Karen Smith Opens Coltrane Month With Drums, Not Saxophone

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has given John Coltrane the whole of September. Seven live performances across the month, all part of the citywide centennial. The person who opens it, on Saturday the fifth at two in the afternoon, is not a saxophone player. She is a drummer.

Her name is Karen L. Smith, and she performs as Magic Fingaz. The choice is more interesting than a running order usually is.

Who she is, before anything else

Smith is a Brooklyn native and a Philadelphia resident, based in Mount Airy, and her list of jobs runs longer than percussionist. Her own profile with the Leeway Foundation describes her as a professional percussionist, playwright, published writer and poet, director, teaching artist and curator, and a member of the Philadelphia Musicians Union Local 77.

She received a Pew Fellowship in 2023 from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. She founded and directs the Karen Smith Experience, formerly known as Weez the Peeples, and the Sistahs Laying Down Hands collective. She is the resident music presenter in the music department of the Free Library of Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Inquirer once called her work Sounds of Freedom.

None of that is filler for a festival program. It is the working life of somebody who has been holding rooms together in this city for a long time, mostly without a centennial attached.

The argument the booking makes

Coltrane is remembered as a horn. That is fair, and it is also the reason a tribute usually starts with a saxophone.

But the thing carrying him was always underneath. The classic quartet is unimaginable without Elvin Jones. The later work leaned harder still on rhythm, and when Coltrane played Mitten Hall at Temple University in November 1966, nine months before he died, the drummer behind him was Rashied Ali. Take the rhythm out of any of that and the rest does not stand up on its own.

Opening a Coltrane month with a percussionist is therefore not a warm up act. It is a claim about where the music actually comes from, made in the one language institutions cannot fake, which is the running order.

What she says about the drum

Smith has described her instrument in terms that sit unusually close to Coltrane’s own territory. “My drum is a spiritual connection to the African ancestors and to the world around me,” she says on her Pew profile. “I create spaces where other artists can join in a spirit of trust and improvisation.”

Read that beside A Love Supreme and the distance is short. Coltrane’s late work was explicitly devotional and explicitly collective, built on players listening rather than on a soloist being admired. A performer who describes her practice as making a space other people can enter is closer to that than most tribute programming manages to get.

There is a second half to her work that says the same thing in a plainer register. Her drumming circles in Vernon Park, one of them supported by a Leeway grant in 2024 and run in collaboration with the Paul Robeson House, are described in that grant record as part of a wider community effort to reduce gun violence in Philadelphia. Intergenerational, outdoors, open to whoever turns up.

That is not a sideline to the music career. It is the same idea about what a drum is for.

What a drum does that a horn cannot

There is a practical reason a percussionist is the right opening act, separate from the argument about influence, and it has to do with the room.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is a hard building to play. Stone floors, high ceilings, long reverberation tails and a public that walks through rather than sits down. A saxophone in that space is beautiful and slightly lost. Percussion is one of the few things that survives it, because rhythm reads through reverberation in a way melody does not. A person three galleries away hears the pulse before they hear anything else, and then they follow it.

That is why drums are what public spaces have always used to gather people, from parade grounds to Vernon Park. Smith’s practice already works this way outdoors, with no walls at all and no ticket, so a stair hall is not a compromise for her the way it would be for a quartet used to a club.

An institution that programs for its actual building rather than for a poster is doing something quietly competent, and it is worth naming when it happens.

The part that is easy to miss about the fee

One more thing about running orders, since this is a piece about who gets chosen.

The opening slot on the first day of a season is the one the local press is least likely to cover and the one the audience is smallest for. It is also, in most seasons, the cheapest slot to fill, which is precisely why it usually goes to somebody early in their career or to somebody the institution owes a favor.

Giving it to a Pew Fellow with two collectives and a union card is a different move. It says the museum wanted her specifically, on the day the month is defined, when the framing is set for everything that follows. Whoever plays first tells the audience what kind of season this is going to be.

Where this sits in the month

The performance is the first of seven at the museum in September, inside Coltrane 100 Philly, the citywide season organized with Senator Vincent Hughes, Jazz Philadelphia, Creative Philadelphia, Ars Nova Workshop and WRTI at Temple University. The full lineup runs to more than thirty events across the autumn, and Visit Philadelphia puts the season at more than twenty eight marquee concerts and community events.

Later in the month the museum carries Yolanda Wisher and the AfroEaters, the Found Objects Band, the Angelo Outlaw Trio, a dance performance by Lauren Putty White, a youth ensemble organized by the veteran educator Lovett Hines, and Isaiah Collier and the Chosen Few in the Great Stair Hall. September 23, Coltrane’s hundredth birthday, is given over on WRTI 90.1 to twenty four hours of his music.

Smith goes first. Somebody decided that.

Why Harry Hayman is writing about a running order

Harry Hayman spends most of his working life on local economies, and the question he asks about culture is the one he asks about procurement: who gets paid, who gets seen, and does the money stay here.

A centennial is a budget. It buys performances, and each performance is a decision about which working artist in this city gets a fee, a room and an audience for an afternoon. Handing the opening slot to a percussionist who runs community drum circles in Vernon Park is a different decision from handing it to a touring name, and it has a different effect on the people who live here.

Neither choice is wrong. But only one of them puts money and attention into the hands of somebody who will still be doing the work in this city in March, when the anniversary is over and nobody is issuing a press release.

The performance is on Saturday the fifth at two. She will be there whether or not the room is full, which is rather the point of her.