As Far as His Eyes Can Hear

My path to appreciating Coltrane's music was thorny and difficult; at times, his compositions seemed altogether out of my world. Why? John Coltrane was a musical genius. He was a genius as a performer and an improvisor. He was a genius as a composer. And he was a genius as a listener. Coltrane's ears were genius ears. Since most of us don't have genius ears, we can't hear the precise harmonies and melodies and rhythms that Coltrane heard (no matter how long we listen). In fact, if the same sound waves that Coltrane heard happened to reach our ears, the music would be different by the time it traveled to our brains.

So how can nongeniuses appreciate music that only a genius can truly hear? The good news is that we don't need to hear every nuance of a composition to like it, to be moved by it, to be enriched by it. Our ears need only get a little smarter to make the listening worthwhile. Still, how can we do that? The best way, of course, is simply to listen to all of Coltrane's recordings (plus all of the other recordings of music composed since the time of the Ming Dynasty and the Middle Ages) over and over again.

Or we can turn to words. Although by now it's a cliché, names and phrases are the keys that open our doors of perception. Words possess magical powers; by simply labeling a perception, we suddenly perceive it that much clearer. I am fascinated by this relationship between language and recognition.

But sometimes I strain against our society's verbalism. For instance, I get annoyed at museum goers, especially myself, who head straight to the printed description of a painting rather than simply looking at the image. "Just look!" I say to myself. Or, when I'm in the presence of music, "Just listen!" Still, we routinely name the things that we love, and this labeling transforms our perceptions. It's like walking in the woods when you know the names of the wildflowers or observing a skateboarder when you know what a reverse-off-the-lip-fakie is. Paradoxically, the words and phrases that help us begin to understand art and music also lock subsequent doors. So it's important to choose the words we use with care.

The phrase "sheets of sound" first unlocked Coltrane's music for me. Because these words worked for the good of my own ears and clearly have helped others' ears enjoy Coltrane's music, I used them in my book. I needed the "sheets of sound" phrase to help future ears hear Coltrane's music. I knew that Coltrane did not coin the phrase "sheets of sound"; the jazz critic Ira Gitler did in the late 1950s. However, I thought that Coltrane eventually accepted this description of his sound. But Arnie Cardillo, who later produced the audio version of John Coltrane's Giant Steps, told me that wasn't the case. In fact, Arnie remembers Alice Coltrane telling him that her late husband never liked the phrase. Overused, those words lock his music down. My chief regret is that I wrote: "John Coltrane played soprano saxophone (little) and tenor saxophone (big) and wrote music which, in his hands, became swirling, leaping, tumbling sheets of sound." Instead, I wish I had written: "Some people called his music sheets of sound." If my book is ever reprinted, I'll correct the mistake.

All of the above is the staring-out-the-window, sitting-in-a-chair, daydreaming part of creating this book. I'm not sure whether it was the easy half or the hard half. Probably the hard half.

The second part of making a picture book is writing the text and painting the pictures and fitting them together in a way that makes sense. I began by making a graphic representation of Coltrane's reinterpretation of "My Favorite Things," the well-known Rodgers and Hammerstein song. (It was Coltrane's biggest hit, if you'll pardon the expression.) This is the first Coltrane recording that made sense to my ears and to a lot of other ears, I suspect. Since most of us know the original tune, it's relatively easy to hear Coltrane dismantling and reconstructing it. I thought I would try to do the same thing graphically. So I painted abstract versions of the images mentioned in the song's lyrics: mittens (which I turned into oblong semicircles), snowflakes (they became six-pointed stars), kittens (which morphed into semicircles and rectangles). To re-create in picture form what Coltrane had expressed in sound, I further dismantled the figures, layering them many times until everything appeared to float across the page. I did the same thing to the text. It went something like this: "Sno-sno-sno-sn-sn-sn-ow-fl-fl"—turn the page—"mit-mit-mit-mittens, m-m-m-m"—turn the page—and so on. I grouped eight pages in stanzas accompanied by the phrase "These are some of John Coltrane's favorite things," each stanza becoming more layered and abstract.

It was around this time that my editor Richard Jackson at Simon & Schuster cleared his throat discreetly and said, "You know, Chris, we may be heading into a very thorny thicket of copyright protection violations."

"You know, I was wondering about that," I said. "But I wasn't dealing with it."

"Isn't there another Coltrane piece that speaks to you?" asked Dick.

"Well, yes. 'Giant Steps' is wonderful."

So I started over again.

Of course, by now I had figures of raindrops and kittens and mittens lying all around me. So, I guess the obvious notion of a kitten taking giant steps prompted me to scuttle my original plan. This time, instead of my figures embodying Coltrane's music, they would perform it. The book itself would serve as a stage, the figures would represent the four musicians who played Coltrane's "Giant Steps," and the narrator would be the musical director. The figures—a box, a snowflake, some raindrops, and a kitten—would appear one at a time, with encouragement from the director, each layering upon (or building upon) what had come before, and would, I hoped, create an impression of music. Also, I made sure that the musicians got lost and the composition fell apart so the director would have an opportunity to speak about Coltrane's music to the audience, the readers.

Anyway, I had to devise a way of painting that would let viewers clearly discern the distinct layers I planned to create. Watercolor is inherently transparent, so that's what I chose. However, when you stack more than two layers of watercolors, the layers start to become indistinguishable from one another, and end up looking like something solid, and usually brown. After weeks of experimenting, I discovered the solution was to sometimes paint my characters in positive, sometimes in negative—that is, sometimes paint the thing, a raindrop, for instance, and sometimes paint everything else, the background. When I combined the various layers, this technique came closest to achieving the balance between variation and clarity that I was looking for. Then, on top of everything, I painted John Coltrane's saxophone as represented by a cat, improvised with an immediate, ink brush line. Now, admittedly, this may or may not work to create an impression of a piece of music. But it's what I did, and there you have it.

Is a book like this relevant to children? Absolutely. After all, it's more important for kids to discover how to acquire knowledge than to have a load of information dumped on them. Whether or not the phrase "sheets of sound" succeeds in unlocking Coltrane's music for children, one thing's for sure: "John Coltrane" and "Giant Steps" will be magic words as long as there is music. These are names that deserve to be spoken of and heard again and again.