"I wanted to make somebody feel like Coltrane made me feel, listening to it"
About this Quote
Marsalis is naming a very specific kind of ambition: not fame, not innovation for its own sake, but the urge to pass along a sensation so total it reorganizes your inner life. John Coltrane didn’t just impress listeners; he converted them. Hearing him could feel like discovering a new nervous system, one where intensity, discipline, and spiritual hunger occupy the same bar of music. Marsalis frames his own drive as that downstream shockwave: art as relay, not pedestal.
The line’s power is in its humility and its audacity at once. Humility, because he positions himself as a listener first, a person who was hit before he ever swung. Audacity, because “make somebody feel” is a claim about emotional authorship. He’s not talking about playing the right notes; he’s talking about engineering an encounter. That verb “make” hints at craft, rigor, even responsibility. If Coltrane’s music was a kind of weather system, Marsalis wants to learn the atmospheric conditions.
Context matters: Marsalis came up when jazz was being pushed to justify itself against rock, pop, and its own avant-garde expansions. He became a leading voice for jazz as a formal tradition with standards, lineage, and proof of mastery. Invoking Coltrane is strategic and personal: it places him inside the canon while also revealing what canon is for. Not a museum, a transmission device. The subtext is almost moral: if music once saved or clarified you, the least you can do is try to hand that clarity to someone else.
The line’s power is in its humility and its audacity at once. Humility, because he positions himself as a listener first, a person who was hit before he ever swung. Audacity, because “make somebody feel” is a claim about emotional authorship. He’s not talking about playing the right notes; he’s talking about engineering an encounter. That verb “make” hints at craft, rigor, even responsibility. If Coltrane’s music was a kind of weather system, Marsalis wants to learn the atmospheric conditions.
Context matters: Marsalis came up when jazz was being pushed to justify itself against rock, pop, and its own avant-garde expansions. He became a leading voice for jazz as a formal tradition with standards, lineage, and proof of mastery. Invoking Coltrane is strategic and personal: it places him inside the canon while also revealing what canon is for. Not a museum, a transmission device. The subtext is almost moral: if music once saved or clarified you, the least you can do is try to hand that clarity to someone else.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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