Imani Winds & Harlem Quartet have built parallel legacies around their virtuoso musicality as well as expanding the canon of great works through their commitments to commissioning, composing, and arranging— particularly by African-American and Latinx composers — for their ensembles. Jeff Scott, former and founding hornist of Imani Winds, composed Passion for Bach and Coltrane for Imani Winds, the poet A.B. Spellman, Harlem Quartet, and a jazz piano trio. The work synthesizes classical and jazz styles, highlighting the gifts of all the performers onstage.

Inspired by and featuring Spellman’s poetry, Passion for Bach and Coltrane interweaves orated poems with music, in a manner inspired by J.S. Bach’s Passion settings. Scott selected one masterwork by each composer — Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Coltrane’s A Love Supreme — and used each as source material to construct a mosaic tapestry around the drama and imagery in Spellman's text. Pensive, ethereal moments are punctuated by Bach, while the tone for moody, dark passages is set by Coltrane's work.

The result is a piece that is “powerfully forward looking” (San Francisco Classical Voice), an enduring testament to the potential of musical creativity.