I’ve been thinking about John Coltraine’s riff on ‘Favorite Things’: sixteen minutes of musical invention that captures the complexity of human emotion.
That’s what struck me the first time I heard it, but it occurs to me now that the way I am moved, the way the complexity of sound communicates a depth of meaning beyond words that I find so astounding, must in some way define the human condition.
No doubt, my life experience is nowhere near what JC lived, his alcoholism and growing up as he did in the 40’s and 50’s as a black man is so far removed from my white small-town existence, yet he communicates my sense of human experience so effectively I must bow to his genius.
