Stillness is The Sound

Beneath the Shades of Miles

An excerpt from John Coltrane’s Spiritual Journey Through Jazz (available September 23 on Amazon in the Kindle Store, Print on Demand, and Audible). This story is from the book’s Coda, Afterlife, set in the Bardo.

The Bardo is a Tibetan Buddhist concept referring to the intermediate state between death and rebirth. It is a transitional realm where the soul experiences visions, memories, and karmic echoes, often described as dreamlike or surreal. In the Bardo, one confronts illusions of the mind—and, with awareness, may achieve liberation before being reborn. It is not a place, but a process of transformation.

_ _ _ _ _ _

Since his final breath, John Coltrane had traveled through tunnels of memory, silence, and light—chasing a tone only the soul could hear.

He had spoken with shadows shaped like doubts. He had improvised through stars. But now, he stood before a gate not made of iron or flame—but of rhythm itself.

A suspended beat. A pulse, held just before the downstroke, trembling with possibility.

Above, the sky was burnished copper, reflecting frequencies that had no names. Below, the ground stretched black and infinite, smooth as vinyl, grooved in perfect spirals that seemed to whisper: Here is where all music begins. Here is where it ends.

And at the center stood Miles.

Leaning against nothing. Watching everything. Half-bored, whole Miles.

He wore a silk jacket stitched with captured lightning, pants that shimmered like spilled midnight, and boots that moved without disturbing the silence beneath them. Obsidian shades veiled his eyes, but that smirk—pure Miles—cut through dimensions. One part welcome, two parts prove yourself, three parts I've been waiting.

Still here. Still cool. Still the gatekeeper.

Coltrane approached with the measured steps of a student, not from fear, but from the deep respect one master pays another. He understood the rules: No one passed Miles without proving they belonged. On Earth, it had been a test of sound, speed, innovation.

Here—in this place between places—it was something deeper. A test of essence itself.

Miles didn't speak. The silence around them had weight, texture—thick as velvet, sharp as broken glass. It pressed against Trane's chest, filled his mouth with the taste of unplayed notes.

Miles simply pointed.

Down.

Trane followed his gesture. There on the matte-black ground sat a trumpet. Scarred by a thousand sessions. Bent from being dropped, retrieved, played through pain. Tarnished by breath and time and tears. Silent as stone.

But wrong. All wrong.

He picked it up anyway. The metal was cold, foreign—a weapon from someone else's war, a voice that had never learned his language. It felt like holding lightning in reverse, all the energy flowing away from him.

He pressed the mouthpiece to his lips. The cold brass shocked his mouth awake.

He blew.

Nothing.

A hiss. No note. No resonance. Just the hollow rush of breath through metal that refused to sing for him.

Miles crossed his arms. That smirk deepened, carved itself into something that might have been amusement if it weren't so cutting.

Then he spoke—voice like gravel soaked in moonlight, like whiskey poured over broken glass:

"Ain't no shortcuts through sound, Johnny. You know that."

Coltrane stared at the trumpet. His fingers found the valves, pressed them experimentally. They clicked with mechanical precision, but made no music. This wasn't his path. The tenor saxophone was his translator, his prayer beads, his ladder to the infinite. This horn spoke a language he'd never learned to love.

It wasn't meant to.

This was the test: not mastery, but surrender.

"Why the trumpet?" Trane asked, his voice smaller than he'd intended.

Miles lifted a single eyebrow—an entire conversation in that gesture.

"Wrong question, man. Why not the trumpet? Why anything? Why music at all?"

No answers, of course. Only riddles wrapped in silk and starlight. It was always this way with Miles—every statement a door, every door leading to ten more doors.

Trane tried again. Blew harder. The trumpet wheezed, spat air, gave him nothing but frustration. Sweat that didn't exist began to bead on his forehead. His chest tightened with the effort of forcing sound through an instrument that rejected him.

"Let's hear you, then," Trane said finally, offering the battered horn with hands that trembled just slightly.

But Miles waved it off with casual dismissal.

From behind him—no motion, no sound, as if the universe simply rearranged itself to accommodate his will—he drew his own horn. Sleek as water, celestial as starlight, edged with blue like it had been dipped in the deepest part of heaven and allowed to dry.

He raised it. Positioned it with the care of a surgeon, the reverence of a priest.

He blew.

One long note.

Not loud. Not flashy. Not showing off.

True.

The sound bent reality around itself, colored the space between atoms. It wrapped around Trane like a question he didn't know he'd been asking his entire life. It curled around his ribs, pried open the door behind his sternum, walked into the most secret chambers of his heart.

Then another note. Lower. Darker. Rich with the weight of every blue hour ever lived.

And another. Rising now, but not climbing—floating, like smoke from a candle that burned with its own light.

No runs. No fire. No technical wizardry.

Just the essence of something older than sound itself.

Coltrane felt something inside him twist—not envy, not awe, but recognition. Miles wasn't just playing music. He was playing him—Trane's own sound refracted through Miles's horn, like sunlight bent through a glass of dark water, revealing colors that had always been there but hidden.

This wasn't competition. It was communion.

Not a duel of skill—a duel of truth.

Each note Miles played seemed to pull something from Trane's chest, some essential frequency he'd been carrying without knowing it. The melody wasn't complex, but it was complete—like a single perfect sentence that contained entire novels.

Then, with the same casual precision he'd used to begin, Miles stopped.

The silence that followed wasn't empty. It hummed with the ghost of every note, pregnant with the memory of sound. It settled around them like snow, soft and encompassing.

Miles nodded once: Your turn.

Trane raised the battered trumpet again. His lips were dry now, his hands steady. He could feel Miles watching, feel the weight of the test, the cosmic significance of this moment.

He blew.

Still nothing.

The frustration rose—not from ego, but from understanding. He was fighting the wrong battle, asking the wrong questions. This wasn't about conquering the instrument or proving his versatility.

He tried a different approach. Softer. More patient. Listening to the trumpet instead of commanding it.

Air moved through the horn, but no music emerged. Just breath. Just effort. Just the mechanical reality of metal and pressure and failure.

Minutes passed. Or hours. Or years. Time moved differently here, measured not in seconds but in heartbeats, in the space between intention and surrender.

Finally, Trane understood.

He wasn't meant to master this horn.

He was meant to let it go.

He let the trumpet fall.

Not in defeat—in release.

It hit the ground with a soft thud that echoed like a prayer.

He took a breath. Not through lungs, but through his entire being. Air filled him differently here, carried frequencies from dimensions he couldn't name.

He didn't try to play.

He just stood.

Stood in the silence that wasn't silence. Stood in the sound that wasn't sound. Stood in the space where all music lived before it was born and after it died.

His body became still, but inside, he could feel it—the pulse. Not his heartbeat, but something deeper. The rhythm that held galaxies in their orbits. The bass line of existence itself.

Miles stared, those hidden eyes reading him like sheet music.

And slowly—so slowly it might have been the movement of continents—he nodded.

Then he too lowered his horn.

Now two legends stood in perfect stillness.

No sound. No movement. No performance.

Just presence.

A silence not empty, but full to overflowing. Full of every note ever played and every note that would never need to be played. Full of the space between sounds where the real music lived.

They stood like that—minutes or millennia, it didn't matter—while something shifted in the fabric of everything. The copper sky deepened. The grooved ground hummed with2 sympathetic vibration. The very air became musical, charged with the electricity of perfect understanding.

This was the sound beyond sound. The tone only the soul could hear. The music that played itself.

Finally, Miles reached up and removed his sunglasses.

His eyes were flame and water simultaneously. The blues made flesh—all the hurt and hope and truth and transcendence that had ever poured through a horn or a heart. Groove and ghost dancing together in irises that reflected infinity.

"You got it now," he said, his voice softer than before, warmer. "Took you long enough, man."

Coltrane bowed his head, not in shame but in gratitude.

"I thought I had to play my way through," he said. "I thought the answer was in the doing."

Miles's smirk softened into something that might have been a smile.

"Nah, Trane. Sometimes the highest note's the one you don't play. Sometimes the deepest groove's the one you don't lay down. Music ain't about the sound, man—it's about the silence that gives the sound meaning."

Behind them, the gate that had never been a gate began to dissolve. Not opening—becoming unnecessary. There was no threshold anymore because there had never been a real barrier.

Only understanding. Only the space between one breath and the next.

Coltrane stepped forward. But not past Miles.

With him.

Side by side, they walked into whatever came next. No horns in their hands now, but something better—the knowledge that the music they'd spent their lives chasing had been inside them all along. Not in their fingers or their breath or their technical mastery, but in their willingness to become silence so that sound could find its way home.

They were beyond the gig now. Beyond the encore. Beyond the need to prove anything to anyone, including themselves.

This wasn't performance. This was peace.

Somewhere—everywhere—a celestial rhythm resumed. Not a beat, but a pulse. The universe's own time signature, the cosmic clock that had been ticking since the first star learned to shine.

And together, in perfect silence that was fuller than any symphony, they kept it.

One step at a time. In tune. In time. In truth.

Behind them, the trumpet lay forgotten on the grooved ground, its silence finally complete. And from that silence, something new began to emerge—not sound, but the possibility of sound. Not music, but the space where music lived.

The sound of stillness. The music of being.

The tone only the soul could hear.

_ _ _ _ _

Until we meet again, let your conscience be your guide.