Let me take you where classic jazz was made back in the day. We’ll meet not in some dark smoky Greenwich Village bar but on a quiet lane in Dix Hills. Indeed, important jazz landmarks lie well beyond the five boroughs and past big-city limits. The roots of a musical genre and a culture identified as a quintessentially urban American experience are nonetheless planted in suburban soil.
On Long Island’s North Shore, a real estate deal alluring was trumped by a love supreme.
Here’s the full text of my Op-Ed. piece in today’s New York Times, about John Coltrane’s former home in Huntington, Long Island — now on the National Register of Historic Places, and soon, I hope, to be an innovative shrine to jazz history. And here’s a site where you can find out more.