“It still touches me,” artist and designer Norman Teague tells me in a soft-spoken voice as we sit in the glass-enclosed lobby of the Elmhurst Art Museum, looking out at the snow. “I told myself I ain’t getting emotional, but it feels emotional when I hear that…” He makes a sudden drum roll on the table with his fingers and laughs. “It’s so close to God.”
Teague is talking about the way Elvin Jones turns the drums into a pulsing wash of sound on John Coltrane’s classic 1965 album, A Love Supreme. The album is subject, inspiration and soundtrack for Teague’s new double exhibit of the same name, jointly curated by the artist and Rose Camara.
The first half of the show, in the Elmhurst Art Museum, encompasses four rooms of Teague’s artwork, loosely structured around the four movements of Coltrane’s album. The second exhibit, next door in the Mies van der Rohe-designed McCormick House, is a collection of works by thirty of Chicago’s BIPOC artists responding to either Coltrane or to other music that inspires them the way Teague is inspired by A Love Supreme. As the wall text asks, “What is your Coltrane story? Who awakened you personally and artistically?”
When I ask Teague when he first connected with Coltrane’s most famous album, he replies not with a single incident, but with a kind of kaleidoscope of musical memory. He thinks he first heard the album at home with his parents. But he was also led to it by an uncle who was “quite enthusiastic about music,” as well as by older friends, by the radio, by Spike Lee’s impassioned proselytizing for jazz.
Teague’s Coltrane-inspired art reflects that sense of Coltrane as diffuse and........