It's John Coltrane day so I am listening to John Coltrane on WKCR in New York. They do a 24 hour broadcast. I'll have to teach and eat and do a few other things that will take me away from my computer, but I'm going to listen to as much as possible.

I love most of all the hard bop Coltrane and the early quartets: Soutrane, Coltrane's Sound, My Favorite Things. The work with Miles and Monk fall within this period. Second choice would be Village Vanguard groups with Dolphy and some of the later quartet recordings. Third, the heavy-handed religiosity of A Love Supreme and Crescent and some of the later avant-garde work. But it's all good. My predilection for the hard bop Coltrane is just a personal thing.

Now he's (they're) playing "The Girl Next Door." What an incomparable ballad player he is.