Weekend self-care open thread: Trane

My oldest brother has been a jazz fan of long standing. But when we were growing up, it was all Beatles and Stones. That's the music on which I cut my teeth. But once he left high school (CARDINAL HAYES, Y'ALL!), and went into the wider world, he discovered America's art music.

I resisted for a long time. And then, I heard this:

John Coltrane was born on Sept. 23, 1926. His active years were from 1945 to his too-early death in 1967. And he remade jazz in that time.

He is, to use an analogy, the Bach of jazz. Where Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie ventured, Trane took their journeys and turned them into a kaleidoscope of a kind of music no one had ever heard before. He pulled notes and timbres and rhythms no one had thought of prior to him. He could take an anodyne song like "My Favorite Things", and turn it into an exploration of variations and notes. His music is filled with both sound and silence. He was the virtuoso's virtuoso. 

When I listened to Trane's rendition of "My Favorite Things", that was when it clicked. "This is why this music matters." That Black music which had its genesis in the plantations could grow to this sublimity puts paid to the racist notion that Black people were savages. John Coltrane is no one's savage. He stands among the giants of Western music.

I cannot stress enough what John Coltrane has meant to me as a writer. His jazz is what I aspire my writing to be. To celebrate his birthday, and for our weekend self-care, the music of Trane.

Art is that which gives us wings to soar above the mundane. May you all be beautiful, and recognize the light within.