Making A Home For John Coltrane's Legacy : NPR

In 1964, John Coltrane moved from Queens, N.Y., to a brick ranch house on a 31/2 acre wooded lot in the quiet suburb of Dix Hills. This bucolic setting — 40 miles east of the city — is perhaps the last place you’d expect to find a musician creating the virtuosic jazz that Coltrane is famous for.   “I believe the solitude and the beauty of Long Island gave him something he had not had or experienced before,” he says. “Clearly it affected the way he conceived.”

But Ravi Coltrane, the son of John and Alice Coltrane, who was herself a noted jazz pianist and harpist, says the woods were part of his father’s creative process.

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Ravi Coltrane was born in 1965 and lived in the Dix Hills house until he was six.

“This is my sister’s room over here. Michelle — this is her bedroom,” he says. “This was the boys’ room back here; this is the room I shared with my two brothers, John Jr. and Oran.”‘

But, Ravi Coltrane says, not all is as it was: The Coltrane Home in Dix Hills has fallen into disrepair in the 45 years after his father’s death.

Preserving The Property

Many, including Ravi Coltrane, are trying to preserve the historic property. The driving force behind the effort is Steve Fulgoni, a music store owner, amateur saxophonist and a huge Coltrane fan. He first visited the house in 2004.

“I was looking around, and I looked in the corner, which I think was in this room, and all there was was one newspaper,” Fulgoni says. “I picked up the newspaper, and I looked at the date, and the date of the newspaper was July 17, which was the anniversary of his death. And I said to myself, ‘I need to do something.'”

That same year, he founded The Friends of the Coltrane Home. Fulgoni petitioned the town of Huntington, N.Y., to declare the site a historic landmark, and two years later, to purchase the property and designate it a public park.

To read the rest of this article or listen to the story, click here: Making A Home For John Coltrane’s Legacy : NPR.