How Baltimore’s classical present intersects its jazz past

In your recent coverage of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s 29-year-old new music director, Jonathon Heyward, revealed he listens to jazz and specifically mentioned tenor sax player John Coltrane (“BSO receives $500,000 state grant to put on free or low-cost concerts in eight Maryland counties this summer,” May 4). Stars aligned with the thought because Coltrane’s last public performance was in Baltimore, a short walk from the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony’s Hall.

It was back on May 7, 1967, at the Famous Ballroom on Charles Street above what is now The Charles Theatre. My brother Phil and I attended.

The Famous Ballroom seated about 600 and on Sunday evenings, $3 ticket, BYOB, the Left Bank Jazz Society had concerts by most of the then jazz greats. There was remarkable supper food available. The venue was famous among all jazz musicians for a warm, integrated, musically hip crowd. Your paper once described it as “concert hall, nightclub and church supper.”

At the end of the first Coltrane show, people from the audience were calling for his biggest hit: “My Favorite Things.” So he performed it with sideman Pharaoh Sanders on, if you can believe it, piccolo. Halfway through, Coltrane started singing, chanting and rhythmically pounding his chest. It was haunting and presaged his death at age 40 within two months.

If I am counting correctly, Coltrane’s last concert was about 56 years before Heyward arrived at the Meyerhoff, but I suggest the more mesmerizing music stirring out there in the firmament surely includes their downtown Baltimore neighborhood.