Jazz

Twenty Four Hours of Coltrane, and Why a Day Beats a Street Sign

WRTI is playing John Coltrane for twenty four hours on September 23, and Philadelphia is moving to make the date his own day.

By Harry Hayman 6 min read
Twenty Four Hours of Coltrane, and Why a Day Beats a Street Sign

On September 23 a Philadelphia radio station is going to stop programming music and play one man for twenty four hours. That is the whole plan. No rotation, no other artists, no format.

The date would have been John Coltrane’s hundredth birthday. He was born on September 23, 1926, and the station is WRTI 90.1, which broadcasts from Temple University. Its listing inside the citywide centennial reads simply, and slightly startlingly, as 24 Hours of Coltrane.

What is actually happening on September 23

The broadcast is one item inside Coltrane 100 Philly, a season of concerts, exhibitions, education programs and community events that runs from late July to the middle of November. The season was announced by Senator Vincent Hughes in partnership with Jazz Philadelphia, Creative Philadelphia, Ars Nova Workshop and WRTI at Temple University, and it carries more than thirty events.

September is the heaviest month. WRTI also runs A LOVE Park Supreme, an outdoor listening experience in LOVE Park from September 21 to 25, from noon to two each day. The Philadelphia Museum of Art carries most of the month’s live performances. Visit Philadelphia’s own listing puts the season at more than twenty eight marquee concerts and community events.

Alongside the broadcast, Councilmember Isaiah Thomas is moving to designate September 23 as John Coltrane Day in the City of Philadelphia. The legislation was drafted by Dr Anyabwile Love, the founder of the John Coltrane Symposium. As of the centennial announcement the bill had not yet been introduced, so the correct description of it today is that it is moving rather than that it is law.

The difference between a sign and a day

Philadelphia has already given John Coltrane the ordinary honors. There is a stretch of the city named John Coltrane Street. The house he lived in still stands at 1511 North 33rd Street in Strawberry Mansion, and it is a National Historic Landmark. A visitor can walk to it, stand outside it and photograph it.

Those honors are nouns. A street sign is a fixed object. It carries a name whether or not any human being reads it, and on almost every day of the year nobody does. That is not a criticism of street signs. It is a description of how they work. Their virtue is that they persist without effort, and their limitation is the same thing.

A day is a different kind of object. A day is a verb. It does not exist unless somebody performs it, and it has to be performed again every twelve months or it quietly stops being real. Cities are full of dates that were designated once and observed twice.

Which makes the pairing here more interesting than either half alone. The city is being asked to designate a date, and a radio station has simultaneously decided what the date will consist of. The observance comes with instructions, and the instructions are the least demanding any civic occasion has ever issued. Turn the radio on.

Why the radio part matters more than it sounds

There is a specific reason a broadcast is the right form for this particular musician in this particular city, and it is not sentiment.

Coltrane’s Philadelphia work is preserved substantially because a student radio station was in the habit of recording things. On November 11, 1966, he played Mitten Hall on Temple’s campus with Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Sonny Johnson and Rashied Ali, nine months before his death. WRTI, then run by students, taped the concert. The reels sat in the station’s archive for decades until a Coltrane scholar found them, and the performance was eventually released as Offering: Live at Temple University.

WRTI has told that story about its own archive more than once. It is the plainest possible demonstration of the argument. The tribute that lasted was not a plaque. It was a machine left running by somebody whose job that day was to leave a machine running.

Twenty four hours of Coltrane on the same frequency, sixty years later, is that behavior repeating rather than a gesture.

There is a second thing a full day does that a concert cannot. Coltrane’s recorded work does not sit comfortably in an hour. The material runs from the standards period through the quartet years to the late records that split his own audience, and a listener who only ever meets one of those phases usually decides the whole catalogue is either easy listening or unlistenable. Twenty four hours is long enough to hear the argument the man was actually having with himself. That is a programming decision as much as a tribute, and it is the kind of decision only a station with an archive and no commercial break can make.

It also lands on a working Wednesday. Nobody has to buy anything, book anything or be anywhere. The most likely place a Philadelphian hears Coltrane on his hundredth birthday is a car on the Schuylkill Expressway or a kitchen radio, which is roughly where most people heard him the first time.

The city’s own framing

Valerie V. Gay, the Chief Cultural Officer at Creative Philadelphia, gave the centennial a line that does more work than most official quotations manage. Coltrane 100 Philly, she said, is an invitation to experience the city through the music that helped define it.

The operative word is invitation. An invitation assumes somebody has to accept it, which is exactly the difference between a day and a sign. Bill Johnson, the general manager at WRTI, said something similarly practical when the season was announced, noting that Temple and the station share a direct connection to Coltrane going back sixty years.

Neither of them claimed the city was honoring a genius. Both described a thing that requires participation.

What this is worth to Philadelphia

Harry Hayman works on local economies, and the reason a broadcast holds his attention is that it is the cheapest cultural infrastructure a city has.

A festival needs a site, a budget, insurance and a weather forecast. A concert needs a hall and a ticket price that excludes somebody. A radio signal needs a transmitter that already exists, and it reaches every kitchen, every car and every workshop inside its range at no cost to the listener, including the ones on the block where the man actually lived.

That last part is not a small detail. Cultural programming in this city concentrates downtown, along the Parkway and on the Avenue of the Arts, and the neighborhoods that produced the musicians are usually the audience least served by it. A signal does not care about that geography. It arrives in Strawberry Mansion on the same terms it arrives in Rittenhouse.

So the ambition worth having here is not a bigger centennial. It is that the day survives the centennial. Anniversaries are easy to fund because they end. What a city gets asked to prove is whether it will still be doing this on September 23, 2027, when nothing round is being marked and no press release is due.

The instructions will be the same either way.

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