John Coltrane
「During the year 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening.」 — from the liner notes to A Love Supreme
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
Companions ⏳🌊
- InfluenceCharlie Parker
Parker's playing, first heard in Philadelphia in 1945, set Coltrane on the road to bebop.
- FamilyNaima Coltrane
The first wife, at Coltrane's side in 1957 as the drugs were given up, and the muse of the ballad 「Naima」.
- ColleagueMiles Davis
Placed the scorned unknown in the quintet and lifted Coltrane to the center of 1950s jazz.
- MentorThelonious Monk
On the Five Spot stage in 1957, he taught harmony and tone color hands-on, at the piano.
- ColleagueElvin Jones
Drummer of the classic quartet, he both challenged and buoyed his long improvisations with layer upon layer of rhythm.
- FamilyAlice Coltrane
His second wife and the pianist of his last band, she shared his spiritual quest and carried it on.
I. The boy from High Point · 1926–1943 (age 0–17)
(Hamlet) He was born in September 1926 in Hamlet, North Carolina. His father, John Robert Coltrane, was a tailor who played the ukulele and violin in his spare moments. His mother, Alice Blair Coltrane, played piano and sang in church. While he was still an infant, the family moved to High Point, in the same state, where they lived in the home of his maternal grandfather, William Blair, a minister in a Black Methodist denomination (the AME Zion Church). His cousin Mary, who grew up under the same roof, would later become the subject of the tune “Cousin Mary.” (Loss) Between late 1938 and early the following year, the elders of the household, his grandfather and his father among them, died one after another. It was a sudden blow for a twelve-year-old boy to bear. His mother made a living doing domestic work, and the household grew visibly poorer. His biographers write that from this time on he grew quieter and clung to his instrument. (Instrument) In a boys' band run by a local minister, he moved from the clarinet to the alto saxophone. He listened to records by Lester Young and Johnny Hodges and played along, and friends recalled him practicing late into the night. The hymns and the cadences of the sermons he had heard in church as a child would later return in his music. (Northward) After finishing high school in 1943, he left for Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, following his mother, who had gone north first in search of work. It was the height of the Great Migration, as countless Black Southerners moved to the industrial cities of the North.
II. A nameless sideman · 1943–1955 (age 17–29)
(Philadelphia) In Philadelphia he worked in a factory and attended music school. There, in 1945, he heard Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie for the first time, and he later recalled that Parker's sound pierced him straight through. The new jazz (bebop), with its improvisations unfurled over fast tempos and complex harmonies, became his goal. (Navy) That same year he enlisted in the Navy and was stationed at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, where he played in the base band. A 1946 session there, in which he recorded Parker tunes with his bandmates, is the earliest surviving recording of him. (Apprenticeship) After his discharge he switched to tenor saxophone in Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson's band, and from 1949 he played in Dizzy Gillespie's orchestra. His first studio solo survives on “We Love to Boogie,” recorded with Gillespie's band in 1951. He then drifted through the bands of Earl Bostic and Johnny Hodges to make a living. It was also in these years that he studied harmony with Dennis Sandole, a Philadelphia guitar teacher and theorist. (Heroin) From the late 1940s he sank into heroin and alcohol. It was an era when drugs were spreading among the young players who idolized Parker. He was often late to the bandstand or nodded off mid-performance, and that is said to be why he left the Hodges band. His skill was known among fellow musicians, but until nearly thirty he remained a nameless sideman. (Naima) Around this time he met Juanita Grubbs, a convert to Islam who went by Naima. She urged books of religion and philosophy on him and became the first steady presence in his drifting life.
III. Miles's quintet · 1955–1957 (age 29–31)
(Quintet) In the fall of 1955, Miles Davis called him in as the tenor player for his new quintet. Sonny Rollins, Miles's first choice, was taking a break from performing at the time. With Red Garland (piano), Paul Chambers (bass) and Philly Joe Jones (drums), the band soon became the small group that defined 1950s jazz. That October he married Naima and raised the little daughter she brought with her as his own. (Panned) At first the critics disparaged his sound as harsh and dry. Beside Miles's spacious trumpet, his solos, driving the notes in torrents, sounded strange. Still, Miles did not let him go. (Marathon) In 1956, to finish its Prestige contract and move to Columbia, the quintet recorded more than twenty tunes back to back over two sessions, as if playing a gig. These tapes became Cookin', Relaxin', Workin' and Steamin'. That May he was also called to a Rollins session, leaving behind “Tenor Madness,” with the two tenors standing side by side. (Fired) But heroin and alcohol would not let him go. In the spring of 1957, Miles dismissed him and Philly Joe Jones from the band. A story persists that shortly before, Miles struck him backstage and that Thelonious Monk, who was there, invited him to work together, but the accounts differ in their details. (Awakening) Back home in Philadelphia, he shut himself in a room and kicked the drug. His mother and Naima are said to have left water and food outside his door. He later wrote that he experienced a spiritual awakening that year. That same year Prestige released his first album as a leader.
The only studio record of him standing beside Sonny Rollins, with the rhythm section of Miles's quintet borrowed intact. Set beside a rival, it lets you hear where his sound stood in the days when critics were still panning him.
- A form in which the same chord sequence comes around every 12 bars (the twelve-bar blues). Because the frame is so simple, the difference between the two tenors stands out all the more sharply.
- Coltrane's sound is bright and straight, packing the notes densely, while Rollins, with a thick, round tone, twists short motifs and mixes in ease and humor. There is pleasure in comparing two paths through the same instrument.
- Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones are the Miles quintet's rhythm section unchanged. Chambers's bass, stepping out one note to the beat as if walking (walking bass), holds the floor steady throughout the long tune.
- Recorded at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Hackensack, New Jersey; Coltrane plays only on this one track of the album.
IV. In Monk's room · 1957–1960 (age 31–34)
(Monk) From the summer of 1957 to the end of the year, he played in Thelonious Monk's quartet at the Five Spot, a New York club. Monk taught by playing things at the piano rather than from written music, and he recalled learning from Monk even how to sound two or three notes at once on the saxophone. Earlier, in June, at the session for Monk's Monk's Music, he had stood beside Coleman Hawkins, an elder of the tenor. (Blue Note) In September, as promised to Alfred Lion of Blue Note, he recorded Blue Train. In the thick of the hard bop then sweeping New York, his playing, now free of drugs, grew noticeably firmer. The following year he also took part in a Cecil Taylor session. (Sound) Returning to Miles's band in 1958, he drew attention with playing that split a single chord into fine pieces and poured out rapid notes. The critic Ira Gitler called it “sheets of sound.” In 1959, on Kind of Blue, he helped open up modal jazz, which plays at length over a single scale. Around then he bought a house in Queens, New York, and settled there with Naima. (Atlantic) Signing with Atlantic in 1959, he presented on Giant Steps the harmonic experiments he had been honing in the practice room, the progression later known as Coltrane changes. His life survives in the track titles: “Naima,” dedicated to his wife; “Cousin Mary,” a portrait of his cousin; and “Mr. P.C.,” for the bassist Paul Chambers. (Independence) He already wanted a band of his own. In the spring of 1960 he reluctantly went along on a European tour with Miles, and on his return he struck out on his own. Around this time he took up the soprano saxophone, which had been all but forgotten in jazz since Sidney Bechet.
His only album as a leader for Blue Note, made a few months after he quit drugs. His regained clarity shows in a firm tone and meticulous writing.
- The title track opens with a dark, weighty theme voiced in harmony by three horns: Lee Morgan (trumpet), Curtis Fuller (trombone) and Coltrane (tenor). It is a blues deeply tinged with minor color.
- Coltrane's solo sets out unhurriedly, then stacks the notes ever more densely with each pass through the form (chorus). The seeds of what would soon be called sheets of sound are already visible.
- “Moment's Notice” is a tune whose chords change relentlessly at short intervals. The harmonic experiments that would lead, two years later, to “Giant Steps” began here.
- The rhythm section of Kenny Drew (piano), Paul Chambers (bass) and Philly Joe Jones (drums) pushes the horns forward with a weighty swing that carries the soulful grit of blues and church music (the hard-bop groove).
The album on which he first released, as his own compositions, the harmonic theory he had honed for years in the practice room. The names of his wife, his cousin and a colleague live on as song titles.
- In the title track, the tune's tonal center (key) shifts relentlessly among three places within sixteen bars. This progression, later called Coltrane changes, became a proving ground for jazz players.
- At a very fast tempo, Coltrane races ahead, transplanting short four-note figures onto each changing chord. You can hear his skill at fitting prepared patterns precisely into place.
- Pianist Tommy Flanagan's solo sounds halting, as if it keeps breaking off. This is often attributed to his meeting the unfamiliar progression for the first time at a fast tempo, and he later recorded the tune again.
- “Naima” is the opposite. The bass holds a single note at length (pedal point) while the harmonies change slowly above it, and the tenor sings the melody without ornament.
- Recorded in May 1959 at Atlantic Studios in New York. “Naima” was recorded separately that December with Wynton Kelly and Jimmy Cobb.
V. A prayer of four · 1960–1964 (age 34–38)
(Quartet) Once on his own, he called on the pianist McCoy Tyner, whom he had known since his Philadelphia days, and in the fall the drummer Elvin Jones joined. With the arrival of the bassist Jimmy Garrison at the end of 1961, the so-called classic quartet was complete. Jones's polyrhythms and Tyner's weighty chords supported his long improvisations. “My Favorite Things,” recorded in 1960, sold unexpectedly well, and for the first time he became a leader who could fill a club. (Impulse) In 1961 he moved to the fledgling label Impulse! The terms are said to have been generous for the time, and from then on the producer Bob Thiele oversaw nearly all his recordings. He founded a publishing company, Jowcol Music, to manage the copyrights to his own compositions himself. (Anti-jazz) When the Village Vanguard live recordings with Eric Dolphy from that year became known, the DownBeat critic John Tynan called their music anti-jazz. The following year, in an interview in the same magazine, he calmly explained himself. Ballads, followed by a collaboration with Duke Ellington and an album with the singer Johnny Hartman, showed that he was also deeply rooted in tradition. (Alabama) In September 1963, the bombing of a Black church in Birmingham, Alabama, killed four girls. Two months later he recorded “Alabama,” mourning in notes instead of words. (Alice) That same year he separated from Naima and met the pianist Alice McLeod. Their son John Jr. was born in 1964, and the family moved to Dix Hills, Long Island. When Dolphy died in Berlin that June, Dolphy's parents gave their son's flute to him. In December, in a single evening's session, he recorded A Love Supreme, a thanksgiving to God in four movements.
It turns the breezy waltz from the musical The Sound of Music into a ten-odd-minute improvisation that unfolds like an incantation. This unexpected hit kept the newly launched quartet afloat.
- Over a vamp that rocks between two chords in place of the original's chord progression, he improvises at length (modal jazz). Each time the music turns between minor and major, the light seems to change.
- Coltrane set aside the tenor for the soprano saxophone. Its thin, nasal tone drew comparisons to the wind instruments of India and the Middle East, and after this recording the soprano began to be heard in jazz again.
- McCoy Tyner lays down the floor, repeating chords stacked in fourths in the same rhythm. However far the solo wanders, there is always a place to come home to.
- Elvin Jones layers a different sense of meter over the three-beat waltz (polyrhythm), whipping up a whirlwind. In concert the piece grew longer year by year, at times running past thirty minutes.
- Recorded at Atlantic's studio in October 1960, with Steve Davis, Jimmy Garrison's predecessor, on bass.
A piece recorded for the four girls killed in the bombing of a Birmingham church. From a man sparing with words, it was the most direct answer he ever gave his times.
- The tenor melody opens with no fixed meter, stretching and contracting freely (rubato), and sounds like a sermon murmured low. It is said to echo the cadences of Martin Luther King's eulogy.
- Rather than marking the beat, Elvin Jones shimmers his cymbals and drums in fine strokes (tremolo), swelling and subsiding like waves.
- Midway through, a pulse briefly takes hold and the music starts to walk, then turns back to the opening lament. It is built like anger about to break loose and held down.
- Recorded at Van Gelder Studio in November 1963 and released alongside club recordings on Live at Birdland.
A prayer in four movements, offered in gratitude for his spiritual awakening of 1957. His own confession and poem were printed in the liner notes.
- It opens with a gong and a short cry from the tenor, after which Jimmy Garrison's bass repeats a four-note motif. At the close of the first movement Coltrane carries the motif through twelve keys, and then a voice chanting the title to the same figure joins in.
- The rhythm section of Garrison, Jones and Tyner pushes and pulls as if breathing together rather than locking onto the beat with knife-edge precision. In the second and third movements that density reaches its height.
- In the fourth movement, “Psalm,” the tenor plays as if reciting the poem from the liner notes, one note to each syllable. Jazz scholars including Lewis Porter brought this correspondence to light.
- Recorded in a single evening on December 9, 1964, at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. The next day he recorded again with added players, but the released version kept the four men of the first night.
VI. The final ascent · 1965–1967 (age 39–41)
(Ascension) In June 1965 he recorded Ascension with eleven players, seven of them horns. It was free jazz, many voices improvising at once with no set framework. He introduced young players such as Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler to Impulse and put them on his stage, clearing a path for them. That year his second son, Ravi, was born, and it was around this time that he married Alice. (Partings) As the music changed, old companions left. Tyner quit the band at the end of 1965, and Jones early the following year. Their places were filled by Alice (piano), Rashied Ali (drums) and Pharoah Sanders on tenor. He pursued density of sound and cries close to prayer rather than meter. (Japan) During a tour of Japan in July 1966 he visited the Peace Park in Nagasaki and prayed. At a press conference, asked what he wanted to become, he answered that he wanted to be a saint. A wide reader of the scriptures of many religions, he believed every faith pointed to a single truth. (Illness) In 1967 he cut back on performing. In February he recorded Interstellar Space alone with Rashied Ali, and in April he gave his last concert at the Olatunji Center of African Culture in New York. The illness was liver cancer. He is said to have long avoided hospitals. (Death) On July 17, 1967, he died at a hospital in Huntington, Long Island, at the age of forty. At the funeral, the bands of Ayler and Ornette Coleman played. He left three sons. Alice carried on her husband's music and faith; their eldest son, John Jr., was killed in a car accident in 1982. Ravi later became a saxophonist.
A recording made five months before his death, alone with the drummer Rashied Ali. It shows, more nakedly than anything else, where he was headed at the very end.
- No piano, no bass — only tenor and drums. With the harmonic floor gone, the melody is free to go in any direction.
- Ali plays no steady beat, scattering rhythms in many directions at once. This drumming, which leans on no meter, became one of the models for free jazz drumming.
- The pieces open with the sound of small bells shaken by Coltrane, and the titles are the names of planets: Mars·Venus·Jupiter·Saturn.
- Even as the tenor drives hard in the upper register, as though tearing the sound apart, it returns to a simple motif of a few notes to catch its breath. You can hear that, for all the ferocity, he never lets go of the motif.
- Recorded at Van Gelder Studio in February 1967, it was not released until 1974, several years after his death.
Lesser-known stories
His earliest recording is a private one made in July 1946 in Hawaii, during his navy service, with fellow sailors. The playing of this twenty-year-old, following Charlie Parker's tunes faithfully on alto, is far from the singular sound to come. Because it was never a commercial record, it surfaced only decades later on an anthology, and so the fact that he began in thorough imitation remains less known, hidden behind the myth. Both Directions at Once, released in 2018, is a forgotten session the classic quartet recorded in a single day in March 1963. Impulse's master tapes are believed to have been discarded in an era of clearing out storage space, but a reference copy Coltrane had taken home survived in Naima's family. The tape had slept for more than half a century. A Love Supreme, too, exists in more than one version. The day after the session he recorded the same piece again, adding Archie Shepp on tenor and Art Davis on bass; this take was not released until 2002. He almost never played the piece in concert, but a tape of a 1965 Seattle club performance, made by the local saxophonist Joe Brazil, was discovered and released as an album in 2021. There is even a church that venerates him as a saint. The Saint John Coltrane Church in San Francisco grew out of a circle of believers deeply moved by one of his performances in 1965, later joined the African Orthodox Church, and plays his music in its services. His words in Japan in 1966, that he wanted to become a saint, were carried forward in an unexpected way.
Notes on terms 📚🔎
Bebop
(Literally) The name bebop is widely believed to come from a vocal imitation of two quick, clipped notes. The nonsense syllables players hummed when singing a melody became the name of a genre. (In jazz) The jazz created in 1940s New York by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and others. Unlike big-band music made for dancing, small groups improvise as if in a contest of skill over very fast tempos and complex harmonies. In soccer terms, it is less a game of long balls and running than one of countless short, quick passes in tight spaces.
Hard bop
(Literally) Hard means firm, strong. The name carries the sense of playing that drives harder and with more heft than bebop. (In jazz) Jazz centered in New York from the mid-1950s that built on bebop while steeping it more deeply in the hot, sticky flavors of the blues and Black church music. Horace Silver, Art Blakey and the records of the Blue Note label are its signature examples. Think of the same tteokbokki with more gochujang stirred in, richer and heavier. If bebop was nimble, hard bop moves the body with more weight and solidity.
Sheets of sound
(Literally) The English sheets of sound means a sheet of sound, a curtain of sound. The critic Ira Gitler coined it in 1958 in DownBeat magazine to describe Coltrane's playing. (In jazz) A technique of pouring out the notes of a chord, and their neighbors, at great speed in the brief moment that chord sounds, so that instead of single notes a mass of sound seems to surge in all at once. It is like seeing a downpour as a curtain rather than as individual raindrops. Coltrane explained that he was trying to see a single chord in several directions at once. (Elsewhere) In everyday English, sheet means a sheet of paper or a bedsheet, and can also mean a single table, as in spreadsheet.
Coltrane changes
(Literally) Changes is jazz musicians' shorthand for a chord progression — the flow of harmonies as they shift. (In jazz) The chord progression Coltrane used in “Giant Steps” and elsewhere, moving rapidly among three tonal centers (keys) spaced four half steps apart. If an ordinary tune lives in one house and occasionally drops by next door, this progression roams nonstop among three houses. It is as though a game of tag suddenly required you to tag three bases in turn, and the improviser has to keep up with a center that never stops moving.
Modal jazz
(Literally) Mode refers to a way of choosing which notes make up a scale. Its root, the Latin modus, means manner or measure. (In jazz) Jazz in which, instead of chords changing quickly every few bars, the players hold onto one or two scales for a long stretch and unfold melodies freely within them. Miles Davis's Kind of Blue from 1959 is the landmark, and Coltrane pushed the approach further and deeper. Rather than climbing stairs in a set order, it is like being handed an entire wide playground to run around in as you please. (Elsewhere) In everyday use, mode means the way a device or situation operates, like a game's easy·hard mode or a phone's airplane mode.
Polyrhythm
(Literal meaning) Poly means "many" in Greek. The word describes several rhythms flowing at once. (In jazz) Playing different senses of meter layered on top of one another at the same time. For example, one part counts the beat in threes while another counts in twos, and they move forward together. Elvin Jones kept the basic pulse while crossing multiple rhythms between his hands and feet, making the whole band feel as if it were swirling. Try tapping a desk three times with one hand while tapping twice with the other: it is confusing at first, but a moment comes when the two lock perfectly into place. That is the essence of polyrhythm.
Free jazz
(Literal meaning) Free means unbound. The name took hold with Free Jazz, the album Ornette Coleman released in 1960. (In jazz) Jazz that pares down or abandons agreed conventions such as set chord progressions, a steady meter and fixed bar counts, so that the players shape the music on the spot while listening to one another. Often several musicians improvise at once. It resembles a game among friends played without rules set in advance, the rules being invented as they go. It may look as though anything goes, but the game falls apart unless everyone listens closely to one another.