Black Pearls: recovered memories.

"On first listening," the liner notes warned, "one might think that Coltrane's music was an example of raw Dionysian spirit untamed by the guiding hand of Apollo." On the cover: Coltrane photographed from below so that his whole torso rises magisterially, the saxophone angled from his mouth and plunging (so it seems) through the frame of the LP. His hair's shaved tight to the skull and his neck bulges from the white collar; with a spotlight from the front, colored theater floods from the side, and solid black background, his head looks like it might explode.

Black Pearls. Or, more accurately, BLACK PEARLS [logo] JOHN COLTRANE. I've never felt more intimidated by an album's packaging--unnaturally so. What had induced such anxiety? Why did the image alone make me recoil?

The music itself was taped on May 23, 1958, a year to the month before Coltrane's watershed recording of Giant Steps. Ranked against previous recording dates from "58 or "57--LPs such as Coltrane, Lush Life, Traneing In, Soultrane, or the magnificent Blue Train--it seems pleasant, if not unremarkable. Listening to the music now, or any time in the last ten or fifteen years, I am overwhelmed by the lack of ferociousness that I used to associate with the album. There's plenty of energy, but it's not "raw Dionysian spirit."

The title cut lasts for roughly thirteen minutes, and it lopes along without any enormous rhythmic or tonal surprises. Coltrane's opening solo tumbles forward, but with nowhere near the melodic force that he'd embody in less than a year. Donald Byrd takes a couple of fine but fairly reserved trumpet choruses, and then Red Garland plays Red Garland. Paul Chambers follows with a solid but under-recorded bass solo; he trades fours with Art Taylor, who then offers a tight, restrained drum solo. And then the band replays the bouncy melody.

The second and last tune on Side A, the standard "Lover Come Back to Me," has no more edge, harmonically, but the tempo's breathtaking--so much so that Taylor seems to struggle to maintain the heat. "Sweet Sapphire Blues," an eighteen-minute cut that comprises all of Side B, opens with about six minutes of Garland before Coltrane enters. Trane solos for four minutes, but his statement is not a radical departure from the choruses on the other two tunes. Black Pearls is a transitional recording, one that allowed him to create the astonishing sessions for Atlantic from '59 to '61. Why, then, did I fear the LP?

I knew it had nothing to do with the abstracted warnings in the liner notes. (Even as a teenager, I never blindly accepted the critics' voice.) Nor could the cover--which now just looks like a fine, somewhat overdramatized portrait of a heroic figure in my life--have generated such an extreme response. Could I place the LP in my memory the way we re-shelve records or CDs and locate that history? I kept playing the recording, hoping that music, as it so often does, would recover lost memory. Then I stared at the album until my eyes unfocused the way Coltrane's saxophone does on the cover, refracted light off the keys blurring to circles, the bell shadowed into the background, until I could see an old woman in a chair placed close to my mother's bedside, and she gave me the answer.

This woman's name was Edna, and she was one of a great many visitors during my mother's battle with cancer. Most of the people who came to our house were close friends, mainly artists whom I knew quite well. Some did not visit often and, when they did, didn't stay long; others, in a selfishness that often accompanies such visitations, prolonged their visits until they had thoroughly exhausted my mother. I'm not sure if anyone can master the art of spending time with a terminally ill friend, but some did much better than others.

And then there were the people who I knew at best by name and who seemed like minor characters in a foreign film. Some had known me as a baby, and I had all the conversations that teenagers never want to have. Wrinkled hands patted my cheek. Near-strangers wept. The impulse, of course, was to say, "Yes. I was small; now I'm big. This is awful. Get away." (As a child, my mother's brother had apparently peered up at his great aunts, all dressed in black and leaning over his small bed, and shouted in Swedish, "You're all a bunch of witch crows!" How I envied his smart mouth.) When close friends came, I felt comforted and grateful, but when our home filled with unrecognizable guests, it seemed as though we had the Saddest Show on Earth, and almost anybody could buy tickets.

Among that crowd, there was Edna, who did everything she could to ease our sorrow, and whose actions bewildered me. I also felt intimidated by her. She had an English accent and she carried herself not with a prissiness often associated with upper-class Englishmen but nevertheless with a British formality. She seemed not at all judgmental, and yet she emanated a sense of learnedness that made me cower.

Edna visited our house several times and at least twice she came on the weekends, when I was not in school. She was thin and energetic, and she wanted to talk with me, and during our poor exchanges I kept asking myself, "Who are you, and why are you making me speak?" I don't, in fact, remember a single sentence. But she must have spoken to my father, asked about my interests, and he must have told her that I loved jazz. I know this because she had gifts for me when we met on those weekends, and they were jazz LPs, both by John Coltrane: Ascension and Black Pearls.

What Edna knew about jazz could probably have formed half of a haiku, but, to be fair, I didn't know very much about jazz, either. I was sixteen, had only been listening to the music for about two years, and my self-education had not been systematic in any academic way. It began in the living room, when the thought of cancer seemed far more abstract than music. I'd been listening to pop--not Top 40, but the kind of I'm-Down-&-Out, Country/Rock schlock that you'd hear from most locally-famous guitarists in Upstate New York. I thought they were hip.

One afternoon, I discovered a cut that I particularly enjoyed and insisted that it be played for my father and our good friend Thorpe. They didn't squash my enthusiasm, exactly, but I could tell they thought this was utterly insipid. My father stood up and said, "Let me put on some records so you'll know there was music before the Beatles," and he put on a Dixieland recording by the trombonist Kid Ory, and then he played the better stuff--Coleman Hawkins. And you'd think my adolescent chutzpah would have told him to shove it. You know: "Thanks, Dad, for taking me down your memory lane, but that shit's ancient." Instead, my whole body filled with one enormous response: This is better than what I know. This is astonishing.

Naturally, my teenage pride didn't give in to words, and I didn't fully acknowledge how badly I'd been beaten in this skirmish of aesthetics, but Thorpe spotted my enthusiasm and began to give me jazz records. Then my father unearthed volumes of jazz LPs that he had acquired over the years. Most were used, some discards from the street (I learned how to repair minor scratches with the graphite from pencils), and some were in mint condition.

Of the swing players, Hawkins was my tenor player of choice. I loved the sweetness of Johnny Hodges and the breathiness of Ben Webster, but Hawkins had such muscularity to his phrasing and, besides, he was one of the first voices I'd heard. (Do we ever love any music more?) I found bebop irresistible and hummed bop tunes throughout the day. And I listened to a great deal of hard bop, seeking out the Blue Note logos on my father's old records. Even today, when little Pee Wee Marquette announces, "Welcome to Birdland, Ladies and Gentleman," my mind spirals to New York: twenty-four years to reach my father's brownstone, and then twenty-six more, until it's 1954, nine years to my birth, but I'm in the room--actually in the club, right near the stand--eye level with Art Blakey and Clifford Brown and Lou Donaldson and Curley Russell and Horace Silver, and they're about to change my life forever with "Split Kick" and "Once in a While."

But Coltrane: What music of his did I know? For certain, I knew his solos on Monk's Music. (I remember hearing Thelonious Monk calling out, "Coltrane, Coltrane," though I didn't know the history behind that cue.) And I know we had a copy of Miles Davis's "Round Midnight, though, for whatever reason, my ears focused on Miles, not Trane. I certainly knew him by name, but I barely touched on his work as a sideman, and I can't remember a single John Coltrane album in the house--a statement that seems impossible but true.

Nor do I recall what I said to Edna when she handed me Coltrane's Ascension, but I remember being absolutely unprepared for the music. It was fifteen years old--recorded during he summer of 1965--and I want to say it jarred me with the same intensity that it had for others after its initial release. Because I had heard nothing that approximated this sound. Because the cover (Coltrane meditative on a music stool, the background completely white except for his name and the multi-colored letters of the title rising to the top right) seemed Buddha-like in its passivity. Because I dropped the needle on the turntable before reading, if I ever read at all, A. B. Spellman's liner notes:

   To begin at the beginning, a caveat
   for the casual listener. Be advised that
   this record cannot be loved or understood
   in one sitting, and that there can
   be no appreciation at all in two minutes
   listening to an arbitrary excerpt in
   a record store. In fact, there is no casual
   approach to be taken to this record.
   It is truly modern; it is as advanced as
   the most advanced contemporary jazz
   is and, the communications scene
   being as retarded as it is, the kind of
   event which Ascension is will be unfamiliar
   to anyone who has not made it a
   serious avocation to search out and
   understand the new jazz.

Very rarely will you find liner notes so true and instructive. At that time in my life, I was very much a "casual listener"; no art meant more to me--not painting, not poetry, not anything--but I didn't know jazz, and certainly not "the new jazz."

I had headphones on. Downstairs, it was time for morphine injections, and that meant absolute quiet. I heard the LP hiss that we've lost with CDs, and then Ascension unfurled: those famous opening statements by Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp (tenor saxophones) and Marion Brown and John Tchicai (altos) and Freddie Hubbard and Dewey Johnson (trumpets)--all of them, their musical lines over and beneath each other, horns riding the grounding basses of Art Davis and Jimmy Garrison, McCoy Tyner coloring the background as though piano chords could drop from above the stage. And Elvin Jones establishing an utterly open rhythm-brief drum rolls and the dish, Dish, DISH of cymbals--until the whole world seems to collapse into sound. All this in the first two minutes of a performance that lasts almost forty.

Ascension exhausts the listener with a nearly-unrivaled intensity. Some have called it a post-nuclear statement. Others think of it as apocalyptic. I remember feeling as though I had experienced a car crash involving several vehicles, where some people had been killed and most others severed--screams and blood, with more and more oncoming cars. Windshields exploding. Tires gripping heated asphalt. Brakes. And, again, the human response to it all. "We did two takes," said Marion Brown, "and they both had that kind of thing in them that makes people scream. The people who were in the studio were screaming. I don't know how the engineers kept the screams out of the record."

There is no way in heaven or hell that Edna had heard this music. And yet, in reflection, it's quite easy to imagine her making the purchase: Edna walks into Sam Goody's or Disc-O-Mat and tells an employee that she wants to buy a jazz album. "He's a teenager and he plays the saxophone." She doesn't tell him what's going on at the home, and he doesn't give her a title, just a name: Coltrane. She walks to the bins and, though the jazz selection in general has been badly depleted since the 1970s, she finds too many choices under the artist's name. Maybe she's in a hurry; maybe the man has walked away. But she's on her own now, and she guides her selection by alphabetical listing: A, then B; Ascension, Black Pearls. She thinks, "I'll give him one today, the other at my next visit." She hopes it will be a small comfort.

Here's a near-parallel scenario: Someone who doesn't know fiction tries to buy an important work for a kid who wants to be a writer. The good-hearted, well-meaning purchaser walks into a large bookstore and asks for the name of a literary giant. "James Joyce." But the person doesn't buy Dubliners or Portrait or even Ulysses. Instead, by accident or under the assumption that an author's last work is probably the most satisfying, she brings the teenager, who up until that point has mainly encountered the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

That analogy, however, seems inadequate in terms of threat. A kid reading the Wake could easily dismiss it: "This is gobbledygook. I don't care what my teacher says." But sound has the emotional edge on literature in terms of immediate impact; unlike words on the page--read well or poorly, at the reader's pace--music comes to us. Information arrives quickly, and sometimes unforgettably so.

Edna had meant well and was genuinely kind, but I resented everything about her. For one, I literally could not comprehend why someone would give a gift--any gift--to a person she didn't know. Mainly, though, I resented her for entangling my passion for jazz with such emotional complexity, such confusion. I thought to myself as she handed me the album, "She must know Coltrane. I guess I know next-to-nothing about the music," and I was half-right. And then, later, as my mother began to slip into a morphine dream and as the headphones began to push the blood from my ears, I thought, "This is the most frightening music ever created." I heard the sounds not as an ascension toward serenity but as a Dantean descent straight to the center of my own collapsing world.

Which is why I don't think I ever broke the cellophane on Black Pearls. I certainly have no memory of it, except for the cover image. I suspect she asked if I enjoyed the other album, and I'm sure I said, "Yes." But I suspect I rejected Black Pearls the way children often refuse to retry a food they've disliked in the past, nor did I replay Ascension for many months.

Once my mother became completely bedridden, Edna didn't return. I kept the Coltrane albums in my collection and flipped by them, always turning instead to Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Art Farmer, Stan Getz, Coleman Hawkins--music that preceded the Free Jazz of the late 1960s--and though I probably thought of her when I saw Coltrane's image, I can't say I noticed her absence. But I'm aware of it now, too late to thank her for the spirit of her gift and, beyond that, for the gift itself. Because when I listen to Ascension--as I did this afternoon in the study of my new home, where sunlight almost whitens the oak floor--I wonder if I didn't encounter this music at exactly the right time, if the experience of loss and love, and of strangers offering what they can in the spirit of sympathy, didn't allow an entrance into the wildly complicated music of Coltrane's final years.

Some gifts, I guess, we have to grow into; others are more immediately satisfying. While I could make no sense of Edna's presents, I understood absolutely why my mother wanted her closest friends to own some of her work. Three days before she died, my father found a series of her paintings--acrylic on paper, roughly two by three feet--and spread them across the floor. Then friends selected the painting they wanted most. Nothing had been signed, and my mother, elevated by a bed we'd rented from the hospital, labored to write her name on the back. In one case, she didn't like the painting-didn't want anyone to choose it-and printed her name in a way that made it seem like a forgery.

Most people had a noticeably difficult time selecting a piece, mainly because of the magnitude of the whole experience, but also because of the works' quality. These were not sketches or juvenilia; these were expansive statements made by an artist in her prime. Friends would say things like, "It's too much," or, "How am I to choose?" This was the gift of legacy. Placed on a wall, in an individual's home, each would make its own statement and carry with it unique associative memories. But spread out across the floor, one vibrant gesture beside another, playing off one another, the paintings seemed to transfer color across the carpet, some sinking beneath the surface, others rising. They simply overwhelmed the eyes.

A Year later, as a high school senior, I took a class in music theory from Paul Betjeman, a brilliant and eccentric teacher who seemed to share none of the tame conservatism of his father, England's former Poet Laureate. Betjeman's room had a low ceiling and a large table that consumed most of the floor space. Against every wall, he had set up various pieces of equipment (keyboards, tape players, speakers, equalizers, amplifiers, a turntable, and so on), and, as a result, students had barely enough room to pull out their chairs.

There weren't many students in his classes. For one, my peers tended to dismiss the arts in favor of business or science courses. For another, Betjeman often came across as a madman--exploding with strings of profanity when, for example, he'd misplaced a pitch pipe (which he did often)--and this, coupled with his naturally distracted demeanor, made them fear him. Signing up for one of his courses, a student could be assured of only one certainty: The class would be small.

I didn't particularly enjoy music theory (in my high school yearbook, Betjeman wrote simply, "Develop a harmonic approach to improvisation"), but I loved those classes, and I loved every outrageous moment. Our musical tastes did not overlap exactly (he seemed most passionate about electronic music, which left me cold), but he really knew jazz and had once been a serious baritone saxophonist, traveling with jazz bands in Europe while his family back in England shook their heads dismissively. One afternoon, I mentioned my great excitement at hearing for the first time Gerry Mulligan's What Is There To Say?, recorded in 1957. Betjeman laughed at me. I said, "Don't you like it?"

"Yes," he replied, softening to a more sympathetic tone. "Of course. It's just that you're listening to the same things I listened to when I was about your age."

I never wanted to be Paul Betjeman, but I knew he had an understanding of jazz that far exceeded my experience and knowledge, either as a player or a listener. And I wanted him to like me, to find me worth his time, but it was difficult to engage him in lengthy conversations, or even short ones. With some embarrassment now, remember walking to our local bookstore, long defunct, and buying a collection by his father, John Betjeman, whose work I didn't know. (I didn't know what a Poet Laureate was, either.) I spent a few days with the book, and while it didn't fully engage me, I found some images that I liked and could appreciate his facility with form.

"I bought a book by your father," I said to him after class.

Oh, he replied, which was exactly r the right response, though somehow I had expected a pat-on-the-head gesture and some gateway into a conversation.

"I like some of the poems," I said.

"He's very English." Betjeman scattered papers across the wide table but did not look remotely in my direction.

"I like some of the landscapes," I said after another awkward pause.

"Yes, well, he's very English.

Even my thick head registered that this would be the end of our discussion.

Often my efforts to make him talk fell flat. Sometimes, though, I'd mention a recording that he particularly loved--Sonny Rollins's version of "You Don't Know What Love Is," for example, from Saxophone Colossus--and he would become if not fully engaged at least passionately responsive. Sometimes I would ask him to recommend recordings, and sometimes--not often, but sometimes--he'd oblige. "Oliver Nelson's Screamin' the Blues," he once answered. "Nelson plays the way he arranges, but listen to the other soloists."

And then one day, perhaps because I never mentioned Coltrane, Betjeman asked if I had listened much to the tenor legend. Headphones: Ascension. I felt overwhelmed with memory, knew I didn't have much time for an answer, and replied foolishly: "I don't like his tone."

Betjeman looked noticeably disappointed, but he responded quite directly to my statement. "Oh, but he spent a long time creating that tone. He really wanted that sound." Then he asked, "Do you know Giant Steps?"

I didn't. Admitting that now seems like the humblest of statements--like I not knowing Mozart or Rembrandt or I water or the word the--but I was too naive to know naivete. Betjeman [ pinched the edge of the record from its sleeve and slipped it onto the player.

He turned the volume up (he always turned the volume up, no matter what the setting had been), and suddenly that tiny room ignited with the fire of "Mr. P. C." Like my previous experience with Coltrane, I had nothing to prepare me for this sound--not even Coltrane, for I had not yet heard Black Pearls and didn't know where Trane had been before Ascension. I had never heard such command and strength, such unrelenting phrases. And it was thrilling--genuinely thrilling--every bit as much as my very first encounter with jazz. What had happened in my life to keep this music away?

The cut concluded, he picked up the needle, and I said, "Oh, my God."

I went straight from school to the record store and bought my own copy. For a long time, I didn't play anything else. And although I've lost many memories of the year when my mother became ill and died, I've never forgotten the afternoon when I first heard Giant Steps, when the spiraling phrases of John Coltrane transformed that tiny room into an amphitheater open to the sky.

Sascha Feinstein won the 1999 Hayden Carruth Award for his poetry collection Misterioso (Copper Canyon P). He is also the author of two critical books, including Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s to the Present, and co-editor (with Yusef Komunyakaa) of The Jazz Poetry Anthology and its companion volume The Second Set. His work has appeared in many publications, including American Poetry Review, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, and The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. He chairs the English department at Lycoming College and edits Brilliant Comers: A Journal of Jazz & Literature.