Trane at 80

“Sometimes, I wish I could walk up to my music as if for the first time, as if I had never heard it before. Being so inescapably a part of it, I’ll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels, and that’s too bad.” John Coltrane to Nat Hentoff

Trane would be eighty today. Happy birthday, wherever you are! And I’ll spend as much time as I can listening to his work, especially the latest — 2005 — release, One Down, One Up : John Coltrane Live at the Half Note. (recorded in 1965; with McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums)

From the liner notes: “I was more listening to him than trying to accompany as a drummer. I was just fascinated by this guy and the way he played. He had so many ideas. It seemed like he was sitting on a mountain of ideas, and they would flake off every three or four seconds.” Elvin Jones, December 2001.

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