John Coltrane

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  John William Coltrane was born on the 23rd of September 1926, in his parents' apartment at 200 Hamlet Avenue in Hamlet, North Carolina. He died at 40, of liver cancer, on the 17th of July 1967. In the four decades that followed his death, he received a special Pulitzer Prize, was canonized as a saint by the African Orthodox Church, and had a congregation in San Francisco declare him God incarnate. How does a saxophonist from the Carolina piedmont arrive at that? What happened between the sugar refinery job his mother found him in Philadelphia and the 38-minute avant-garde piece he recorded with ten other musicians at a New Jersey studio? What does it mean that his most celebrated album is a four-part suite addressed to God, composed at his home on Long Island, and that the man who made it said, in 1966, that what he hoped to be in five years was a saint?

• 2. The Making of a Player

  ›

  In December 1938, Coltrane's father, aunt, and grandparents all died within a few months of one another. He was twelve years old, and from that point he was raised by his mother and a close cousin in High Point, North Carolina. He played clarinet and alto horn in a community band at William Penn High School, drawn early to reed instruments by the sounds of Lester Young and Johnny Hodges. His mother bought him his first saxophone, an alto, as a birthday gift in September 1943, when he turned seventeen. He had been in Philadelphia only a few months by then, having followed his family there that June after graduating from high school.

  For his 17th birthday saxophone, he would find his most formative teacher not at a school but on a bandstand. On the 5th of June 1945, Coltrane saw Charlie Parker perform for the first time. He recalled the moment in a 1960 DownBeat magazine article: "the first time I heard Bird play, it hit me right between the eyes." That encounter shaped everything that followed. He enrolled at the Ornstein School of Music to study with Mike Guerra, then used his G.I. Bill funds after his Navy service to continue at the Granoff School of Music with jazz guitarist and composer Dennis Sandole, studying music theory under Sandole's guidance from 1946 into the early 1950s.

  The dedication Coltrane brought to the instrument bordered on the obsessive. Bassist Jimmy Heath, who led one of the bands Coltrane played in, recalled that he practiced "25 hours a day." Heath described an incident in a San Francisco hotel: after a noise complaint, Coltrane simply took the horn from his mouth and practiced fingering silently for a full hour. It was not unusual for him to fall asleep with the saxophone still in his mouth, or to sustain a single note for hours on end. Tenor saxophonist Odean Pope identified the Philadelphia pianist and theorist Hasaan Ibn Ali as a significant, if less-discussed, influence on Coltrane's melodic thinking, saying, "Hasaan was the clue to the system that Trane uses."

• 3. Navy, Bebop, and Early Miles

  ›

  Coltrane enlisted in the Navy on the 6th of August 1945, the day the first U.S. atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, choosing enlistment over the risk of being drafted by the Army. He trained as an apprentice seaman at Sampson Naval Training Station in upstate New York before being shipped to Pearl Harbor, where he was stationed at Manana Barracks, described as the largest posting of African American servicemen in the world. By late 1945, when he arrived in Hawaii, the Navy was already downsizing after the war's end.

  His talent was recognized, and he joined the Melody Masters, the base swing band. Because the Melody Masters was an all-white ensemble, Coltrane was treated as a guest performer rather than a full member, so as not to alert superior officers. He still pulled kitchen and security duty when not playing. By the time he was discharged, on the 8th of August 1946, he had assumed a leadership role in the band. His first recordings, an informal session in Hawaii with fellow Navy musicians, took place on the 13th of July 1946. He played alto saxophone on jazz standards and bebop tunes. He left the service having earned the American Campaign Medal, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal.

  Back in Philadelphia, Coltrane moved through the city's active jazz scene, switching from alto to tenor saxophone in 1947 when he joined Eddie Vinson's band. He played with groups led by King Kolax, Jimmy Heath, Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Bostic, and Johnny Hodges over the next several years. Then, in 1955, while freelancing and still working with Dennis Sandole, he received a call from Miles Davis. Davis was forming a quintet after a period in which his career had suffered, in part, from heroin addiction. The band that resulted, known as the First Great Quintet, with Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums, recorded two marathon sessions for Prestige in 1956 that yielded four albums: Cookin', Relaxin', Workin', and Steamin'. The quintet eventually broke apart partly because of Coltrane's own heroin addiction, a problem he had been carrying since 1948.

• 4. Sheets of Sound and Giant Steps

  ›

  In October 1958, jazz critic Ira Gitler coined the phrase "sheets of sound" to describe what Coltrane had developed during his time with Thelonious Monk and was now perfecting back in Davis's group, which had expanded to a sextet. The playing was dense, with rapid runs cascading in very high note counts per minute. Coltrane himself explained 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."

  His period with Monk, at New York's Five Spot Cafe from July through December 1957, was its own turning point. Contractual conflicts meant Coltrane took part in only one official studio recording with Monk's quartet. But a private tape made by his first wife Juanita Naima Coltrane of a late summer 1957 reunion was eventually released by Blue Note Records as Live at the Five Spot: Discovery! in 1993. A high-quality tape of a November 1957 Carnegie Hall concert by the quartet, recorded by Voice of America, surfaced later and was released by Blue Note in 2005 as Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall.

  From that crucible came Blue Train, recorded for Blue Note with trumpeter Lee Morgan, bassist Paul Chambers, and trombonist Curtis Fuller. Four of its five tracks are original Coltrane compositions, and the title track, "Moment's Notice", and "Lazy Bird" have since become jazz standards. Then came Giant Steps in 1960, his first Atlantic album consisting entirely of his own compositions. The title track contains what musicians came to call Coltrane changes, chord progressions considered among the most difficult of any widely played jazz composition. He continued working with Davis through April 1960, participating in sessions that produced Milestones and Kind of Blue.

• 5. The Classic Quartet

  ›

  Coltrane formed his first quartet for live performances in 1960 for an appearance at the Jazz Gallery in New York City. After moving through several personnel combinations, he settled on pianist McCoy Tyner, a native of Philadelphia who had been a friend for some years; bassist Jimmy Garrison, who joined in 1962; and drummer Elvin Jones. Tyner later recalled that the understanding between them was that he would join the band when he felt ready. The first album recorded by this lineup was My Favorite Things in 1961, also notable as Coltrane's first album on soprano saxophone, an unconventional choice at the time because the instrument was more associated with earlier jazz styles.

  In 1961, Impulse! bought out Coltrane's Atlantic contract, and he resumed his recording relationship with engineer Rudy Van Gelder, working mostly at Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. A celebrated residency at the Village Vanguard that year demonstrated a new direction: music influenced by Indian ragas, modal jazz, and free jazz. The 15-minute blues piece "Chasin' the Trane" from those sessions was strongly inspired by John Gilmore, longtime saxophonist with Sun Ra's ensemble. After hearing Gilmore perform, Coltrane reportedly said, "He's got it! Gilmore's got the concept!"

  Criticism followed. DownBeat magazine labeled Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, who had joined the group as a second horn, players of "anti-jazz" in 1961, a characterization that bewildered and upset both musicians. Audiences in France booed Coltrane during his final tour with Davis. But as his style developed, he was determined, in his own words, to make every performance "a whole expression of one's being." The quartet shifted to a more harmonically static approach in its studio recordings in 1962 and 1963, collaborating with Duke Ellington and recording with baritone singer Johnny Hartman. On the 7th of March 1963, at Van Gelder Studio, six of those Hartman tracks were recorded for the John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman album, released that July. A session recorded the previous day, the 6th of March 1963, was presumed lost for decades after Impulse! destroyed its master tape to save storage space; a spare copy Coltrane had given to his wife was used to release Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album on the 29th of June 2018.

• 6. A Love Supreme

  ›

  In December 1964, the Classic Quartet entered Van Gelder's studio and recorded A Love Supreme, a four-part suite conceived as an ode to Coltrane's faith in and love for God. Coltrane wrote it at his home in Dix Hills on Long Island. The fourth movement, "Psalm", is structured around an original poem to God that Coltrane composed and printed in the album's liner notes. He plays almost exactly one note for each syllable of the poem, basing his entire phrasing on the words.

  The album grew directly out of a spiritual experience Coltrane described in the liner notes. In 1957, he had overcome heroin addiction and alcoholism, which he had carried since 1948. He wrote that he had experienced, "by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music." He had called his first wife Naima in 1964 to tell her that ninety percent of his playing would be prayer.

  A Love Supreme became the quartet's best-selling album, certified gold in Japan by JASRAC in 1972 for exceeding half a million copies sold there, and certified gold in the United States in 2001. The quartet played it live only three times, and it was recorded twice: in July 1965 at a concert in Antibes, France, and in October 1965 in Seattle, Washington. The Antibes recording was released by Impulse! in 2002, and a recently discovered amateur recording titled A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle was released in 2021. In 2026, marking the hundredth anniversary of Coltrane's birth, Danish harmonica player Mathias Heise arranged and performed the suite with the Danish Radio Big Band for an album titled A Love Supreme Revisited.

• 7. The Final Push

  ›

  After A Love Supreme, Coltrane moved steadily toward the avant-garde. In June 1965, he convened a session at Van Gelder's studio with ten additional musicians, including Pharoah Sanders, Freddie Hubbard, Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, and John Tchicai, to record Ascension, a 38-minute piece built around collective improvisation between solos by young avant-garde musicians. The album was controversial, and the collective improvisation sections drew the most resistance. Sanders joined the band permanently in September 1965. Rashied Ali then joined as a second drummer, and within months both McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones had departed.

  Typer said he could not hear himself over the two drummers. Jones left in early 1966, dissatisfied, and said of Coltrane's latest music, "only poets can understand it." Both musicians later reflected differently on the period. Jones said, "Well, of course it's far out, because this is a tremendous mind that's involved, you know. You wouldn't expect Einstein to be playing jacks, would you?" Tyner recalled, "He was constantly pushing forward... he was always searching, like a scientist in a lab, looking for something new... He kept hearing these sounds in his head."

  The second quartet, with Sanders on tenor, Alice Coltrane on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Ali on drums, was known in concert for playing long versions of their repertoire, many stretching beyond 30 minutes to an hour, with individual solos often exceeding fifteen minutes. In the studio in 1967, Coltrane also recorded a series of duets with Ali that appear on the album Interstellar Space. His penultimate live performance and final recorded one was a radio broadcast for the Olatunji Center of African Culture in New York City, eventually released as an album in 2001. He died of liver cancer at Huntington Hospital on Long Island on the 17th of July 1967, at the age of 40. His funeral was held four days later at St. Peter's Lutheran Church in New York City, where the service was started by the Albert Ayler Quartet and finished by the Ornette Coleman Quartet.

• 8. Saint John

  ›

  After his death, a congregation in San Francisco began worshipping Coltrane as God incarnate, calling themselves the Yardbird Temple after Charlie "Yardbird" Parker, whom they equated to John the Baptist. They later affiliated with the African Orthodox Church, which required changing Coltrane's status from a god to a saint. The St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco is the only African Orthodox church that uses Coltrane's music and lyrics as prayers in its liturgy. In 1966, an interviewer in Japan had asked Coltrane what he hoped to be in five years, and he replied, "a saint."

  Journalist Samuel G. Freedman wrote for The New York Times that the Coltrane church "is not a gimmick or a forced alloy of nightclub music and ethereal faith. Its message of deliverance through divine sound is actually quite consistent with Coltrane's own experience and message." Coltrane is depicted as one of 90 saints in the Dancing Saints icon of St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, a 3,000-square-foot painting in the Byzantine iconographic style that encircles the entire church rotunda, executed by Mark Dukes, an ordained deacon at the Coltrane church.

  The honors accumulated long after his death. He received a posthumous Grammy for Best Jazz Solo Performance in 1982, and the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. In 2007, he was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize citing his "masterful improvisation, supreme musicianship and iconic centrality to the history of jazz." The John Coltrane House in Philadelphia, where he had lived after his Navy service, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1999. His last home in the Dix Hills district of Huntington, New York, where he composed A Love Supreme, was added to the National Register of Historic Places on the 29th of June 2007.