Coltrane in Seattle

Originally published in Earshot Jazz , April 1995 by Keith Raether Late in the morning on October 1,1965, drummer Elvin Jones was rummaging through Jan Kurtis' kitchen in Lynnwood, banging on cast iron skillets, tapping on stainless steel pans. Searching for new sound. Saxophonist John Coltrane sat quietly at the kitchen table, interrupting his inner focus only to smile at Jones or talk about song charts. Saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, pianist McCoy Tyner, bassists Jimmy Garrison and Donald Rafael Garrett — the rest of Coltrane's band on a West Coast tour that began in San Francisco — listened with purpose. Seattle saxophonist Joe Brazil completed the circle. "Coltrane seemed to be thinking about a lot of things," says Kurtis, 30 years after he recorded Coltrane's seminal Live in Seattle double album and the otherworldly Om later released on Impulse Records. "There must have been an enormous amount of music going on inside of him." Jones, meanwhile, had ...

Originally published in Seattle Weekly September 29, 2015, reprinted in Stories of Music Volume 2 , which won 2017 International Book Award) by Steve Griggs Fifty years ago, the hottest jazz artist in the world arrived in the Emerald City in search of a new sound. He found it. In 1965, America was at a turning point. The Beatles played their first stadium concert, Bob Dylan went electric, Malcolm X was assassinated, Martin Luther King marched to Selma, NASA launched probes to the moon and Mars, and men first walked in space. Here in Seattle, the Space Needle had been pointing to the heavens for four years. And on September 30, saxophonist John Coltrane and his ensemble would weave together all these threads at a 225-seat jazz club on the corner of First Avenue and Cherry Street and make history. The venue was named the Penthouse, though it was on the ground floor of a ramshackle hotel. Owner Charlie Puzzo, a bartender with a penchant for the promiscuous, liked to name his clubs after n...