The Long Island home of jazz legend John Coltrane has been named a national treasure.

A national historic preservation group is joining efforts to refurbish the former Dix Hills home of Coltrane, who was considered a giant in the jazz world. Coltrane and his musician wife Alice lived at the home in the mid-1960s.

Daughter Michelle Coltrane is an accomplished musician herself who now lives in California. Tuesday was the first day she stepped back inside her childhood home.

"I wanted to go in slow motion so I could feel something," she says. "All the memories just started washing over me."

Pat DeRosa, 96, of Huntington, played tenor saxophone with Coltrane.

"He must've practiced 24 hours a day to get some of the stuff that he knew," DeRosa says.

In the early 2000s, a real estate developer bought the house for the purpose of tearing it down and building a subdivision on the 3 1/2-acre site. A community group was then formed to preserve it. Eventually, the Town of Huntington bought the house and turned it over to the nonprofit group.

Everything in the home will be refurbished, including the upstairs room where Coltrane wrote his most famous song, "A Love Supreme."

Officials say it will probably take several years before the house will be open to the public.

Coltrane lived in Dix Hills until he died of cancer in 1967. He was 40 years old.