Jazz

The Month the Philadelphia Museum of Art Gave to John Coltrane

The Philadelphia Museum of Art handed a month of its floor to John Coltrane, and Harry Hayman reads what an institution says with a calendar.

By Harry Hayman 5 min read
The Month the Philadelphia Museum of Art Gave to John Coltrane

People go to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to look at things. That is the entire proposition of a museum and nobody has ever needed it explained. This September the building is quietly asking for something different, which is that visitors listen.

Across September the museum carries ten entries tied to Coltrane 100 Philly, the citywide centennial for John Coltrane. Seven of them are live performances. The other three are a guided tour series, a workshop and a film screening.

What is actually on the calendar

The month opens on September 5 at two in the afternoon with the Karen Smith Experience, led by the Philadelphia percussionist Karen Smith. On September 11 there are guided Jazz in Art tours through the day, and at five the poet and singer Yolanda Wisher performs with the AfroEaters. The Found Objects Band plays on September 12 at two. The Angelo Outlaw Trio plays on September 18 at five, and a dance performance by Lauren Putty White follows on September 19 at two.

September 20 is the densest day of the month. It carries an improvised felt collage workshop inspired by Stuart Davis, a screening of Speakin’ Trane and Passing Through at one in the afternoon, and the Coltrane Remix Youth Ensemble, organized by the veteran Philadelphia educator Lovett Hines.

The month closes on September 25 at seven with Collier Plays Coltrane, the Chicago bandleader Isaiah Collier and the Chosen Few in the museum’s Great Stair Hall.

The full centennial, announced by Senator Vincent Hughes with Jazz Philadelphia, Creative Philadelphia, Ars Nova Workshop and WRTI at Temple University, runs to more than thirty events across the autumn. Visit Philadelphia’s listing puts the season at more than twenty eight marquee concerts and community events between late July and the middle of November.

What the number does and does not prove

It is tempting to say the museum has more jazz on its September calendar than most jazz clubs. That claim would be wrong, and it is worth saying so plainly, because the honest version of the point is stronger.

A working jazz club programs several nights a week. A club running Thursday to Sunday clears seven dates inside a fortnight without anybody calling it a season. Seven performances in a month is not a large number by the standards of a room that exists to sell music.

What is unusual is not the volume. It is the venue. Seven performances is a large number for a building whose function is to hang objects on walls and keep the light off them, and the museum committed floor space, staff, security and a month of its public calendar to a musician who died in 1967.

Why a calendar is a budget document

Institutions talk about their values constantly and almost none of it is checkable. Mission statements cost nothing. Land acknowledgements cost nothing. A calendar is different, because a calendar is a resource allocation that the public can read.

Putting a performance in a museum is not free and it is not simple. It requires a room cleared of visitors or reconfigured around them, a sound system, insurance, a fee for the performers, staff hours outside the usual pattern, and a curator willing to defend the whole thing internally against the argument that this is not what the institution does.

Doing that seven times in one month, for one dead saxophone player, is an unusually expensive way of saying something. What it says is that John Coltrane is not the property of the clubs, the collectors or the specialist audience. He is a Philadelphia public asset, and the city’s largest cultural building is behaving accordingly.

There is a second reading available, and it is the more practical one. Museums across the country have spent a decade trying to answer a question they cannot dodge, which is what a building full of static objects offers a public that increasingly wants to be somewhere rather than to look at something. Live programming is the usual answer, and it is usually thin: a jazz brunch, a members evening, a DJ in the lobby during a blockbuster show. A month built around a single figure with a genuine local claim is a different order of commitment, and it is a bet that the audience for it exists.

Whether that bet pays is measurable, and the museum will know by October. Attendance on performance days against a normal September, first time visitors, the age profile in the room. None of those numbers will be published, which is a shame, because they are exactly the numbers every other cultural institution in the city would want to see.

The museum could have taken the cheap route without any criticism at all. A wall panel, a listening station, a small display of album art, a curator’s note in the newsletter. Every institution in America has run that playbook for a centenary and nobody has ever complained about it.

The part that is easy to miss

The September 20 program is the one worth watching, and not because of the film or the collages.

Lovett Hines is 83 years old. He created the education program at the Philadelphia Clef Club of Jazz and Performing Arts, and his former students include Questlove, Christian McBride, Immanuel Wilkins, Bilal Oliver, Derrick Hodge and Justin Faulkner. On September 20 he has a youth ensemble on the floor of the museum.

That is a centennial for a dead man being marked by putting living teenagers in the most prestigious room the city has. It is also, structurally, the same act that produced Coltrane: an adult with a room, and young players allowed to use it.

If the museum repeats nothing else from this month, that is the item to repeat.

What Philadelphia should take from it

Harry Hayman works on local economies, and the question he asks of cultural programming is the same one he asks of procurement. Where does the money land, and who gets reached?

Museum programming carries an access problem that everyone in the sector knows about. The building sits at the head of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, admission has a price, and the audience skews toward people who already visit museums. A month of jazz does not fix that on its own.

What it does do is give the city a precedent it can point at. The largest arts institution in Philadelphia has now demonstrated, on the record and in public, that its floor can carry live music from local performers for a sustained run. That is a fact other institutions and other funders can be asked about.

The museum’s own calendar will tell everyone what happens next. September ends, the centennial ends in November, and the interesting question arrives quietly in the spring, when there is no anniversary to justify anything.

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