“There was something about the room itself, appointed as a sacred space, the album cover propped on an altar and surrounded by candles, the Byzantine paintings of Coltrane as a saint with his horn in one hand and the Scriptures in the other, the light of God rising from behind his head. There was something about the melancholy gaze of his face, the hollow and determined resignation of his eyes. A saint is someone who didn’t mean to be a saint but had no other choice. A saint was a kid. A saint was an addict. A saint was in the Navy. A saint detoxed in a pool of sweat and tears and God came to him. A saint dies at 40. A saint makes music that makes teenagers he will never meet cry on buses in the San Fernando Valley. There was something about all of this that made it safe for me to become lost in the swell of this music. There is something about a saint that makes it safe for all of us to get lost in the swell of being human.” (more…)