Jazz
Jim Snidero releases “House of Trane” on 30 October through Savant Records. It is the alto saxophonist’s twenty-seventh album as a leader and he records it in quartet with Stefan Karlsson on piano, Nat Reeves on bass and Jason Tiemann on drums. It arrives in the centenary year of John Coltrane, born on 23 September 1926.
The starting point for the record is the house. John and Alice Coltrane moved in with their family in 1964, in Dix Hills, Long Island; he composed “A Love Supreme” there and lived on the property until his death in 1967. Alice stayed with the children until 1973 and used the basement as a recording studio. By the early 2000s the building was heading for demolition, and the campaign that saved it was led by Steve Fulgoni, a local jazz advocate. The National Trust for Historic Preservation named it a National Treasure and it is now being prepared as a museum and education centre, with a working recording studio in the basement.
Snidero got there by chance in 2022: he was heading to Southampton, looked up the address and came off the expressway. He found the gates open and sat down in the yard. He went back this April and Fulgoni took him through the house. “I was literally in tears,” he says. “I was struggling with exactly what I was going to do for my next record. After I left that house, I said: I’m writing about this, because I can feel it.”
The titles come from specific corners. “Ascent” is the staircase up to the small room where he composed “A Love Supreme”; “Free to Be”, the basement studio; “Glass Ring”, the circular stained-glass window connecting the living room and the meditation room. “Hearth Felt” is two notes, a B natural rising to a C. Snidero’s relationship with this music goes back nearly fifty years, to North Texas in the late 1970s: “He had only passed away about 10 years earlier, so the music was on all of our minds.”
Text by Aina Torrents