Doing the Dishes on a Sunday While Listening to Coltrane

From Pirated CDs to YouTube, I'm reminded of how rebellion never left the room!

This morning, I heard a radio guest being asked how they choose music for their Sundays. They mentioned jazz as one of their go-to genres.

Later, while doing the dishes in the afternoon, I decided to put some music on YouTube. John Coltrane popped into my mind. Curious, I checked his discography on Wikipedia, wanting to find his first album. Released in 1957, Coltrane was his debut LP.

As I scrubbed the dishes, the idea of writing an article about this came to me. What would I say? Bourdieu argues that music doesn’t say much. I don’t want to challenge him directly, but even without lyrics, Coltrane’s music carries weight—especially knowing he was a Black musician in his era.

That thought took me back to the years I lived in East London, a province in South Africa. Now I’m in Gauteng, quite a different place. It was in East London, back in 2004, when I first encountered John Coltrane’s name. That kind of music belonged more to my father’s generation, not mine.

My father worked for a construction mogul who lived in a suburb by the sea. This mogul owned a bar in East London where I first saw John Coltrane’s name. I was just a kid then, and the bar had a collection of jazz CDs—at least, I think they were jazz. My father wanted me to copy some of those discs onto his laptop.

Remembering that now, while washing dishes, it hit me: we were essentially pirating music. We were rebels, finding shortcuts around the system. So from now on, whenever I think of John Coltrane, I’ll also think of those rebellious moments from my youth.

Ah, those days—when CDs were a thing. Today, it’s all about YouTube, if you can afford the data. Still, piracy remains part of how music circulates. Maybe that means we’ll always carry a bit of rebellion with us.