His grandmother's church. Mount Zion Baptist on Warren Street, where she had sung in the choir for 41 years, and where Caleb had spent every Sunday of his childhood watching old women in white hats sway in time and shout, "Yes, Lord!" when the spirit moved them.
He played that now.
Not a hymn anyone would recognize, just the feeling of one. The bend of the notes. The call and the response. The way gospel music reached up and pulled heaven down by the collar.
A woman in the crowd, a cafeteria worker named Rosa Jimenez, who had clocked out 10 minutes earlier and stayed to see what the noise was, crossed herself.
Then Caleb did the thing that broke the room in half.
He quoted Coltrane. Four notes. Just four. The opening phrase of "A Love Supreme," the most sacred four notes in American jazz. The phrase Coltrane had written on his knees after surviving heroin addiction, the phrase he had said came to him directly from God.
Trevor Klein, the second-chair jazz band senior, put both hands on top of his head and said, loud enough for the crowd to hear, "No way! No way!"
Mrs. Brooks had both hands pressed to her chest. Tears were running down her face, and she was not wiping them away.
Harold Whitaker's arms had uncrossed. He did not remember uncrossing them. They hung at his sides. His mouth was slightly open.
The assistant deans behind him had taken a half step away without knowing they had done it, the way people instinctively step away from a man who is about to fall.
A boy named Brendan Walsh, a junior, 6-foot-3, the captain of the lacrosse team, who 2 months earlier had shoved Caleb into a locker in the gym hallway and called him a name Caleb had never told his grandmother about, was crying. Openly. Not wiping his face. His shoulders were shaking.
"The saxophone isn't an instrument anymore." That was what the chemistry teacher would tell a reporter 4 days later, when the video had 40 million views and news crews were standing on the lawn of Jefferson Prep at 6:00 in the morning. "It wasn't an instrument. It was a testimony. That boy was telling us something we hadn't earned the right to hear."
The third movement began, and the third movement soared. It was everything the first two had been building toward. It took the low conversation of the opening, the mournful climb of the middle, and the gospel cry of the second movement, and lifted them all at once.
The melody rose through the octaves. It found the high register of the alto saxophone and stayed there, clean and unbroken, without a single crack or hesitation for 16 straight bars.
Diane Kessler, in the back of the atrium, was crying. She had worked for the senator for 11 years. She had stood next to the caskets of soldiers. She had watched the senator speak at the funerals of children.
She did not cry at work.
She was crying now.