Imbolc Valentine Moon
Then again, there’s jazz. Not sure how it made its way into my soul. Sometime in my teens. Might have been that see-it tour I took with the Methodist Church to New York and Washington, D.C. Gene Krupa at the Metropole stands out as a memory, though just what I would have been doing there I have no idea.
Jazz, like the Coltrane piece I’m listening to right now, Body and Soul, comes along with big east coast city memories, including the wood paneled corridors of Washington, D.C. It feels like night time and carpeted hallways with people doing significant things, well past working hours. Smoke filled rooms, half-empty glasses with lipstick stains and cigarette butts smoking in ceramic ashtrays.
There’s also the stadium in Cincinnati where Coltrane shared the stage with Monk and Herbie Mann. Where the jazz went on and on and then we returned to the place we were crashing, somewhere on Mount Adams, maybe on Celestial Avenue or Paradise or Monastery Street. It had these kind of street names.
The combination of marijuana, the jazz festival, the late 60’s and Mount Adams makes for a peculiar set of memories, as if for a while I floated along on Celestial Avenue listening to tenor sax riffs, that wonderful complexity of Monk’s piano, the flute, the horn all marking a variation on the theme of heaven. Might have been.
(Cincinnati landmark Immaculata Church on Mt. Adams in the background)