Roll On, John: The Church of Saint Coltrane and "The Harlem of the West," via John Gilmore
"I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music."
This article is going to take “the scenic route” – in order to get to where we’re going, I’ve got to tell the story of John Gilmore, tenor saxophonist in the Sun Ra Arkestra for over forty years.
Very little has been written about John Gilmore. Besides his obituary in the New York Times, I’ve only found two articles about him online: a moving tribute by his bandmate Knoel Scott for Artyard Records in 2017, and a fascinating blog post by James Marshall from 2010.
Gilmore, Scott recalls, was born in Mississippi in 1931, and grew up in Chicago. Attending DuSable High School, John fell under the tutelage of Captain Walter Dyett, the revered music instructor whose students included the likes of Nat King Cole and Dinah Washington, amongst many others.
Gilmore served in the U.S. Air Force, playing clarinet in the Air Force band from 1948 to 1953. Returning to Chicago, and having switched to tenor saxophone as his primary instrument, he went on the road with Louis Armstrong’s former right-hand man Earl Hines, and later that decade encountered John Coltrane, who would go on to cite Gilmore as a major influence.
The most fateful musical encounter of Gilmore’s second stint in Chicago, however, would be when he joined the band of an eccentric yet prodigiously talented bandleader calling himself Sun Ra. Gilmore can be seen and heard playing with Sun Ra in Edward O. Bland’s documentary The Cry of Jazz, filmed in Chicago in 1959.
The Sun Ra Arkestra, as the band came to be known, would remain Gilmore’s home for the rest of his life. As a star soloist in the space-themed group, John followed Sun Ra first to New York City and then to Philadelphia, where he became one of the core group of musicians who lived and worked with Sun Ra in a large rowhouse in the Germantown area.
Gilmore’s mastery of the saxophone created confusion as to why he seemed reluctant to break out on his own. John recorded one album as co-leader (1957’s Blowin’ in from Chicago, with fellow DuSable alumnus Clifford Jordan) and made numerous recordings as a session musician throughout the 1960s (including a year as a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers), but he appears to have stopped recording outside of the Arkestra from 1970 onwards.
The question of why a musician of his considerable talents would choose to remain for so long in someone else’s shadow was put to Gilmore in the 1980 documentary A Joyful Noise. John’s answer is eloquent and thoughtful, but the real story is told by the way his eyes light up when he describes the effect Sun Ra’s music had on him.
As one of the comments notes, “Anyone who smiles with their eyes like that when they talk about someone is worth knowing.”
In Sun Ra, Gilmore had found someone who could keep him challenged and inspired musically. In Gilmore, Sun Ra found someone intuitively capable of interpreting his music in the spirit it was written. The trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah, in his autobiography A Strange Celestial Road: My Time in The Sun Ra Arkestra, writes of his first encounter with Sun Ra and Gilmore, “Their eyes gave away that they were kindred spirits.”
Despite the mutually beneficial aspects of this partnership, it could be argued that Gilmore’s loyalty to Sun Ra hindered him in some ways. For example, in the same book, Abdullah recalls an occasion in the 1980s where John was offered thousands of dollars to put together a band and record an album of his own, only to turn down the opportunity so he could be available for Sun Ra’s rehearsals.
Likewise, when the music producer Hal Willner was planning a tribute album in honour of the composer Nina Rota, he attempted to enlist Gilmore as the star of the record - only to receive word from Sun Ra that this would not be happening. Underneath a YouTube video of Gilmore playing with the Jazz Messengers, a comment reads “tried to steal John from Sun Ra for my own band back in the 70s but he wouldn’t leave Sun Ra.”
When Duke Ellington passed away in 1974, Harry Carney, his baritone saxophonist of 40 years, is reported to have said, “This is the worst day of my life. Without Duke, I have nothing to live for.” Within six months, Carney too had died. I don’t know if John Gilmore felt the same way after Sun Ra’s departure from Earth in 1993, but his own health swiftly declined even as he assumed leadership of the Arkestra. John held on until 1995 – by which time, according to Abdullah, he was “so weak that he couldn’t make it up to the bandstand” – before passing away from emphysema that August.
As Sun Ra’s profile continues to grow (he always claimed that he was making “Music for the 21st Century”) John Gilmore’s work is also reaching a new audience. In 2017 a two-album anthology of his work was released, both of which can be heard on the wonderful Sun Ra Bandcamp page. The Sun Ra Arkestra is keeping his memory alive too, and present-day tenor man James Stewart is unfailingly introduced as sitting “in John Gilmore’s chair.”
As for John Gilmore himself? He’s out there somewhere - travelling the spaceways with Sun Ra, making music free from inconveniences like gravity and linear time.
Not long ago, I stumbled across a video from 1989 of John Gilmore being visited in his dressing room by a priest, who is accompanied by two of his adult children. It’s a heartwarming watch: Gilmore receives his guests warmly, and the priest – clearly a jazz enthusiast – manages to get John reminiscing about his time with Coltrane.
It was only on second viewing that I noticed how the priest introduces himself: “We’re from the church that canonized John Coltrane.” Huh?
A few Google searches later, I had discovered The Church of St John Coltrane, which has existed in various forms in San Francisco’s Fillmore District since 1969.
This unusual house of worship was created by Franzo and Marina King, who were so moved by seeing Coltrane perform in 1965 (a few years after his own “spiritual awakening”) that they decided to combine their faith with their love of his music, using Coltrane’s album A Love Supreme as a kind of sacred text.
Two short documentaries about the church are available to watch on YouTube, one from 1996 and another from 2021. Both are fascinating and complement each other well.
The Church of Saint Coltrane (1996)
Saint Coltrane: The Church Built on a Love Supreme (2021)
What began simply as group listening sessions in the Kings’ apartment evolved into services, often featuring lengthy jam sessions led by Franzo, himself an accomplished tenor saxophonist. An alliance with Alice Coltrane – John’s widow, and a jazz icon in her own right – ended acrimoniously, but the publicity from the ordeal attracted the attention of the African Orthodox Church. The Coltrane Church was subsequently absorbed into the larger organisation, the only condition being that they demote Coltrane from a deity to a saint, which they did.
Far from simply being an eccentric jazz project, the church became a hub of community activity, offering, according to church member Sister Deborah Williams in the 1996 documentary, “free hot meals, clothing, counselling, temporary shelter, skill training, and a host of other services for those in need.”
Learning about the Coltrane Church led me to find out more about the Fillmore district itself. It turns out that the church is the final outpost of what was once “The Harlem of the West,” a thriving neighbourhood of Black-owned businesses and music venues.
In the early ‘40s, African-Americans had travelled up to San Francisco from the southern states as part of the Great Migration, to work at the shipyard and waterfront jobs created by World War II. They found homes in the beautiful Victorian houses previously occupied by the diverse Fillmore’s large Japanese community, who, in the wake of Pearl Harbour, had been evicted from their houses and imprisoned in concentration camps, as a result of President Roosevelt’s unconscionable Executive Order 9066.
For a while the going was good for the Fillmore’s Black residents – the jobs were plentiful and paid well. The problems began once the war ended; the defence industry jobs dwindled, and the returning soldiers took what was left. Unemployment spread through the Fillmore. The area began to decline, and – thanks to the California Community Redevelopment Act of 1945 – it was declared blighted in 1948 and earmarked for redevelopment.
The redevelopment didn’t begin for another decade, by which time the music venues, businesses and a general sense of community had helped the area get back on its feet somewhat. The Fillmore had by now fully established itself as “The Harlem of the West,” home to exciting jazz venues like Bop City, Leola King’s Blue Mirror, and Jack’s Tavern, where stars like Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and John Coltrane could often be seen.
But change was coming, headed by the new Executive Director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, Justin Herman, who was appointed in 1959. The Agency used eminent domain to force people from their homes and businesses to make way for redevelopment, providing only vague promises of replacement accommodation. The new buildings were not completed until years later, and by then the former residents either found themselves priced out or had already moved on.
“The Harlem of the West” was dismantled piece by piece over the coming decades – in 1995, the city half-heartedly created the Historic Fillmore Jazz Preservation District, but it was far too little, far too late. One of the only remaining links to the Fillmore of old is the Church of St John Coltrane.
Against all the odds, The Church of St John Coltrane has endured. Its survival has not been easy: in 2000, rising rent saw the church evicted from the modest storefront location on Divisadero St. it had occupied since 1971 (its location in the 1996 documentary). The church survived, but in 2016 it was reported to be facing eviction again from another storefront location on Fillmore Street (a KQED headline even announced “Little Hope of Saving Coltrane Church, Last Vestige of SF Jazz District”).
Once again, however, the church was saved, and found a new home at St Cyprian’s Church on Turk Street, where it was based at the time of the 2021 documentary.
Today, the church can be found in an annex of the Magic Theater at the Fort Mason Center. Marina and Franzo, who has long since risen to the rank of Archbishop within the AOC, are still leading the services, which are livestreamed every Sunday on the church’s Facebook page and are always lively, music-filled affairs.
In an SFGate article from last year, Pastor Wanika K. Stephens – Franzo and Marina’s daughter, and a senior figure within the church (also the resident bass player) – admitted that the church’s future remains uncertain. If everything must end eventually, then I hope the end of the St John Coltrane Church lies many years in the distant future. What it represents – music, community, and the joy of shared experience – are, at the end of the day, what it’s all about.
Sources
On John Gilmore:
John Gilmore, 63, Saxophonist In the Avant-Garde of Jazz by Jon Pareles
Remembering June Tyson and John Gilmore by Knoel Scott
John Gilmore by James Marshall
A Strange Celestial Road: My Time in the Sun Ra Arkestra (book) by Ahmed Abdullah
On The Church of St John Coltrane:
Church of Coltrane will play on in new location by Don Knapp
St John Coltrane Church faces eviction, a sign of San Francisco's lost jazz history by Julia Carrie Wong
Little Hope for Saving Coltrane Church, Last Vestige of SF Jazz District by Cy Musiker
San Francisco’s St. John Coltrane Church continues at Fort Mason Center by Nico Madrigal-Yankowski
A saxophone divine: Experiencing the transformative power of Saint John Coltrane's jazz music in San Francisco's Fillmore District (essay) by Peter Jan Margry and Daniel Wojcik
On the Fillmore District:
Why San Francisco's Fillmore District Is No Longer the 'Harlem of the West' (Bay Curious Podcast) by Bianca Taylor
Swing the Fillmore by Elizabeth Pepin
Western Addition: A Basic History by Gary Kimiya
Sad chapter in Western Addition history ending by Leslie Fulbright
How Urban Renewal Destroyed The Fillmore in Order to Save It by Walter Thompson
Fillmore Revisited — How Redevelopment Tore Through the Western Addition by Rachel Brahinsky
An enjoyable listen. There's so much history to unpack!
Thank you Jemima!