“It is no accident,” says Early, that during the time of Coltrane’s greatest period as an artist, from 1960 to 1967, Martin Luther King was talking about redemptive love and sacrifice as a solution to the American race problem, many American artists and intellectuals, particularly after 1965 were going “Oriental” and turning to the East for

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But those special feelings, that “immense elation and freedom, as the outlines of the confining selfhood melt down”—forgive me for quoting William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, but he comes closer to describing the spirit of a jazz performance than any music critic—only have been granted to me when in direct contact with musicians

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