New Love

5. John Coltrane - Blue Train
I played guitar in my high school jazz band, and I was never really any good. Still, when I started college I tried out for and played in a couple jazz ensembles. One of my directors prompted me to sing a bit with the vocal jazz group and I quickly discovered that I was much better at singing jazz than I was at trying to comp and solo on my guitar. As a singer I could emulate jazz artists much easier than I ever could on guitar. That said, most of my knowledge of jazz was still rooted in the cheese-jazz that I played in high school. I wanted to embrace it, live it, breathe it, blah blah blah, but I needed a staring point. On a trip to Seattle to visit my sister, it was early Fall and rainy, I walked into a used CD shop on Capitol Hill and found the album that would spark a new love in my life.
At some point in the years leading up to college, I heard the title track from John Coltrane's Blue Train. I can't really recall if this is true, but I believe it was in one of the deleted scenes from the movie Singles. I certainly felt that the track had something to do with Seattle, and that it was necessary to purchase the album in Seattle and listen to it while the rain fell outside and I breathed in the steam of my americano from the Coffee Messiah. Blue Train is important to me in so many different ways, it's really difficult to describe. My favorite moment of the entire album is right after Coltrane begins his solo on the first track. Philly Joe Jones enters the tune with what have to be the wettest sounding cymbals I've ever heard. Those few bars did more to hook me on jazz than anything I listened to before or since; and every time I listen to Blue Train now, every one of my senses is transported back to Seattle and that rainy Fall day. Only a few albums have that kind of staying power for me. It led me to other jazz albums like Miles Davis' Kind of Blue and Lee Morgan's Sidewinder, and made me a smarter, more impassioned musician.