John Coltrane
Naima

There is an album - which I recommend to you - called Cielo e Mar. Cielo e Mar is an aria, for tenor, from Gioconda, by Amilcare Ponchielli. An important aria, with some high Cs in it. One of those showpieces that everyone sings, that everyone has sung. And that album does just this job. It takes a bunch of tenors - some well-known, some less so - and lets you hear them as they sing this aria. Nice album. Useful. At least for me. For me, who knows nothing about music. Useful to get an idea. I like this one, this one less. Understand, for example, if someone is a heroic tenor, if someone is lyrical, if someone should really change profession. Things like that. Then, naturally, you come to track nineteen. And you realize that there is no contest. You listen to track nineteen again, a couple of times. Then twenty, but two minutes in you stop. Then maybe the one that you kind of liked before, but just for a minute, again a bit of nineteen, just three or four times, shake your head, change the album. Period, end of discussion.

Cielo e Mar is a reading - so to speak - horizontal.

The one I’m talking about today, on the contrary, is a vertical reading. It's the story of a piece, of a ballad, to be precise, called Naima.

Naima was written by John Coltrane. In that Giant Step which is probably his first masterpiece. He writes it for a woman, named Naima, of course. And he plays it. It's a Coltrane, the one of Giant Step, who is still trying to play a lot. Even complicated stuff, the Giant Steps from which the album takes its title, those he has to make with his fingers to play. But he is a very sweet Coltrane while he thinks of his Naima. It's 1959. Not a trivial year. The year of Kind of Blue. Naima is a very sweet ballad, without too many virtuosos, without rhythmic explosions, without anything. It's to be listened to with eyes closed. And one imagines him, too, Coltrane, with his eyes closed, as he plays it. With eyes closed, to see only her

Naima, to be more precise Juanita Naima Grubbs, is John’s first wife. They will not have children, they will separate in 1963.

Naima, the ballad, is a resounding success. It becomes a standard. It becomes one of those things (another example is My Favorite Things) that Coltrane plays his entire life. One of those things that spins in his head, and that in the end, whatever he is doing, always comes back to his mind.

Naima, the ballad, for instance, can be re-listened to in the beautiful Live at the Village Vanguard, of 1961. In the desperate - and in its own way beautiful - Afro Blue, of 1963, in the (for me very difficult) Live at Village Vanguard Again, of 1966, where alongside John there is already Alice, with whom they will have the Ravi I spoke about some time ago. Just to rummage through the records I have here.

There are surely many ways to approach the music, a man like Coltrane. I offer you one.

Study how Naima evolves over the years. Study, or at least try to sense, what moves inside the head, inside the heart of this guy from North Carolina, as time goes by. Try to sense what love was for him, what it has become as life has changed him. What has changed, what has remained the same.

Ultimately, that's all that matters.