Live review #12: Coltrane at 100

City Lights centenary tribute

Coltrane at 100, City Lights, San Francisco, April 15th, 2026

By Jonah Raskin

NOW, MORE THAN ever before, and especially on the 100th anniversary of his birth, I think of John Coltrane as the quintessential saxophonist for the Beat Generation. Not long ago, Keith Shadwick, the British born musicologist and author of half-a-dozen unique books about rock’n’rollers (Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin) and about jazz and the blues, opined that Jack Kerouac’s novel ‘On the Road did for literature what Charlie Parker and John Coltrane did for jazz.’

Shadwick believed that they whipped it up ‘into brave new shapes and forms that challenged the norm and set a generation in motion’. And, by the same token, what Parker’s and Coltrane’s albums did for jazz, Kerouac’s books did for literature. The writer and the musicians moved along parallel tracks.

So it made sense that City Lights Bookstore to host a wild night with music and words that paid tribute to Coltrane’s centenary. There were more Black people in the shop than ever before, at least in my memory, and I’ve been in the shop almost once a week for the last several years.

There was more live jazz than ever before and more talk about Coltrane, and regarding the Black liberation movement and about religion and spirituality, too. More than I had ever heard at City Lights. On a wall at the front of the makeshift stage, Coltrane’s portrait occupied a prominent place and seemed to regale the audience members who filled every seat and who stood shoulder to shoulder from deep inside the shop to the front door.

Pictured above: Franz King and Emory Douglas at City Lights’ Coltrane event

Emory Douglas, a member of the Black Panther Party and its best known visual artist, painted the portrait. He went deep into his memories and dredged up tales about Panthers he had known and loved: Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Bobby Hutton and Eldridge Cleaver, who acknowledged the liberating energy of rock’n’roll on white kids in the Sixties in his book Soul on Ice.

But the evening belonged, not to rock, or the Panthers, but to jazz and to Coltrane who was born into an African American family in Hamlet, North Carolina, in 1926 –the same year that Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey.

‘Trane’, as he was often called, made his mark on history, first in bebop in the 1950s, and later as one of the all-time truly exceptional jazz saxophonists in a field crowded with the likes of Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz, Pharoah Sanders and more. The sax was the instrument for the Beats, much as the guitar would be the instrument for the hippies and all the Sixties folk.

At first Trane played alto sax. Then he switched to tenor, joined the US Navy, studied music theory at the Granoff School of Music, and, according to legend, practised all day and all night. A heroin addict, he struggled for years to kick his habit and apparently succeeded, but he died at the age of 40 – two years before Kerouac’s demise – in 1967 in Huntington, Long Island, my home town. Much too short a life.

When news of Trane’s passing reached me in Manchester, England, where I was a student, I put aside my records of the Beatles, the Stones, the Who and the Kinks and, for a week, listened to Coltrane’s albums, My Favorite Things (1961) and A Love Supreme (1965), which are still my favorites of his LPs.

City Lights’ dapper, dignified staffer Solomon Rino kicked off the centenary and set the tone for evening when he noted that Coltrane ‘graced the planet like a God’. Franzo King, who founded, with his wife, Marina King, ‘the Church of John Coltrane’ described himself as ‘an apostle of Coltrane consciousness’ and explained that ‘without music there is no possibility of a change in thinking.

Pictured above: Emory Douglas’ Coltrane portrait amid the bookshelves

When he first heard Coltrane, he said, he experienced ‘a sound baptism’. He added, ‘the name John Coltrane is a mantra with liberating power’. Maybe so. I have always found his brand of jazz delightful.

Professor Nicholas Louis Bahan III, the author of The Coltrane Church and The People’s Detective (which features a Black Lives Matter activist turned private investigator) aimed to steer the conversation in a scholarly direction. No go. Douglas talked instead about his life as a Panther and his travels to China. ‘I learned through observation and participation,’ he said.

Franzo King blew the sax with energy, precision and passion; Kerouac would have most certainly applauded. Not surprisingly, Franzo extolled the power of images and sounds not words and ideas.

He was joined at the front of the room by two young African American drummers, one with a faded T-shirt that read ‘A Love Supreme’, plus two guitarists, one of them a white man, another saxophonist and five vocalists. They did not seem to have rehearsed or practised beforehand, but rather came together organically and played spontaneously, pursuing the art of improvisation.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the floor under my feet vibrated, that the sounds from the band and the singers rose up to the ceiling and filled every nook and cranny at City Lights. No saxophonist was more of a romantic than Trane and the evening distilled that moving spirit.

My companion for the event, a young woman born and raised in Haiti, found Franzo King’s brand of religion a bit too much to take. Calling John Coltane a ‘saint’ didn’t work for her. But the Coltrane devotees appeared to be blessed by ‘a love supreme’. I applauded Douglas when he urged listeners to ‘decolonize the imagination’, words that were spoken, after all these years, like a true Panther.

Editor’s note: All images by the author