Livingston, Montana-based poet Marc Beaudin, a former Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness Foundation artist-in-residence, announces the release of an album of poetry and jazz titled, From Coltrane to Coal Train: An Eco-Jazz Suite. The recording, comprised of nine tracks, will be available on compact disc, as well as digital download and streaming on various platforms.

The album of interconnected poems exploring themes of environmental activism, climate change, and the music and message of jazz legend John Coltrane, features music by members of the band Morphine, and the related groups Orchestra Morphine, Vapors of Morphine, and Twinemen. Dana Colley plays saxophones, bass clarinet, upright arco, and flute. Billy Conway provides drums, percussion, bass, guitar, and vibraphone. Laurie Sargent performs vocals, bass, and keyboards.

The idea for the suite grew out of “Jazz/Poetry Thing,” a 2017 performance at The Attic in Livingston by Beaudin and Colley, along with Billings poet Dave Caserio, harmonica player Buff Brown and bassist Parker Brown. Plans for another live show featuring the poems of From Coltrane to Coal Train were put on hold, first due to Conway’s cancer diagnosis, and then by the Coronavirus pandemic.

Eventually, the musicians were able to create and record the music playing along to scratch tracks of Beaudin’s poetry, who then performed the final vocals to match the music—a collaboration that spanned months of back-and-forth between the East Coast and the Rocky Mountain West.


“The spark for this project comes from the idea that John Coltrane, with groundbreaking recordings such as A Love Supreme and Expression, represents the highest level of beauty and goodness that humans can reach,” says Beaudin. “And the coal train that cuts our town in half several times a day, represents the lowest.”

The poems explore various aspects of our current environmental and climate trauma, as well as looking to the power of art to show us a path beyond the degradation.

Beaudin is the author of Life List: Poems, a Montana Book Award honor book winner, and the hitchhiking memoir Vagabond Song: Neo-Haibun from the Peregrine Journals. His work has been widely anthologized in publications dedicated to environmental and social justice. He also is a theatre director and designer, as well as co-owner of Livingston’s Elk River Books.

Colley and Conway, along with Mark Sandman, were members of the “low rock” band Morphine that took the alternative/indie scene of the 1990s by storm, releasing five studio albums of moody, jazz and blues-based songs like “Cure for Pain” and “Honey White,” before Sandman’s tragic death while headlining an Italian music festival. Since then, they have worked, along with Sargent, on various projects that grew out of Morphine, including Orchestra Morphine and Twinemen.

Sadly, Conway’s illness led to his death in December of 2021. The recording session for From Coltrane to Coal Train would prove to be the last time he and Colley ever played music together. The album serves as a tribute to Conway’s unquenchable spirit, talent and generosity as a musician and as a friend.

The CD, which includes a booklet of the poems and photography by Beaudin, as well as digital downloads and a limited edition, facsimile manuscript documenting the evolution of the poems, are available through a Kickstarter campaign being launched to raise the necessary funds. More information can be found at Beaudin’s website, CrowVoice.com.