The Church of Saint John Coltrane
Organized religion got you down? Feel like giving up on it altogether? You are not by any stretch alone. Religiosity is in grave decline in Europe and the U.S., prompting panic in some quarters and satisfaction in others (that young adults, for example, agree more with Karl Marx than with the Bible). The list of reasons for religion’s growing unpopularity is long and rather predictable, and you won’t find a case for the contrary here---unless, that is, it’s for the St. John Coltrane Church. If there’s any religion that deserves an upswing, so to speak, perhaps it’s one based on the genuinely ecstatic, consciousness-expanding music of one of America’s most spiritually-minded jazz composers.
Founded in San Francisco by Bishop Franzo King and his wife Reverend Mother Marina King in 1971 as the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church, the small body of worshippers has since become something a little more radical: The Saint John Will-I-Am Coltrane Church, whose vibe, writes Aeon, “is a rapturous out-of-your-head-ness, where instead of the choir and the hymn book there is the sinuous, transcendent music of the jazz saint.” We get a powerful immersion in that vibe in the course of the 30-minute documentary, The Church Of Saint Coltrane. The church band, with Bishop King himself on the soprano saxophone, gets deep into Coltrane’s music, in funky performances of cuts from Coltrane's groundbreaking 1964 A Love Supreme especially.
Interview with John Coltrane June 15, 1958
June 15, 1958 interview of John Coltrane by August Blume. The interview was conducted while Coltrane was appearing in Baltimore with the Miles Davis' Quintet, and appeared in print in the January 1959 issue of The Jazz Review.
This event is free with museum admission