Have To Overnight Some Music From Japan

You know you have a problem when you start buying stuff from Japan, right? And in this case I definitely have a problem.

It's one of my favorite albums, an Impulse! recording entitled John Coltane And Johnny Hartman. You can read the basic story of it here. It was recorded fifty-one and a half years ago at Rudy Van Gelder's second studio, over the course of a single day. Compared to A Love Supreme, which would be recorded a year later, this is pretty lightweight stuff. Six standards, nothing edgy or avant-garde or "outside".

I am not sure when I first heard the album --- probably some time in the early Nineties. I started a Coltrane kick in 1989 with "Blue Train", which happened to be in the stacks at my local library, and over the next ten years or so I listened to most of the major Coltrane and Miles recordings. Back then, however, I was looking for aggressive, technically difficult music, and I probably dismissed the collaboration with Hartman as too poppy.

A few years ago, however, I found the CD during a reshuffling of my basement and it became the soundtrack of many "stuck" trips. When I say "stuck" I mean it in the Pirsig sense. In Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance he writes about how you can only be creative when you are in that "stuck" moment. That moment when you have run out of your existing ideas and you are open to inspiration. We all recognize it after it happens --- it's the last second before you say "Aha!" and fix whatever you were trying to fix, or troubleshoot whatever you were trying to troubleshoot. It's the last second before you finally touch the keyboard and start that five-thousand-word piece that is due tomorrow morning. It's the last second before you reach for someone and kiss them for the first time.

When you are young, the stuck moment comes naturally, but as you age it becomes shy and fleeting. This record helped stick me, helped me get stuck. It was the only CD to which I listened during one memorable 1,459-mile trip from Hilton Head to Destin to Powell, Ohio. Just these six songs, rotating endlessly. I remember the late night approaching a beach with the top down, existing solely in the moment, secure in the knowledge of what lay ahead of me but in no hurry to get there. Stuck.

That original CD is scuffed and skipping now so I bought a Japanese Super Audio CD for my home sound system, then a Mobile Fidelty 24k gold CD for sentimental purposes. Now, this Japanese-market vinyl for when my new turntable arrives. I can't wait for that day. I'll close my laptop and dim the lights and put the needle on the record as I have done since childhood. Then I will sit and wait for the magic.