure as much as to try to impress my seatmates as to contemplate the man on the cover. I was cool!

* * * * *

We celebrate today what would have been John Coltrane’s 82nd birthday with the usual outpouring of tributes and remembrances. This is mine.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House and here for an index with links to other appreciations.