Illustrating

Physi­cist and sax­o­phon­ist Stephon Alexan­der has argued in his many pub­lic lec­tures and his e-book The Jazz of Physics that Albert Ein­stein and John Coltrane had rather a lot in com­mon. Alexan­der in par­tic­u­lar attracts our atten­tion to the so-called “Coltrane cir­cle,” which resem­bles what any musi­cian will rec­og­nize because the “Cir­cle of Fifths,” however…