Duke Ellington & John Coltrane

In 2026, I decided to take a different approach to the music I listen to in the morning with my cup of coffee. Find one album. Press play. Let it ride.

Duke Ellington & John Coltrane
(Jan. 31, 1963)

I'll preface this by saying, I'm not a "Jazz Guy." I don't know good jazz from bad, nor who the players were that created the foundation of jazz as we know it. Most of my exposure has come from samples in songs by heady hip-hop artists like Pete Rock, Talib Qweli, and The Roots, my early days working in mall department stores, or 90s-era rom-coms set in New York.

I do know the names of Duke Ellington and John Coltrane. I did not know, for certain, which one played the piano, and which played the flute. I had to look it up. Duke is the pianist. John plays the flute...and the various saxophones (alto, tenor, soprano) and the bass clarinet.

How and why I ended up listening to this album, repeatedly while drinking my coffee this month, is unknown. Some glitch of the algorithm, perhaps. I'm not mad about it. 

The entire collaboration album comes in a tight seven tracks over 34 minutes. It starts off with an absolute banger. In A Sentimental Mood, is a light snow while walking the streets of New York City on Christmas Eve. It's a steaming latte on an overstuffed couch in a daylight basement cafe on one of Paris' side streets. It's what I imagine Rob Reiner heard scoring his internal narrative monologues.

Even if you don't listen to jazz (or Jazz, respectfully), you probably know this song. It is a soothing entry into a terrifying musical world that, to the uninitiated, feels intimidating as a maze, seemingly, devoid of rule or logic. It's sophisticated, in that it has the vibrancy of emotion only felt by teenagers experiencing the simultaneous joy and agony of falling in love for the very first time. You may also have heard it watching The Equalizer 2 on an airplane.

The song makes me smile down at my not-quite-there, but not-quite-terrible cup of too-hot coffee at the airport bar at a much too early hour. It tides me over as I drink a watery Stumptown on my fight eastbound. It keeps me calm when the pilot says, "I wish I could promise you a smooth flight today, but, um...I can't. We're hearing there are some bumpy skies, so we're just gonna get up there and see how it goes."

Tracks two and three, Big Nick and Take The Coltrain, respectively, shake me out of the welcoming reverie with a frenetic "Look, Ma! No hands!" sort of energy. Our maestros lead me around the room—the imaginary jazz bar my brain is picturing with round tables along dark walls, the thrum of kitchen noise emanating from the swinging saloon doors, and a smallish dancefloor fronting the step-up stage at the far end of the room. It matches the shaking of my person occurring in the real world, where I'm throttling the jetstream with 150ish strangers in what amounts to an oversized tin can.

Track four, Stewie, slows things back down a notch, but we're still here for a good time. We're dancing. We're vibing. We're drinking white wine spritzers and Negronis and tall pilsners. It's free. It's joyous. It's the kind of music listened to live, or at least with a spirited intention, before leading you back down with track five.

If you were even in the ballpark of turning this date into something more, My Little Brown Book is the closer. I can almost feel the tactile haptics of putting this record on the record player,** dropping the needle to this song, and turning into the warmth of my date's smile.*** I don't have to ask her to dance. We're already dancing. It's New Year's Eve at home. It's our Anniversary. It's Tuesday.

This song makes any surface a dancefloor in the aforementioned jazz hall in my mind, the lights softened by an ever-present smoky haze even in the decades post the abolishment of cigarettes from proper society. Just when you think it is over, and you've begun to pull away, a little piano riff offers the opportunity to squeeze one more moment.

My coffee is gone. It was fine in a not doing more harm than good sort of way. Our stewards inform me it was Stumptown Coffee, but I wouldn't dare hold them accountable for anything served at 40,000 feet up. Also, I think I love jazz now, at least, if Coltrane and Duke are representative.

Back in my mind, the sexual tension has skyrocketed. Track six is a pressure releaser. The pace picks up to encourage a whirl and a twirl. It reminds us that in between the joy and the agony is this place where things are supposed to be fun. Titled Angelica, the song clocks in at 5:53. It's the only track that feels like it runs a little too long. One minor complaint, primarily due to the value of each second of a sub-forty-minute album.

They leave us with bumba-buh-baa, bumba-buh-baa, bumba-buh-baa. That recognizable audio countdown on the drums that kicks off The Feeling Of Jazz. John plays. Duke plays. Either soundscape could be a song of its own, but pulled together by the backing band, you're left satiated but wanting more when the final notes fade away. If you're lucky, you're drinking a coffee that does the same, and your record player is set to repeat.**** 

*Happy Birthday to a director no stranger to a jazzy walk on a snowy evening.

**I don't actually own a record player. But if I did, this is a song I imagine I'd play on it.

***My date is my wife of 20 years. She is the best, and the love of my life. I presume you have your own date.

****Do modern record players have an automatic repeat feature? Or do I have to walk all the way over there to lift the needle arm myself?

SIDE NOTES

• Duke Ellington is interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, NYC, not 12 miles from where I'm typing this side note.
• The song was composed by Duke Ellington on the fly at a performance in Durham, NC, in an effort to quell a dispute between two women in the audience. Coincidentally, I'm watching Duke Vs. North Carolina Men's Basketball teams compete in Durham RIGHT NOW! Someone is slacking on the code of this simulation.
  
  During the period of this recording Coltrane was going through a divorce, after which he quickly remarried. He was also becoming a much more spiritual person and musician having credited a religious experience for his recovery from alcoholism and heroin additions. He was 36 years old.
  
  Only four years later he would die of liver cancer. Coincidentally, a San Franciscan temple would come to worship Coltrane as God incarnate, and then as a saint after affiliating with the African Orthodox Church.

"The resultant St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco is the only African Orthodox church that incorporates Coltrane's music and his lyrics as prayers in its liturgy.^[115]

Rev. F. W. King, describing the African Orthodox Church of Saint John Coltrane, stated, "We are Coltrane-conscious ... God dwells in the musical majesty of his sounds." -Via Wikipedia

COFFEE THOUGHTS

I was in the market, and they had a machine that would copy your keys for you. Car keys, fobs, apartment door, there were no restrictions. You just insert your key into the slot or hold your sensor up to the pad, et. voila! A key is born. 

What. The. Hell. That is not how you're supposed to get keys made. You need to find a local hardware store that might (just maybe) stock the specific key shape you need copied. There, you'll find an older, white-haired gentleman to ask for help. He'll be gruff and not at all the pleasant joy he was moments ago, swapping stories with his equally senior hardware store colleague before you came along. If you're a woman, he might call you Honey or Sweetheart, in a way that you half expect an older woman to pop out of the back to say, "Don't pay ol' Frank, no mind, Doll."

He'll want to know if you want the butterfly key or the flag one. I don't think they work on commissions, but the disappointment he shows when you say, "No, just the regular one," is palpable. He'll argue with you about the "DO NOT DUPLICATE" etched into your original. He'll cave after a brief back and forth because he doesn't get paid much to care, and also, he's here for the crappy coffee and the storytelling anyway. He turns his back to you to get to work on a machine that looks pre-Cold War while you take in rolls of various chain thicknesses, bungies, and straps of all sizes, and L-shaped shelf mount thingies.

When he's done, he'll painstakingly write the key sku code onto a small manila envelope to take to the register. He hands it over, and you can still feel the heat of freshly shaped metal through the cardstock. You've spent 45 minutes on this key operation, and when you get to the dueling cash registers* at the front of the store, you've somehow added a roll of paracord and a carabiner to your hardware store haul, because, well, because you never know.

That is how you get a spare key. Not from some vending machine adjacent to customer service at the big box grocery.

*All hardware stores have two registers that face each other, straddling the entry/exit doors. I think this is in part so that they can keep an eye out for shoplifters, and also so that occasionally, after a particularly gruelling customer experience, the register checkout people can look across at each other and sigh dramatically.

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