John Coltrane

John Coltrane: The Search That Would Not Stop

Interviewed in Japan in 1966 and asked what he hoped to be in five years' time, John Coltrane answered: "a saint." He was dead within eighteen months, at forty. A congregation in San Francisco took the answer literally; the St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church still uses his music as liturgy, and its founding pastor explained the theology plainly: "We are Coltrane-conscious. God dwells in the musical majesty of his sounds."

High Point

Coltrane was born on 23 September 1926 in Hamlet, North Carolina, to John R. Coltrane and Alice Blair, and grew up in High Point. Both his grandfathers were African Methodist Episcopal Zion ministers. Between December 1938 and early 1939 his father, his aunt and both grandparents died within a few months of one another, leaving him with his mother and a cousin. In June 1943 the family moved to Philadelphia. He took saxophone lessons at the Ornstein School of Music from 1944 to 1945 under Mike Guerra, later studied theory at the Granoff School on the G.I. Bill, and worked with the guitarist Dennis Sandole from 1946 into the early 1950s.

The Navy and the Woodshed

He enlisted in the Navy on 6 August 1945, the day the bomb fell on Hiroshima, and was posted to Pearl Harbor, where he played as a guest with the all-white Pacific Fleet Ceremonial Band; his first recordings were made informally in Hawaii on 13 July 1946, on alto saxophone. He had already heard the thing that would organise his life. On 5 June 1945 he saw Charlie Parker play: "The first time I heard Bird play, it hit me right between the eyes." He switched to tenor in 1947 while working with Eddie Vinson, and practised with a ferocity his contemporaries found alarming - the saxophonist Jimmy Heath's estimate was twenty-five hours a day.

Miles, Monk and the Sheets of Sound

Miles Davis called him into his new quintet in 1955. Coltrane stayed from October 1955 to April 1957, cutting the Prestige albums Cookin', Relaxin', Workin' and Steamin', until the group broke up partly over his heroin addiction. He had been using since 1948; in 1957 a religious awakening ended both the heroin and the drinking, and he described it seven years later in the liner notes to A Love Supreme as "a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life." He spent the second half of that year at the Five Spot with Thelonious Monk, an education preserved on only one official studio session because of contract conflicts, and made Blue Train for Blue Note, from which "Moment's Notice" and "Lazy Bird" became standards. In October 1957 the critic Ira Gitler coined "sheets of sound" for what he was doing, and Coltrane's own explanation reveals the mechanics: "I found that there were a certain number of chord progressions to play in a given time, and sometimes what I played didn't work out in eighth notes, sixteenth notes, or triplets. I had to put the notes in uneven groups like fives and sevens in order to get them all in." He rejoined Davis that December and stayed until April 1960, playing on Milestones and Kind of Blue.

Giant Steps

His first Atlantic album as leader, Giant Steps (1960), contained nothing but his own compositions. The title track's chord sequence - a cycle of key centres moving in major thirds - was so unlike anything in the standard repertoire that it acquired his name. "Coltrane changes" remain a benchmark of difficulty for working musicians and a permanent addition to the theory of the music.

The Classic Quartet

He assembled his own group in 1960 and settled on McCoy Tyner at the piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. My Favorite Things (1961) was his first record on soprano saxophone, an instrument then associated with much older styles. Impulse! bought his contract in May 1961, and the celebrated Village Vanguard residency introduced audiences to Indian raga, modal writing and free improvisation arriving in the same set. Reaction split violently: DownBeat called Coltrane and his second horn Eric Dolphy players of "anti-jazz" in 1961, an accusation that baffled both men. Coltrane's stated aim was that every performance be "a whole expression of one's being."

A Love Supreme, and the Break

The quartet's best-selling record, made in 1964 at his house in Dix Hills on Long Island, was a four-part suite offered as an ode to his faith; its closing movement, "Psalm," sets a poem of his own at nearly one note per syllable, so that the horn recites rather than sings. They performed it live only three times. Then he moved past what his own band could follow. Ascension, recorded in June 1965, is thirty-eight minutes with ten additional players including Pharoah Sanders, Freddie Hubbard and Archie Shepp, much of it collective improvisation. Rashied Ali came in as a second drummer. Tyner left after Meditations, saying he could no longer hear himself over two kits; Jones followed in early 1966. "Only poets can understand it," Jones said. He also said this: "Well, of course it's far out, because this is a tremendous mind that's involved. You wouldn't expect Einstein to be playing jacks, would you?" Coltrane died of liver cancer on 17 July 1967 at Huntington Hospital, aged forty. Miles Davis: "Coltrane's death shocked everyone, took everyone by surprise. I knew he hadn't looked too good, but I didn't know he was that sick - or even sick at all." The funeral was opened by the Albert Ayler Quartet and closed by the Ornette Coleman Quartet.

Why John Is Called a Genius

Coltrane's case is unusually well supported because it is technical and checkable. He did not merely play his art form better than his contemporaries; he added a piece of theory to it. The "Coltrane changes" of Giant Steps are a named harmonic structure that entered the permanent vocabulary of jazz, and his own account of the sheets of sound describes an analytic problem being solved in real time - too many chord tones for the available subdivisions, so group them in fives and sevens. That is arithmetic under improvisational pressure, not intuition alone. Elvin Jones, who played beside him nightly, reached for the obvious comparison and did not apologise for it: "this is a tremendous mind that's involved." The 2007 Pulitzer board cited "masterful improvisation, supreme musicianship and iconic centrality to the history of jazz."

The counter-case is real and comes from inside the band. DownBeat filed the "anti-jazz" charge in 1961; Tyner and Jones, the two musicians who built the classic quartet with him, both walked away because the late work had become unplayable for them, and Jones's "only poets can understand it" was not a compliment. The mystical claims of the final years - that the right song might bring rain or heal a sick friend - suggest a search that had outrun its own judgement. The most honest statement is that Coltrane's genius was harmonic and structural, that he demonstrably enlarged the theory of his music, and then spent his last two years dismantling that achievement in public. Whether that was intellectual courage or its collapse is a question the recordings do not settle.

Legacy

Giant Steps won the Edison Award in Amsterdam in 1961, and Coltrane entered the DownBeat Jazz Hall of Fame in 1965 while still recording. A posthumous Grammy came in 1982, the Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 1997, and the special Pulitzer Prize in 2007. His Philadelphia house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1999 and the Dix Hills home where he wrote A Love Supreme joined the National Register in 2007. The church in San Francisco is still there.