"SOUND BAPTISM":

For a long period of my life, sometime after I stopped attending Christian church services, I made it a ritual to listen to John Coltrane's A Love Supreme in its entirety on Sunday afternoons. I'm not sure where I heard the album first, or what exactly inspired me to do so. I only remember doing it, and feeling I was doing something that was not only good for me, but also important.

Some people don't get it. But for those who do, the religious experience of it all is palpable. Some blend of harmonics and melodics, tradition and improv, mastery and experimentation, makes A Love Supreme one of the great religious movements in modern life. Recorded in a four-hour session on December 9, 1964, with Coltrane on alto saxophone, Jimmy Garrison on bass, McCoy Tyner on piano, and Elvin Jones on drums, the music does not discriminate, inspiring the secular and the spiritual alike.

To celebrate this week's fiftieth anniversary of this iconic recording, music venues around the world are staging performances of Coltrane's work--including, of course, Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco.

The Coltrane church began in the late 1960s, when Franzo Wayne King and then-girlfriend Marina King heard Coltrane perform in San Francisco. They called their experience of hearing him live, a "sound baptism." This led them to form the "Yardbird Temple," named with Charlie Parker in mind, and with jazz at its base. In 1982 the little independent congregation joined the global fellowship of the African Orthodox Church, a denomination that began in the 1920s as an African-American split from the Episcopalian church.

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