The Last Bus to Coltrane

He followed her husband’s sound in life; he followed her silent footsteps in death. There is something metaphysical about what happened on January 12 and 13. Alice Coltrane, wife of John Coltrane died, January 12. Saxophonist, Michael Brecker always wanted to be John Coltrane. He remains the only musician whose genius came close to the Coltrane sound. He passed on January 13. It’s almost like he had heard, Alice Coltrane had departed. The next day, he packed his bags and hastened to catch up with her. He knew instinctively where she was headed. She was going to rendezvous with her husband. Michael Brecker wanted to be there too. Brecker had been searching for John Coltrane through all of his living years. He would die for a meeting like that. Alice and Michael hopped on the last bus to Coltrane to form an eternal triumvirate with a man who they both loved. John William Coltrane. Sometimes death works like that. One can shrug off the timing as being pure conjecture, or you can look at the ties that bind these three human beings. Factor in reincarnation, which both John and Alice Coltrane believed in, and you start to see a pattern in these two deaths that travel beyond the boundary of an accidental happening. In his eulogy, at Michael Brecker’s funeral, in New York, Randy Brecker talked of his brother and the passing of Alice Coltrane He noted they both died in a space of twenty four hours. He called it “particularly significant.” What Brecker did in life, as a jazz musician is legendary? What both, John and Alice Coltrane achieved in terms of Jazz is there for all to hear. We know their lives. Have heard their music. It is their dying that is mysterious and intriguing, glorious in its coordinated exit. Two souls leaving to hook up with a sound they both knew so well. A sound that now resides in silence. The ethereal tone from the horn of John Coltrane. It is a religious experience Alice Coltrane knew what that felt like. She followed Hindu Vedanta philosophy most of her life. It guided her very being here on earth, helping her reach that metaphysical state, beyond which is the realm of glorious nothingness. Michael Brecker, had been there occasionally. Alice Coltrane knew this. She had heard him play and listened to his records which evoked here husband’s soul. Michael was a brother in free flow flight, lost, looking for directions in the real world. Alice Coltrane knew what ‘lost’ felt like. She had lived through her husband’s heroin addiction, his troubled genius and his lonely search for new roads in jazz. When John Coltrane died July 1967 at the age of 40, she clung to his music, took a vow of celibacy and began searching for answers in the Vedas. Between scriptures and notes she lived her life in California, often wondering what life might have been like if her husband was still alive, what jazz would have been like…. Between his Tenor fluidity and Soprano sax brilliance, John Coltrane had left gaps for others to follow. Few did. Even today, it is hard to hear a jazz musician who plays like Coltrane. His influence is universal; playing in his wake is something else. Michael Brecker was the only man on earth who could hear the drum that John Coltrane had left behind. Alice Coltrane knew that sound too. The only two people who could tune in to John Coltrane. Now they are gone into silence, the domain of a whiter shade of pale. Back here on earth, we are left with the fragments they created in passing.

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