After Johnny Hodges fired him, John Coltrane was back in Philadelphia and spottily employed—so spottily that he was without a job for New Year’s Eve of 1954. And so, out of pity, and in gratitude for some musical pointers Coltrane had given him, a trumpeter friend named Ted Curson took him along to a gig in Vineland, New Jersey. Curson, who went on to have a solid jazz career, remembered the evening decades later. “He played ‘Nancy with the Laughing Face,’ I’ll never forget that,” he said. “I never heard anything so great, so intense, with so much feeling.”
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