The Bridge
The John and Alice Coltrane Home in Dix Hills enters a soft opening this month, two decades into its restoration and days before Coltrane's centennial. Then Sonny Rollins walks off the stage in 1959 and takes his horn to a New York bridge.
LioraThe house where John Coltrane wrote A Love Supreme starts a soft opening this month. Gretchen Parlato's new record landed Friday, with three singers guesting. And a saxophone player who stepped off the stage for roughly two years and took his horn to a bridge. It's Saturday. Let's go.
LioraIt's Saturday, September 12th. This is The Daily Quintet. I'm Liora. Five stories from the world of jazz, in about ten minutes. Here we go.
One. The Lead: The John and Alice Coltrane Home in Dix Hills, a National Treasure since 2018
LioraToday, a house.
The John and Alice Coltrane Home sits in Dix Hills, New York, on three and four tenths acres. The National Trust for Historic Preservation named it a National Treasure in 2018. The home's own site says a restoration two decades in the making enters a soft opening this month, for Coltrane's centennial.
Coltrane lived there from 1964 to 1967. He composed A Love Supreme in a guest bedroom of that house.
DownBeat reports what the restoration kept. Alice Coltrane's meditation room, with its rainbow paned rose window. John's master bedroom, with the original morning glory purple carpet. The house reopens as an interactive museum, a recording studio, and a meditation space.
LioraSteve Fulgoni founded Friends of the Coltrane Home and is its president. The couple's daughter, Michelle Sita Coltrane, is artistic director.
The centennial lands on the 23rd, a hundred years to the day. The estate's Coltrane 100 site puts a concert at the Hollywood Bowl on the date, with Lakecia Benjamin and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra under Wynton Marsalis.
Two. Listen to This: Gretchen Parlato's The Wise Ones landed Friday on Edition Records with Robert Glasper and
LioraToday's record came out Friday. The Wise Ones, Gretchen Parlato, on Edition Records. Eleven tracks, cut in Los Angeles over two days last November. Parlato produced it with Alan Hampton.
Look at the band. Hampton plays guitar, piano and bass. Robert Glasper and Gerald Clayton both play piano and keys. Mark Guiliana is on drums. Three singers guest: Meshell Ndegeocello, Amber Navran and Becca Stevens. There is a cover of "Landslide" on it.
The tip. Glasper and Clayton, both on piano and keys. Play it front to back with the credits closed, and keep a note of where you think each one is.
Now the release desk. Kiefer put out a single yesterday on Blue Note, "BusyForYa," with Planet Giza and Shibo. It comes ahead of his Blue Note debut, Memory Bomb, due the 25th.
LioraNew York, the Lower East Side, the summer of 1959. A small apartment on Grand Street. Inside it is Sonny Rollins, twenty-eight, getting a lot of publicity for his work. He is about to step away from performing and recording for roughly two years, and practice on a bridge, because a neighbor was pregnant and the apartment was small. How the jazz world finally found him is its own story. Sekou has it.
Three. The Bridge: In 1959 Sonny Rollins stepped away from performing and recording for roughly two years
LioraOne true story from this music's history, every day. Sekou tells it, I ask the questions. Sekou, where are we?
SekouNew York. The Lower East Side, summer of 1959. A small apartment on Grand Street. Inside it is Sonny Rollins, twenty-eight years old, and he is getting a lot of publicity for his work. He had kicked a heroin addiction he had struggled with earlier in the decade. And he is about to step away from performing and recording for roughly two years.
LioraWalk away at twenty-eight. Why?
SekouHis own answer, given to a reporter decades later, is plain. Quote: "What made me withdraw and go to the bridge was how I felt about my own playing. I knew I was dissatisfied."
So he stops. No stage, no studio. His wife Lucille backs him.
Then the practical problem. The apartment is small and a neighbor is pregnant. The New York Public Library's finding aid for his papers puts it flatly: he started practicing on the Williamsburg Bridge to avoid disturbing a pregnant neighbor. He found the place by accident. Walking down Delancey Street one day, he told the National Endowment for the Arts, he noticed these steps going up.
LioraSteps up onto the bridge.
SekouOnto the walkway. In the open air, his practicing would not disturb his neighbor.
He goes back nearly every day for close to two years. Hour after hour, night after night. Asked in 2022 how long, he said often fourteen or fifteen hours a day.
On September seventh, 1960, he turns thirty. The next day, after admitting to himself that he smoked one cigarette, he writes in his journal: "Birthday now past but tendencies toward disruption still exist."
LioraDid the world know where he was?
SekouNot at first. In January 1961, rumors say he will play a Chicago club, but he never shows. Down Beat reports that the club said he was still practicing and experimenting, then adds: "Rumor has it that he does his practicing in the middle of a well-known bridge in New York City."
Later that year the critic Ralph Berton comes across him up there. Berton writes it up, thinly fictionalized, to protect him. He moves the scene to the Brooklyn Bridge and calls the saxophonist Buster Jones. Jazz readers work it out anyway.
Rollins told him why he was up there. "You're just suspended out there. You feel as if you're on top of everything, and you can see so far and so much."
LioraWhere did that run?
SekouMost accounts point to Metronome, July 1961. Though the New York Public Library's archive says Harper's instead.
By then his friends are pulling at him. Charles Mingus and Max Roach come to Grand Street in June of 1961, and Mingus writes to him after, pushing him back to work: "I'd much rather you'd save me immediately, and Max, with your saxophone." One public radio account gives a plainer reason he came down: he needed money, for dental work.
He returns in the fall of 1961. New label, RCA Victor. New group, with Jim Hall on guitar and Bob Cranshaw on bass. In early 1962 he makes his first studio record in over three years and calls it "The Bridge."
Rollins, on what the two years bought him: "I did come back with a brand new thing: me."
He died this past May, at ninety-five. The walkway is still the city's, not his. There is a petition, again.
LioraTwo years off the stage, and the only person he had to satisfy was himself. One account says he was not earning during the sabbatical. You can hear every one of those hours. That's The Bridge. Back to today, right after this.
Four. On the Road: A Sonny Rollins birthday tribute at the Birdland Theater, Herlin Riley in New Orleans
LioraTonight, coast to coast.
Tonight's ticket first.
If I had one ticket tonight, it's New York, and it points at tonight's story. The Birdland Theater has Donny McCaslin, Ben Allison and Steve Smith in "Way Out West, A Birthday Tribute to Sonny Rollins," two sets, seven and nine thirty, forty five seventy six.
Now the sweep. In New Orleans, Snug Harbor has the Herlin Riley Quartet at seven thirty and nine thirty, fifty two sixty. In Los Angeles, Catalina has Tierney Sutton on the music of Alan and Marilyn Bergman, doors seven, show eight thirty, fifty seven. In Minneapolis, the Dakota has "The Thrill is Gone," a birthday celebration of B.B. King, at seven, from forty one ninety five. In Boston, Scullers has Arturo Sandoval, with no set time and no straight ticket price on the club's own page.
LioraTwo rooms out. Kansas City's Green Lady Lounge is closed for now after a fire its site puts on an HVAC unit. Chicago's Jazz Showcase we could not read: its calendar came back empty.
Five. One More Note: George Russell cut "Manhattan" on this date in 1958 with Coltrane, Art Farmer
LioraSeptember 12th, and a session.
The Smithsonian's jazz calendar credits this date in 1958 as the day George Russell recorded "Manhattan." The band included John Coltrane, Art Farmer, Bob Brookmeyer and Bill Evans. Which lands the day back where we started it.
Two birthdays share the date. Cat Anderson, the trumpet player, born in 1916 in Greenville, South Carolina. The trombonist Steve Turre, born in 1948 in Omaha, Nebraska.
Put on something with brass out front.
Outro
LioraThat's the Quintet. If today's show earned it, follow The Daily Quintet wherever you listen.
The Daily Quintet is an AI-crafted production, researched and checked by humans. Every listing you heard came from the venue or the festival's own organizer.
That's your Saturday. I'm Liora. See you tomorrow.