backroad bohemia.

COLTRANE LIVES!  Jazz great John Coltrane's family home in Philadelphia has been
declared a national historic landmark. For jazz fans, the honor places a brilliant artist
and innovator back in the spotlight. Renovation plans for this site include the installment
of studio space, an archive, a gift shop, and lecture and performance rooms. Until 1958,
when he resettled in New York City, the young musician made his home base on North 33rd Street in Philly. It was within this structure that he practiced out loud or executed silent finger runs after hours. Here, on the dining-room walls, are two unsigned watercolors that are traceable to Coltrane-the-impressionist.

hart to heart

"Planet Drum explores rhythm and noise,"  drummer and percussionist Mickey Hart once said, "it’s
a sound yoga of processed acoustic percussion headed straight for the trance zone that becomes a dance of ancient and modern worlds. Deep drumming is a skeleton key into these realms.”

Hart will step into that trance zone once again during the next six weeks on a nationwide tour that reunites the former Grateful Dead drummer with fellow percussionists Zakir Hussein, Sikiru Adepoju and Giovani Hidalgo.

The occasion marks
the release of the new Global Drum Project CD, marking the
15th anniversary of Hart's celebrated
Planet Drum album, book, and tour.

Check for local
concert dates at www.planetdrummusic.com. 

city lights publishes
new kerouac memoir

Edie Parker was 18 years old when she
met Jack Kerouac at Columbia University
in 1940. A young socialite from Grosse Pointe, Michigan, she had come to New York to study art and quickly found herself swept up
in the excitement and new freedoms that the big city offered a sheltered young
woman of that time.

Jack Kerouac was also eighteen, attending Columbia on a football scholarship, impressing his friends with his intelligence and knowledge of literature. Introduced by a mutual friend, Jack and Edie fell in love and quickly moved in together,
sharing an apartment with Joan Adams
(who would later marry William S. Burroughs).

Edie Parker-Kerouac's account of those times is the subject of You'll Be Okay: My Life with
Jack Kerouac (City Lights).

This is the story of their life together in New York, where
they began lifetime friendships with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and others. Edie's memoir provides the only female voice from that nascent period, when the leading members of
the Beat Generation were first meeting and becoming friends.

In the end, Jack and Edie went their separate ways, keeping in touch only on rare occasions through letters and late-night phone calls.

In his last letter
to Edie, written a month before his death, Kerouac ended
it with the encouraging phrase: "You'll be okay."

It was from that note that the title of this book was taken.