Brief Review: BEFORE JOHN WAS A JAZZ GIANT [Vol. 2, #45]

A Brief Review of

Before John Was a Jazz Giant:
A Song of John Coltrane.
Carole Boston Weatherford.
Illustrated by Sean Qualls.
Hardback: Holt, 2008.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Reviewed by Chris Smith.

With three kids ages six and under, I am always on the lookout for excellent new picture books.  I was therefore delighted to stumble upon the recent book Before John Was a Jazz Giant: A Song of John Coltrane by Carole Boston Weatherford (and illustrated by Sean Qualls) at my local library.  Although from the title, one would suspect that this book was about John Coltrane, which it is, it is not primarily a biography, but rather uses the story of Coltrane’s boyhood as a pretext to teach the spirit of jazz and the practice of listening.  Or to put it differently, this is a biography of John Coltrane in sounds.  Coltrane’s formation, as presented here, is fundamentally an aural one.  Weatherford, using simple and poetic language, makes the case that the sounds that Coltrane heard as a school boy (“hambones knocking in Grandma’s pots,” “Mama playing hymns for the senior choir” or “the sobs of kinfolk at family funerals” for instance) were essential to the classic jazz pieces that he would come to compose.  Listening, of course, as Weatherford’s telling Coltrane’s story here emphasizes is vital to the creation of art that is rooted in a people and a place.  Qualls’s brightly colored illustrations, done in varying levels of abstraction over the course of the book, are reminiscent of the classic jazz-tinged work of Ezra Jack Keats and vividly capture the jazz imagination of Weatherford’s rendition of the Coltrane story.  Weatherford’s writing ultimately climaxes at the heart of the story: “Before John was a Jazz Giant, he was all ears.”  Ending on this resonant note challenges us to consider what we might create out of our own experiences among a people and a place if we too would only be “all ears”?

Related posts:

1. Brief Review: THE BIBLE AMONG THE MYTHS by John Oswalt [Vol. 2, #46]
2. Brief Review: FOLLOW ME TO FREEDOM by Shane Claiborne and John Perkins [Vol. 2, #44]
3. Brief Review: Can Poetry Save the Earth? By John Felstiner [Vol. 2, #37]

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