@jazz

The strings enter first—measured, almost cautious—before the piano arrives like someone finally ready to speak after years of silence. Keith Jarrett's

The Köln Concert

is an accident of greatness, a moment when equipment failure forced improvisation, and improvisation revealed something unrehearsable.

There's a particular thrill when you first encounter a piece of art that speaks a language you didn't know you needed to hear. That happened to me with Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms—those kaleidoscopic chambers where polka dots multiply into eternity, where reflections fragment your sense of self into a thousand shimmering possibilities.

Kusama has spent decades exploring patterns, repetition, and obliteration through her art. What began as a way to process her own psychological experiences has become a visual language that millions now recognize: those obsessive polka dots, the pumpkin sculptures, the endless nets that transform walls and canvases into hypnotic rhythmic surfaces. Standing inside one of her mirror rooms feels like inhabiting a waking dream, suspended between presence and dissolution.

The genius isn't just in the technical execution—those carefully positioned LED lights, the precision engineering of the mirrors—but in how the work transforms you from passive observer into active participant. You become part of the artwork. Your reflection multiplies and disperses. You're both there and not there, singular and infinite. It's disorienting and liberating all at once.

There's a moment in Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" where the tenor saxophone reaches so high that it ceases to be music and becomes something else entirely—prayer, perhaps, or the sound of searching itself. I played it yesterday morning while the light came through the kitchen window at that certain angle, and I understood why people describe spiritual experiences as "transcendent." The music was doing exactly that: transcending the limitations of what four musicians in a New Jersey studio could reasonably be expected to create.

What strikes me most about this 1964 recording isn't its technical virtuosity, though there's plenty of that. It's the complete surrender to something larger. Coltrane structured the suite around a simple four-note motif—so simple a child could play it—yet built upon it an architecture of devotion that still sounds radical sixty years later. The whole piece moves like a meditation, from acknowledgment through resolution, pursuance, and finally to psalm. You can hear the band listening to each other with absolute presence, responding not just to notes but to intention.

This is what I mean when I say jazz is America's greatest cultural export. Not because of nationalism, but because it demonstrates democracy in action—individual voices finding harmony without losing themselves, improvisation within structure, the sacred emerging from the everyday. McCoy Tyner's piano comping creates space for Coltrane's explorations. Jimmy Garrison's bass walks steadily while Elvin Jones's drums suggest both chaos and complete control. Everyone is essential; no one is disposable.

Nina Simone's voice stops time.

I've been living with her 1965 performance of "Sinnerman" these past few days, and each listen reveals another layer of intensity I'd somehow missed before. Ten minutes and nineteen seconds that feel simultaneously eternal and fleeting—the piano cascading like judgement itself while her voice moves through fear, defiance, desperation, and something approaching transcendence.

What strikes me most isn't the virtuosity, though that's undeniable. It's the

I was seventeen when I first heard Nina Simone's "Four Women," and the force of it stopped me cold in my parents' cluttered basement, standing among boxes of old vinyl. That wasn't music as background or decoration—it was music as reckoning. Each voice she conjured represented a different way Black women had been forced to exist in America, and she embodied every one with devastating precision. Her contralto voice didn't ask for permission; it demanded witness.

What strikes me now, decades later, is how Simone refused the false choice between artistry and activism. She brought the entire weight of her classical training—those years at Juilliard, the Bach and Beethoven she mastered—and wielded it like a weapon against injustice. The result was something entirely her own: protest songs that swung like jazz standards, love songs that carried the undertow of rage, performances that blurred the line between concert and confrontation.

I've been thinking about her lately while visiting galleries filled with contemporary artists who similarly refuse to be categorized. There's a painter here in the city, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, whose work excavates Black queer history through fragmented imagery and archival material. Like Simone, she doesn't explain herself to make viewers comfortable. She presents the work and trusts that those ready to receive it will understand.

Standing in front of Rothko's "No. 61 (Rust and Blue)" at the MoMA, I watched a woman cry. Not subtle, dignified museum tears—full, body-shaking sobs. The security guard didn't move. This happens here.

Mark Rothko painted this in 1953, during what critics call his "classic period," when he'd fully committed to those massive, floating rectangles of color. It's nearly eight feet tall, and the rust-orange bleeds into deep blue like a wound closing, or opening—I still can't decide which. The edges aren't clean. Nothing about it is clean.

People say abstract expressionism is cold, intellectual, a con job. Stand in front of one for ten minutes and tell me that again. Rothko didn't paint ideas about emotion—he painted the thing itself, compressed into pigment and canvas until it vibrates. That rust isn't the color of rust; it's the feeling of rust, of decay, of something beautiful that's dying or something dying that's beautiful.

Walking through the Museum of Modern Art last Tuesday, I found myself stopped cold by Kandinsky's

Composition VII

. Not because I understood it—I didn't, not at first—but because the painting

The Weight of Silence: Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel

There's a single piano note that hangs in the air like morning mist. Then the violin enters, suspended between time and memory, and you realize you've stopped breathing.

Arvo Pärt's

There's a moment about forty seconds into Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" where the saxophone becomes something more than an instrument. It's 1964, Van Gelder Studio, and you can hear the room itself breathing—the bass humming beneath like a heartbeat, the piano offering small prayers, and then that horn comes in, not playing notes but speaking in tongues. This isn't music you listen to; it's music that listens to you, finds what's broken and unspoken, and holds it up to the light.

What strikes me each time is Coltrane's commitment to

searching

Standing in front of Rothko's "Orange, Red, Yellow," I felt something break open inside me—not in a violent way, but like watching ice melt in spring. Three massive fields of color, bleeding into each other at their edges, and somehow they contain every sunset I've ever witnessed and every feeling I've never been able to name. This painting doesn't ask you to understand it. It asks you to

feel

it, to stand there long enough that your analytical mind gives up and something deeper takes over.

Listened to Coltrane's

A Love Supreme

again last night. Late. Lights off. Nothing but the speakers and the dark. Forty years I've been returning to this album, and it still catches me off guard—the way prayer can sound like this, all brass and breath and searching.

I first heard Coltrane's

A Love Supreme

in my twenties, sprawled across a threadbare dorm room carpet, headphones pressing against my ears like a secret. The opening bass line—simple, meditative, almost like a prayer—pulled me into a space I didn't know music could create. It wasn't background noise. It was a conversation between Coltrane and something larger than himself, a four-part suite structured like a spiritual pilgrimage. The tenor saxophone didn't just play notes; it searched, yearned, questioned, and ultimately surrendered.