The birthdays of jazz legends are usually celebrated with radio programs and respectful performances by younger musicians. Each year in San Francisco, John Coltrane, who would have been 81 on September 23, is remembered with much greater fervor. The city owes its special tribute to the members of St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church, for whom "Coltrane Consciousness" is an integral part of Christian worship.

The celebration of what the church hailed as the manifestation of St. John took place in the Fillmore Street building where the congregation has recently made its home. Only a few years ago, many doubted whether this San Francisco institution would survive being forced by a rent increase from its original Divisadero Street location.

For a packed room of nearly 100 people, many of them blowing horns or tapping out rhythms wherever they could, the vitality of St. John's wasn't in the slightest doubt. "The Ministers of Sound" — an ensemble also known as Ohnedaruth (Sanskrit for "compassion") — were out in full force, playing a three-hour odyssey of Coltrane's music intertwined with prayer.

At St. John's, there is no separation between music and worship, but the basic program is that one Coltrane song guides each part of the service, with a special place given to Trane's 1964 "A Love Supreme" and the accompanying liner notes. The Sisters of Compassion, led by Reverend Mother Marina King, make the words of the liturgy fit the soaring music. The effect is inevitably distant from the original recordings, but feels faithful in spirit to the musical direction of Coltrane's later years.

Presiding over all this is His Eminence Archbishop Franzo King. It was King's initial "sound baptism" at a 1965 Coltrane show at North Beach's old Jazz Workshop that provided the impetus for the church's founding. Today, he is the still the force at its heart — greeting every visitor personally with a warm "Where are you from?", preaching the gospel, and blowing the tenor sax that hangs beside the huge gold cross around his neck.

"Just tell the truth," Archbishop King told me, when I mentioned I'd be writing about the service. "Not the whole truth, but the truth," he added with a smile. At the Coltrane Church, the music is not be reduced to words.

Searching for the Perfect Note

The shimmering cymbal salvo of "Acknowledgment" opened the service, with members of Ohnedaruth appearing from all sides of the church. The core players in the ensemble included Fred Harris on piano, Franzo King Jr. on tenor sax, Roberto de Haven on tenor and alto sax, Wanika King-Stephens on bass, and drums. Archbishop King himself manned the tenor sax on "Attaining" (from Trane's 1965 "Sun Ship") and "Lonnie's Lament" (a beautiful ballad form the 1964 "Crescent").

As at any good jazz jam session, musicians dropped in throughout the afternoon. A second electric bass showed up about an hour into the session, then an accomplished bongo player, finally a cluster of horns. Inspired by a tender rendering of "Equinox", a middle-aged couple (whose feet came prepared) emerged from the audience for a wild bout of tap dancing. Some of the musicians seemed to be having private conversations with their instruments, playing prayerfully in a corner or in a wing of the church hidden from view.

"Attaining" formed the soundtrack for a confessional prayer, followed by "Lonnie's Lament" as the Introit, ushering congregants into prayer with a simple melody gradually elaborated into more and more dazzling layers of sound. "Spiritual" (first recorded in the Village Vanguard sessions of 1961) served as the hauntingly beautiful melody for a recitation of the Lord's Prayer.

"Acknowledgment" from "A Love Supreme" has a special place in the church's liturgy, linked by Archbishop King to Psalm 23 ("The Lord is my shepherd..."). Here the ensemble really took off, as de Haven blew his heart out above the solid underpinning of the rhythm section. Harris sounded for the all the world like a bluesy McCoy Tyner on the keys, with drums thrashing out an authentic echo of Coltrane's Classic Quartet. It was the horns which took their cue from the later Coltrane sound, with shades of Pharaoh Sanders and Archie Shepp.

The large number of musicians — up to a dozen on a given song — kept the energy up through songs that usually stretched towards the 30-minute mark, but so too did the crowd. Even though most of those in the makeshift pews were new to the church, they were dancing, shaking tambourines, and chanting "Thank you, Jesus" along with the veterans.

"For your information, we are slaying spirits. We are dealing with menacing spirits," Archbishop King told his flock after the frenzy had wound down. Icons of Coltrane with his saxophone, painted in the traditional Eastern Orthodox style, sparkled on the walls.

After readings from the Epistles and the Gospels, the holy set finished up with renditions of "Reverend King" (first recorded on a 1966 date in San Francisco) and "Equinox" (from 1960). On the latter, Harris' skills on the keyboard came out in full, in a solo that followed McCoy Tyner's closely before turning inward. Ohnedaruth proved that they are not bound by the searching, spiritual work of later Coltrane, but can handle sensitively the earlier, more relaxed ballads, too.

Preaching to the Coltrane Faithful

After "Equinox", a call of "Coltrane lives!" went up in the room, and a few fans who'd been looking more for music than for God slipped out. Feeling good, but not quite sure what to do next, the crowd fell back into their seats. They had come from all over the nation and the world, and most of them were in the Coltrane Church for the first time.

It's part of the church's legend that its most effective ministry has not been fire-and-brimstone sermons, but simply putting A Love Supreme on the speakers. (Core church members themselves reportedly had a daily ration of three Love Supreme listens per day.) Still, the preaching had to come sometime.

Dr. Nicholas Baham, a professor of ethnic studies at Cal State East Bay, is the leading academic authority on the church, and a long-time member — the sermonizing fell to him. (Dr. Baham is in contract with the UC Press to publish a book, "Apostles of Sound," about St. John's.) Politely, but firmly, Dr. Baham began by letting Satan (who'd come "to bust this up") out the door of the church and onto Fillmore Street.

"It's not that we're worshipping Coltrane," Dr. Baham explained, "but that he's helping us to see things clear." He stressed "the message of Trane beating addiction" and how God's intervention made that possible. Dr. Baham's call "to take this CD [A Love Supreme] and attach it to this [the Bible]" met with loud approval.

To show what this might mean, Dr. Baham employed a technique that Archbishop King apparently started in the church: pairing Bible passages with Coltrane's remarks on spirituality.

he key point of departure is in the "Love Supreme" liner notes, written by Coltrane himself. These notes forgo any critical discussion of the music to focus on its personal and spiritual resonance. Here Coltrane describes the spiritual re-awakening he experienced in 1957 that allowed him to overcome his heroin addiction and achieve "the means and privilege to make others happy through music."

These notes aside, Coltrane's spiritual message is probably best sought in the music itself. His interest in all religions, fascination with the acts of prayer and meditation, and basic spiritual values come out in the titles of his later pieces. Dr. Baham sounded as much like a jazz critic as a preacher discussing "Ascension" (from the album of that name), explaining how the traditional format of soloists taking turns is discarded in favor of unity and a message of unconditional love.

Spreading Coltrane Consciousness

Coltrane's 81st birthday also happened to be the 38th anniversary of St. John's founding. Four years after their sound baptism at the Jazz Workshop, Archbishop King and Reverend Mother Marina King began to fashion their particular blend of the musical and the spiritual. By 1971, what was then called the "One Mind Temple Evolutionary Transitional Body of Christ" had established itself in San Francisco's Western Addition.

Although the church is still not doctrinaire by any definition, it aligned itself some years later with the small African Orthodox Church (AOC), a movement started in Chicago in 1921 by George Alexander McGuire, in response to racism in the Episcopal Church. King's title is "Archbishop, Jurisdiction of the West", since he has single-handedly helped the AOC expand its reach to California. The core congregation seems to take Coltrane's ecumenism to heart — they know that they're taking a particularly "Christian angle" — and St. John's blend of Episcopalian liturgy, Eastern Orthodox style, and Pentecostal fervor has to be unique.

It's the music, and the earnest searching behind it, that has probably kept St. John's strong, long after many other spiritual and cultural experiments of the 1960s have disappeared.

With the world-class musicianship of Ohnedaruth always the anchor, Baham praised the Archbishop for letting anyone who wants to play get into the action. 

"You remember the brother with the slide trombone?" he asked the congregation about a former member, getting shouts and laughs in return. "As far as I understood, this brother could play one note, just one note. Rhythmically, he was OK. Spiritually, he was fine."