December 2025

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.

The opening chant feels like stepping into a cathedral you didn't know existed. Coltrane builds these massive sonic walls and then tears them down, note by note, until you're standing in something intimate and overwhelming at once. Elvin Jones on drums doesn't keep time so much as he bends it, makes it elastic. You can feel him pushing against the structure, testing what it can hold.

People talk about spiritual jazz like it's some rarefied category, but this album is just a man trying to say thank you. Trying to find the vocabulary for grace. There's an urgency in Coltrane's saxophone—this sense that he's running out of time to get it all out, every feeling, every revelation. The way he circles a phrase, repeats it, transforms it. Like watching someone learn a new language in real time.

McCoy Tyner's piano work in "Resolution" is what devotion sounds like. Those chords are architecture. They build space for the whole quartet to move inside. And when Jimmy Garrison's bass comes in, grounding everything, it's like finding solid earth after floating.

What strikes me most is how generous this music is. It doesn't ask you to understand bebop theory or jazz history. It asks you to feel. To pay attention. To notice the conversation happening between these four musicians who trusted each other enough to get completely lost together.

I think about how Coltrane recorded this in one session. December 1964. One day. Like he'd been carrying it inside him and finally found the moment to let it out. There's no pretense here, no showing off. Just four people making something sacred out of instruments and air.

Put this on late at night when the world gets too loud. Let it wash over you. Notice where your breath changes. Where you lean forward. Where you close your eyes. That's the album working.

#music #jazz #spiritualjazz #coltrane #musiclover

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.

Mark Rothko spent his career chasing what he called "basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom." He wanted his paintings to be experiences, not objects. He famously said that people who wept before his paintings were having the same religious experience he had when painting them. Standing there, I understood. The orange glows like embers. The red pulses with something between rage and tenderness. The yellow hovers, barely contained, like joy at the edge of grief.

What strikes me most is how these massive canvases—this one stretches nearly eight feet tall—manage to feel both monumental and intimate. Rothko intended them to be hung low and viewed up close, enveloping the viewer. He wanted to eliminate the distance between the painting and the person experiencing it. In our age of Instagram art, where we experience everything through a screen at thumbnail size, there's something radical about art that demands your physical presence, that only reveals itself when you show up.

Color field painting emerged in the 1950s when Abstract Expressionists were exploring pure abstraction, removing all reference to the external world. While Jackson Pollock dripped and splattered energy across canvas, Rothko meditated on stillness. His paintings are portals, not windows. They don't show you something else—they become something themselves.

The longer I stood there, the more I noticed. The edges aren't sharp—they breathe and shimmer. The colors aren't solid—they're layered, translucent, containing depths you can't quite reach. This is what Rothko meant when he said he was interested in "the expression of human emotion" rather than illustration. He painted feeling as substance.

There's a reason his chapel in Houston feels sacred to people of all faiths and none. Art at this level transcends cultural specificity and speaks to something universal—our capacity to be moved, to contemplate, to exist in the presence of beauty without needing to possess or explain it.

If you ever get the chance to stand before a Rothko, take it. Give yourself twenty minutes. Let the initial "that's it?" wash away. Let your eyes adjust. Let the colors work on you. You might find yourself in the presence of something you didn't know you needed.

#art #Rothko #modernart #museumvisit

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. He wasn't content to master the changes and call it done. "A Love Supreme" is a spiritual offering, four movements that trace a path from acknowledgment to resolution to pursuit to psalm. The urgency in his playing—those rapid-fire runs that seem to tumble over themselves—feels less like virtuosity and more like necessity. He's not showing off; he's trying to reach something just beyond language.

I think about the context: 1964 America, a nation fractured and uncertain, a Black artist creating space for transcendence in a world that often denied him basic dignity. Coltrane chose devotion over bitterness, complexity over simplification. The album's famous four-note motif—those descending tones that feel like a mantra—becomes a kind of sanctuary. You can chant it, walk to it, breathe with it.

What makes this music endure isn't just technical mastery but emotional generosity. Coltrane invites you into his searching without demanding you share his specific faith. The suite works whether you hear it as sacred text or as pure sound. It meets you where you are.

Standing in front of Rothko's "Orange, Red, Yellow" at MoMA years ago, I felt something similar—that sensation of color as presence, of abstraction as intimacy. Coltrane's music does this with sound. The washes of saxophone, the layers of rhythm, they don't depict emotion so much as become it. You're not observing grief or joy from a distance; you're inside it, part of its architecture.

If you've never sat with "A Love Supreme" start to finish, find an hour when you're not trying to do anything else. Good speakers or headphones. Let it unfold. Notice how the bass line carries you even when the melody seems to splinter. Notice the spaces where Coltrane pulls back, how silence becomes part of the conversation. Notice what rises in you—restlessness, peace, longing, recognition.

This is art that demands nothing but offers everything. It's been sixty years, and it still sounds like tomorrow.

#music #jazz #Coltrane #ALoveSupreme #musiclover #albumreview