The late Pete Henderson was one of Pittsburgh’s premiere hard bop jazz musicians. Pete told me that during a Crawford Grill matinee in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, John Coltrane’s mesmerizing solo went on and on. Trane left the stage for intermission still wailing. Trane walked through the Grill and could be heard still playing his solo backstage. Pete said Trane walked back on stage after the break still playing the same hypnotic solo. Pete Henderson shouted out loud, “*&^%$#!”
John Coltrane would be 100 years old this year. All around the world people of countless religious beliefs, world views and cultures are celebrating his birth date on September 23. His music and his legacy are artistic, material, and spiritual. He adopted the Sanskrit name Ohnedaruth which means Compassion. On July 13 and 14, 1966 John and Alice Coltrane visiting Japan, paid homage to the victims of the United States’ 1945 atomic pogroms in Hiroshima and Nagasaki–compassion in his art and in his life.
Pittsburgh in its heydays was a Black Music Mecca. Here and there today are some Pittsburgh Coltrane enthusiasts who surely remember some of Trane’s visits to town. And if local Coltrane authorities like yesterday’s Pittsburgh jazz masters Kenny “Fish” Fisher, Roland Draft, William “Beaver’ Harris, and Edward “Rabbit” Barnes were still among us, they could, really for real, recount Trane’s Pittsburgh legacy on stage and in the community.
FRED LOGAN
Pete Henderson also told me that way, way back before John Coltrane was “Trane,” he was stranded in Pittsburgh for a spell (“Back in the day,” that was not uncommon. Jazz giant, Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, and Blues queen, Aretha Franklin were stranded at different times in the “Burgh.”). Pete said Trane lived in the Hill District at the home of a local saxophone player with a Muslim name I do not remember.
Similarly, the renowned Pittsburgh vibraphone titan Rabbit Barnes told me that years and years ago, he saw Coltrane perform at a club on Centre Avenue in Shadyside near Morewood Avenue (?), and at a club on the Southside of Pittsburgh (?). The names of both venues are lost to record.
Former United States president, and Blues Brothers-wannabe, Bill Clinton states in a Coltrane documentary film that in the brief span of ten years John Coltrane’s music progress through more historic artistic transformations than whole schools of music progress in an entire century. John Coltrane recorded 1957-1967!
In October 1959, (month and year thanks to Robin Kelley’s biography of Thelonius Monk), Cannonball Adderley told Richard “Rip” Weston, Kenny Fisher, Roland Draft, and some other very young Coltrane groupies in front of the old Ellis Hotel on Centre Avenue that Coltrane’s live music was at least six months ahead of Trane’s latest recordings in the record stores!
Kenny Fisher and aspiring local drummer Vern Card were among the local
Coltrane fans who hung out with the quartet all day long when Trane was in town.
Fish and Vern often said they were dismayed by Trane’s honest, sincere humility
(compare with Miles Davis’s unabashed egomania). They said Trane would often lament that he was only a jazz musician and might have been an important lawyer or a medical doctor.
Often after the Crawford Grill closed Vern Card, who worshipped the ground Elvin Jones walked on, would chauffeur the quartet to a White Towers restaurant where they would sit and talk until dawn. Vern would often arrive late to work. And he eventually lost his job as an apprentice baker, just five minutes from where he lived. He said that he deeply regretted losing his employment. But given the chance he would do the very same thing again without a second thought!
Over the decades, Coltrane alumni have given stellar performances in Pittsburgh. In November 1969, Coltrane bassist Jimmy Garrison was at the old Loft in Homewood with Beaver Harris and the 360 Degrees Experience. During the last week of May 1972 (the week of the historic 1972 African Liberation Day in Washington, DC), Coltrane alumni McCoy Tyner and Rashied Ali played at the old Diplomat Club on Penn Avenue in East Liberty.
At an historic performance that I am absolutely certain will be released someday as another “lost” recording, in 1995 the world acclaimed Geri Allen and Trane alumni McCoy Tyner did a piano duet of Billy Strayhorn’s compositions at the old Regent Theater, now the Kelly/Strayhorn Theater in East Liberty. (Current Allegheny County resident John Weston and friends saw the John Coltrane Quintet at a club in New York City featuring Eric Dolphy, when the one and only Rashaan Roland Kirk walked in (another “lost” recording I am certain will be “discovered” and released). Pete Henderson said one Saturday afternoon the wind and snow were blowing outside of the Crawford Grill, John Coltrane on horns, Elvin Jones on drums, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and McCoy Tyner on piano were playing “The Music!” (Amiri Baraka’s term), when Eric Dolphy walked in the door, on his way to a gig in Ohio. Dolphy joined in. And they wailed right then and right there in Pittsburgh
