I discovered John Coltrane about the same time I discovered Jack Kerouac. I’m pretty sure it was the summer between my sophomore and junior year. They seemed to go together seamlessly, Blue Train was my soundtrack to On The Road and it made sense to me, the restless teen I was — looking to, you know, burn like a “fabulous yellow roman candle.” Coltrane’s music always made me think that the saxophonist may have well been one of those kinds of people Kerouac talked about “ambling after”, one of those, “mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved…” The intensity of recordings definitely felt that way.
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