Since I have mostly been writing about coding lately, I’ll get back to that in a bit. For now I’ve been thinking about an essay by John Bracey about his memories of John Coltrane, written for the Massachusetts Review. It’s a very personal essay that makes a subtle connection between John Coltrane the person, and the fictional John from Du Bois’s “The Coming of John” in The Souls of Black Folk. There is an extended quote from Du Bois that begins the essay.

“John,” she said, “does it make every one - unhappy when they study and learn lots of things?” He paused and smiled. “I am afraid it does,” he said. “And, John, are you glad you studied?” “Yes,” came the answer, slowly but positively.

Bracey is making a connection between Du Bois’s John and Mr. Coltrane as searching intellectuals, happily studying where others find mostly pain and frustration. I believe Du Bois was making a point about his own intellectual path and his place in life - a life that set him apart from others even if only because his unquenchable intellect propelled him to achieve far beyond the early circumstances of his life. Bracey’s essay is something I am going to have to think through a bit more before I can write about it with any depth, but I have always thought of Coltrane as being an intellectual on the same plane as Du Bois, as well as a musician on the same plane as J.S. Bach. Both Du Bois and Bach produced massive amounts of material throughout their lives, creating to corpuses of work that people analyze and draw inspiration from long after they have passed. Coltrane’s achievements as an improvisor and a composer are similarly depthful, even if Coltrane didn’t live long enough to produce as massive a corpus of work as the others.

In any event, I’ll need to chew on these ideas a bit before I can truly know what I think. I’ll need to listen to a bunch of Coltrane as well as re-read Souls of Black Folk. I don’t think I ever did a close reading of “Of the Coming of John” - at least not as close as those parts of the book that are more obviously related to the study of music. I should also check out Amus Mor’s poem “The Coming of John” to see how he made the connection between Du Bois and the broader appreciation of jazz (something tells me Du Bois wouldn’t have liked Coltrane’s music).

All of this feeds my intellectual curiosity as well as my direction with my musical practice. I need to spend more of my practice time on single-note soloing as this is my weakest area of guitar playing. I can’t play a solo to get myself out of a wet paper bag, at this point. There is no way I can approach the fluency of someone like Coltrane, but I can certainly cop some ideas. More importantly, though, a figure such as Coltrane is an exemplar of the kind of musician I truly long to be: driven by curiosity and unafraid to step into the deep end. Curiosity gets me where I’m going, for the most part, but the deep end is a place I rarely find myself while playing. In fact, I just need to play more often, period, no matter what the musical context. I don’t play nearly enough.