Odean Pope at the Lancaster Avenue Jazz Festival: 87, Still the Elder Statesman

There are announcements you read once, move past, and forget by the end of the week. Then there is the kind that sends you back to read it again, and then you are calling people who care about this city’s music to make sure they saw it too. When I came across word that Odean Pope would be on the Lancaster Avenue stage in West Philadelphia this July, outdoors, free to anyone who walked up, that was the second kind.

Pope is 87. He was born October 24, 1938, in Ninety Six, South Carolina, and came north to Philadelphia at ten years old. In the time between then and now, he has become one of the most significant jazz musicians this city has produced, not because of a singular album or a famous recording, though the discography is long and serious, but because of what he kept doing: teaching, playing, building, connecting one generation to the next. The Lancaster Avenue Jazz and Arts Festival is now in its twentieth year, and this summer it is honoring the spirit of John Coltrane. The connection between Coltrane and the man on that Lancaster Avenue stage is not symbolic. It is direct.

The Day Coltrane Called

Odean Pope was seventeen when John Coltrane reached out with an offer. Coltrane was leaving Philadelphia for New York to join Miles Davis, and he needed someone to step into his spot in Jimmy Smith’s band. He chose Pope. When Pope expressed doubt about his age and readiness, Coltrane gave him the line that Pope has repeated in conversations for decades: “Never say that. Always say you can do something.”

That exchange is documented on Pope’s own biography page, and I return to it every time someone writes off a young musician before giving them a real chance. Coltrane was already reading ability when the rest of the room was reading age. The transfer of belief that happened in that conversation had consequences still playing out in 2026. Pope got in the chair with Jimmy Smith. Everything that came after flows from saying yes instead of no.

Coltrane himself grew up on North Philadelphia’s streets, studied the same corner of the city, moved in the same musical world before New York took him. That proximity matters. Pope did not inherit something abstract from a famous musician’s reputation. He inherited something specific from a neighbor who happened to be one of the most consequential saxophonists in American music.

Almost Thirty Years With Max Roach

Pope joined the Max Roach Quartet in 1979, and by his own account, he toured with Roach for almost thirty years. That is not a guest appearance or a stint. That is a working life built inside the orbit of one of the great drummers in jazz, absorbing Roach’s rhythmic intelligence over decade after decade of performance on stages from Philadelphia to Sydney.

Roach died in 2007. Pope carried that education with him. It shows up in how his music is organized, in the density and discipline of rhythm it carries, in the silence it refuses to waste. The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, which awarded Pope a Pew Fellowship in the Arts for Music Composition in 1992, has cited his “distinctive sound” as one that links North Philadelphia to the jazz innovators of the mid twentieth century who shaped modern music. That is not archival language. The sound is present tense. He is still making it.

The Saxophone Choir and a Life of Building

Pope founded the Odean Pope Saxophone Choir in 1977. It is not a conventional ensemble. Influenced in part by the big choral sound of the Baptist churches of his South Carolina childhood, the Saxophone Choir moves between structure and improvisation in ways that feel specific to his biography: someone who absorbed sacred music as a boy, absorbed bebop and hard bop as a young man, and never fully separated those threads.

He also started the jazz studies program at Settlement Music School, one of Philadelphia’s oldest community music institutions. He has given master classes within the School District of Philadelphia for decades, working with students in the same North Philadelphia neighborhoods where Coltrane once practiced. Penn Libraries recognized the Saxophone Choir’s work specifically as a program on Philadelphia’s jazz legacy, which tells you how the city’s cultural institutions now understand what Pope built over those years. Thousands of young people in this city have had their first serious exposure to jazz through programs that exist because Pope chose to build them inside the public school system and community music organizations rather than only in concert halls.

The Line That Runs to Immanuel Wilkins

Pope first met Immanuel Wilkins at the Philadelphia Clef Club of Jazz and Performing Arts when Wilkins was around seven years old, a prodigy working through the Clef Club’s workshops. Pope took him seriously immediately, and that relationship has sustained for two decades, through Wilkins’s years at Juilliard, through his emergence as one of the most recognized alto saxophonists in contemporary jazz.

In May 2026, just weeks before the Lancaster Avenue festival, WRTI reported on a project called RECESS, a collaboration between Pope and Wilkins mounted in a former PECO station at 1835 West Oxford Street in North Philadelphia. The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage supported it. Wilkins designed the space as a kind of interactive playground and bandstand combined, with Pope as the living anchor. The Philadelphia Inquirer covered their partnership, describing an ongoing creative relationship that began in a community workshop and grew into something much harder to categorize.

That arc, from a Clef Club session to a an installation in North Philadelphia backed by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage to the stages of Ars Nova Workshop, is what it looks like when jazz education in this city actually works. It is not a pipeline in any institutional sense. It is two musicians who found each other and kept finding each other. Pope’s summation of Wilkins: “He’s a great person.” The simplest things carry the most weight.

What the Lancaster Avenue Festival Means to West Philadelphia

The Lancaster Avenue Jazz and Arts Festival has now run for twenty years. It takes place at Saunders Park Greene, in a neighborhood anchored by the commercial corridor that HopePHL works to support alongside its housing, youth programming, and food relief work. The festival is not a separate initiative from that broader work. It is the same mission with a different face.

HopePHL was formed in 2023 through the merger of People’s Emergency Center and Youth Service Inc, two organizations with a combined history of more than 120 years in Philadelphia. Between them they serve over 25,000 community members annually. When HopePHL puts on a free outdoor jazz festival in the twentieth year of that event’s life, and ties its theme to John Coltrane as his centennial approaches, it is naming something about how West Philadelphia understands its own place in the city’s music history. Coltrane’s formative years in North Philadelphia, his study and development there, his professional departure from there: all of that is part of the same story these neighborhoods have been telling themselves for generations.

West Philly Local’s coverage of the festival in its twentieth season noted the Coltrane tribute framing directly, which is the right frame. You trace the line forward from Coltrane and it runs through Philadelphia at every stop.

Why a Free Stage Matters More Than a Ticketed Hall

I believe culture is infrastructure. One of the arguments that keeps shaping my thinking is about what happens when the price of admission becomes zero. Jazz Philadelphia, the organization that has spent years documenting and advocating for the city’s jazz legacy, makes this case from the institutional side. HopePHL makes it from the neighborhood side. The Lancaster Avenue festival makes it from the stage.

At 87, Odean Pope does not need a free festival on a West Philadelphia street to establish anything about his career. The career is established. The Pew Fellowship is on the wall. The almost thirty years with Max Roach are in the record books. What a stage at Saunders Park Greene does at this point is make the lineage visible to people who may not have the language yet for what they are hearing.

A teenager at that park who sees Pope play and then asks who that is and gets the story, about Coltrane, about Roach, about the Settlement Music School, about Wilkins at seven years old in a Clef Club workshop, has received something no curriculum packages and no streaming service serves up by algorithm. That is how a living tradition moves. Not through retrospectives. Through proximity. An outdoor stage with no ticket, in a neighborhood that has been building this kind of infrastructure for generations, is one of the most honest things a city can do for its own music.

Pope is not a monument to Philadelphia’s jazz history. He is still inside it, still working, still passing the knowledge forward. The festival is a reminder that the knowledge has somewhere to go.