Vito Delsante

Posts Tagged ‘john coltrane’

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Before/After Genius – The New Isht at Trip City

by Vito Delsante on March 15, 2012 at 6:28 am

Today marks the debut of my new bimonthly column at Trip City; Before/After Genius. Steel City Noir (fiction) will alternate with B/A Genius (non fiction), and hopefully, folks will see that I’m capable of writing a few things that aren’t comic books (not that it’s a bad thing, but diversifying is always good).

A little bit of history: Before/After Genius wasn’t created for Trip City. Not originally. Many moons ago, my good friend, Ron Richards, started a new site called Murmur. It was a pretty ambitious idea; basically an interactive community with user generated content, it was as close to the old zines we’d get at hardcore shows as you could get. Ron grew up in that atmosphere, and when he asked me if I’d be interested in submitting, I came up with B/A Genius. So why wasn’t I on the site? Well, I didn’t know it was user generated; I thought it was by invite and when Ron never followed up, I thought it was because he had all the content creators he needed. So, I shelved it and when Dean and Seth asked me if I was interested in “working” at Trip City, I brought this out as one of bullets in my creative pistol.

So, the next question…why Prince? I get into it a little in the article, and I won’t spoil that, but it’s a fairly simple reason. A couple of friends asked me to rank the top ten most influential musicians, and when I thought about it, I had to rank them in order of importance to me and the way that I make/made music. Prince was number one (followed by John Coltrane and the Police). There was a point, about 10 years ago, where I could not stop listening to Sign O’ The Times because it was, and still is, everything I could ever ask of music. It was fun, it was touching, it was sexy and it was incredibly real to me. Still is. Prince is undeniably a musical genius, even if we can’t hear that anymore. And that’s where the idea of before and after came in. I wanted to focus on the one moment of genius and look at what came immediately before, and what came immediately after. I could spend time on multiple albums, but the focus was important to me. Sometimes, genius never goes away and sometimes, that lightning strikes once. I wanted to spark discussion, not only about Prince, but about genius in general. Go to Trip City, read the article, and let me know how I did.

└ Tags: before/after genius, dean haspiel, ifanboy, john coltrane, murmur, police, prince, ron richards, seth kushner, trip city

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Divert Your Attention – John Coltrane

by Vito Delsante on October 9, 2009 at 9:03 pm

Posted In: Random, Video

I was thinking that I wanted to put some content on here once a week, even if it has nothing to do with me or my projects. This is where my site really becomes a blog and less of a “hey, check out what Vito’s got coming into stores now!”

So, as you can tell by the title of this post, this is about John Coltrane. Many of you who know me well know that I’m a huge Coltrane fan. I personally discovered Trane in college, as a Freshman (SPOILER ALERT: this anecdote might show up in a later volume of FCHS, actually). I was in a band, so to speak…it was more like 5 of us meeting in the lounge on the 9th Floor and just jamming. I was supposed to sing, but we ended up just playing, so I was playing percussion (on whatever I could get my hands on). Our bassist was this phenom by the name of Ian. He was unstoppable…a real force of nature. Anyway, Ian introduced me to Coltrane. I had an affinity for Jazz, having listened to Big Band with my grandfather and then catching Branford Marsalis in Sting’s first two solo albums. A friend made some David Sanborn tapes for me, and I enjoyed them and at that point, yeah, just like everyone else in America, I liked Kenny G. But when I got to college (University of Pittsburgh), I discovered Miles Davis and it kind of opened my eyes to what Jazz really was. Ian and I listened to Kind of Blue and he pointed out Coltrane and then he dug out Blue Train, one of the greatest Jazz albums of all time. It was at that point that I realized what Kenny G and David Sanborn lacked and it was soul. They might have had heart, but they didn’t have that extra ingredient that made Jazz transcendent. So, after this, Ian and I bonded on music. We would go over to a Jazz club at Carnegie-Mellon and he’d sit in with the band (I wasn’t much of an instrumentalist, so I just hung out and listened). The one area where Ian and I disagreed was on drugs; he felt that using heroin made him a better musician and sited that Charlie Parker, Miles and yes, even Coltrane, all experimented with it. I hope that he’s out there somewhere, still playing, but cleaned up…just like Coltrane did.

Anyway, as your Friday (Weekend) Distraction, here are a few Coltrane videos from when he was at his peak. For more on John Coltrane, visit the following links:

Wikipedia Entry
Official Site

By the way, the image above was painted by my good friend, Mark Chiarello.