Frank Abagnale Jr’s fake Pan-Am pilot license
John Coltrane’s Funeral Service – July 21, 1967
The send-off given to John Coltrane (1926-67) remains the most iconic in jazz history. The venue was St Peter’s Lutheran Church in midtown New York, which, in 1960, had appointed Puerto Rican pastor John Garcia Gensel as its special “minister for the jazz community”. Coltrane’s funeral started with a startling version of “Our Prayer” by Albert Ayler and ended with a similarly incendiary performance from Ornette Coleman’s quartet. In between there were prayers, meditations and readings from various holy scriptures. It was a fitting tribute to Coltrane, who had become the closest thing that jazz had to a spiritual icon, even inspiring two Pentecostal preachers in San Francisco to set up the St John Coltrane African Orthodox Church. But it was Coltrane’s second wife, the pianist, harpist and composer Alice McLeod, who would take this spiritualism to a higher plane. She immersed herself in Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam, later establishing an ashram in California and making a string of devotional albums that mixed her late husband’s rapturous modal jazz with Indian instrumentation.
