After that show, which they came to think of as their “sound baptism,” the Kings became obsessed with Coltrane. They had come to San Francisco to be closer to Franzo’s brother, but they were also in search of community, and one place they discovered it was in their regular listening sessions with friends, studying records by Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk. Eventually, they started a small jazz club. Coltrane’s death, in 1967, at the age of forty, devastated the music world. For one thing, he had seemed immortal, as though he had already merged with the cosmos. “I believe in all religions,” he famously said. He had become fascinated with the music and belief systems of Africa and Asia, exploring ways to capture the whole of existence in a string of notes. The music he was making at the end of his life was fiery and chaotic, in search of a transcendent beauty that few people yet recognized as such.





1 / 9 Chevron Chevron Archival Photograph Courtesy Franzo and Marina King By the early nineteen-eighties, the Coltrane Church had become part of the African Orthodox Church.

For Franzo and Marina, who had begun taking Coltrane’s music and ideas seriously as a world view, he had not passed away. He had merely ascended. Franzo had always imagined becoming a preacher one day. He had now found his God. The Kings’ jazz club was refashioned into a temple, where members participated in the organizing and uplift common in the Bay Area of the sixties.