Straight No Chaser

I Heart John Coltrane

we won't play it over speakers by her bassinet. it isn't newborn-friendly; its crashing cadences might irritate her little eardrums and she might holler.

it won't lull and soothe her, sleepless nights, because it isn't lullaby material. it's slow, mostly, but not lullaby slow. not debussyish, pastel-slow. there are pink tones, and blue ones, but neither set is of the powerderpuff variety. the blues are hard purple-blues, indigos; the pinks are gold-embossed and tinge reds and browns, burgundy-like. rather than rocking her infant brain gently to sleep, it would stimulate and agitate her with its depth, its texture, its gritty sparkle.

chances are she won't like it, growing up, because the average elementary schooler is not terrible impressed by sixties-era avant-garde coltrane. she'll be listening to the contemporary equivalent of britney spears and usher, on her own time; on mine, such as during short car rides, she'll complain mildly about the jazz, until she realizes that complaining won't do her any good. she won't care, so she won't ask, so i won't tell her what it's called, the song she'll hear most.

she won't find out it's what she's named for. if and when she's coerced into one of those grade-school projects, research the origin and meaning of your name, she'll have to focus her findings someplace else. if she writes on her first name, she might choose to write about the prevalence of arabic names in the african-american community. middle name, maybe she'd write about the aunt to whom it pays homage. and i'm sure she could compose a perfectly cookie-cutter essay on the significance of her surname, how the enslavement of blacks in america yielded deceptively anglo labels for their descendants.

we won't tell her why it sounds so familiar; that, because it was probably background to her conception, it may have been the first music she ever experienced as an entity. a kid never wants to hear about her parents' sex life, anyway; even if it happened to be an especially beautiful story, she'd sneer at it.

we will expose her to it, little by little, until she becomes accustomed and (hopefully) partial to its profound rhythms, its cascading improvisation and the way it swells and stretches at the climax. she will slowly become aware of things like sensuality and peace, with fertility, and over time she will come to associate it with these things.

it will be available to her via our collections. and if, someday, we catch her listening to it on her own, maybe even humming along with a look of contentment (which is, incidentally, the name's meaning), that's when we'll tell her.

she'll have looked it up by then--she'll be inquisitive like that--so she'll already know, but we'll tell her anyway. "it's called 'naima,'" we'll say. "just like you are."