discovering & recovering Black Pearls & Ascension--

"Black Pearls is a transitional recording, one that allowed him to create the astonishing sessions for Atlantic from '59 to '61. Why, then, did I fear the LP? I knew it had nothing to do with the abstracted warnings in the liner notes. (Even as a teenager, I never blindly accepted the critics' voice.) Nor could the cover--which now just looks like a fine, somewhat overdramatized portrait of a heroic figure in my life--have generated such an extreme response. Could I place the LP in my memory the way we re-shelve records or CDs and locate that history? I kept playing the recording, hoping that music, as it so often does, would recover lost memory. Then I stared at the album until my eyes unfocused the way Coltrane's saxophone does on the cover, refracted light off the keys blurring to circles, the bell shadowed into the background, until I could see an old woman in a chair placed close to my mother's bedside, and she gave me the answer..."