From a Jazz Club to a Consecrated Church

The congregation now known as the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church began in the mid-1960s in San Francisco as the Yardbird Temple, a jazz listening club founded by Franzo King and his wife Marina King and originally centered on the music of saxophonist Charlie Parker, nicknamed Yardbird. Following the 1967 death of John Coltrane, another towering figure of American jazz whose later recordings had taken on an explicitly spiritual character, the Kings and their community shifted their devotion specifically to Coltrane, coming to regard his music and his life as a genuine spiritual path, and the group reorganized under a new name reflecting that focus. In 1982 the congregation formally joined the African Orthodox Church, a historically Black-led Christian denomination founded in the early twentieth century, adopting Saint John Coltrane as the community's patron and taking its present name, the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church, a step that placed what had begun as an informal jazz devotional community inside a recognized, canonically organized Christian church body. The congregation has operated from several different San Francisco locations over the decades since, continuing to combine formal Christian liturgy with the specific musical and devotional focus on Coltrane that has defined it from its earliest years as the Yardbird Temple.