“A House for a Prophet”
Program: A Coltrane Monument,
Girard Street at Fairmount Park, Philadelphia Pa, near Coltrane’s House.
IDEA: Monument will be occupied by a Philadelphia Musician on a revolving schedule
Sound: “Blue Trane” Leon Thomas
Site : Fairmount Park near John Coltrane’s home at 33rd and Girard Street, Philadelphia, PA
Form : A Bell Tower.
Sound : Leon Thomas “Blue Trane”
Cornel West on Coltrane “For me, it is the dialectical interplay between the old school and prophetic thought and action. I’m an old Coltrane disciple just like I’m a Christian. You can be full of fire, but that fire has to be lit by a deep love of the people. And if that love is not in it, then the fire actually becomes just a sounding brass and tinkling cymbal that doesn’t get at the real moral substance and spiritual content that keeps anybody going, but especially people who have been hated for so long and in so many ways, as black people have.
For me, the love ethic is at the very center of it. It can be the love ethic of James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Marvin Gaye, John Coltrane or Curtis Mayfield, but it has to have that central focus on loving the people. And when you love people, you hate the fact that they’re being treated unfairly. You tell the truth. You sacrifice your popularity for integrity. There is a willingness to give your life back to the people given that, in the end, they basically gave it to you, because we are who we are because somebody loved us anyway.” The New Times Aug 21 2015