January 29-February 4, 2004

artpicks

Ashley Kahn reads

books

With the honorable Slought Foundation spending several months combining archival material and contemporary artwork for their recent exhibition, "Coltrane," Ashley Kahn seals up January by telling tales of the giant stepper's greatest work in A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album (Viking). Written with Coltrane drummer Elvin Jones, Kahn's book details (as did his Miles Davis book, Kind of Blue) the breathless single day in 1964 on which Coltrane's "signature" was recorded; the story's told through anecdotes from its conceptualists, players and their families, about contrapuntal nuances, new spiritualities, the burgeoning culture of African Americanism and wild free-jazz abandon that led to the sainted suites. McCoy Tyner, Alice Coltrane and John himself, tapped throughout several interviews, plot the moment that is the Impulse label icon. Like a keen film documentarian, Kahn mixes and matches black-and-white images from the dawning of the age of Aquarius and the first bleatings of free jazz, spliced-and-diced texts and a living, breathing feel for the music itself for a book -- and surely a talk -- that reveals all the intricacies of the work with its own ferocious, authoritative writing. This was the time. And this is a record of the time.

Ashley Kahn reads from A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album, Thu., Jan. 29, 7 p.m., free, Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341.

—A.D. Amorosi

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