James Phillips’s Cosmic Connection is a bursting, cacophonous and rhythmic homage to visionary musician, composer, and music theorist John Coltrane. Phillips made the piece at a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem to be the backdrop to a memorial concert to Coltrane at Town Hall, New York that same year. In imagining an uplifting visual counterpart to Coltrane's music and soul, Phillips hit on light. He said, “Sound is sound. I work with the visual manifestations of sound. The visual component to that would be light.”
