Coltrane, John

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Coltrane, John

September 23, 1926
July 17, 1967

Born in Hamlet, North Carolina, jazz tenor and soprano saxophonist John William Coltrane moved with his family to High Point, North Carolina, when he was only a few months old. His father was a tailor, and his mother was an amateur singer. Coltrane received his first instrument, a clarinet, when he was twelve, although he soon began to play the alto saxophone, which was his primary instrument for a number of years.

After high school Coltrane moved to Philadelphia, where he studied at the Ornstein School of Music and the Granoff Studios, where he won scholarships for both performance and composition. He played in the Philadelphia area until 1945, when he entered the navy for two years, playing in navy bands. His exposure at this time to bebop and the playing of Charlie Parker proved a major and lasting influence on Coltrane's music. Coltrane was so awed by Parker's abilities on the alto saxophone that he switched to playing the tenor saxophone, on which he felt he wouldn't be intimidated by the comparison. When Coltrane returned to Philadelphia, he started playing in blues bands, and in 1948 he was hired by Dizzy Gillespie. But Coltrane began drinking heavily and using drugs, and in 1951 he lost his job with the Gillespie band.

The recognition of Coltrane as a major jazz figure dates from his joining the Miles Davis Quintet in 1955, an association that would last, on and off, until 1959. In 1957 Coltrane overcame his drinking and narcotics problem, in the process undergoing a spiritual rebirth. Also in 1957 he began to play with Thelonious Monk and recorded his first album as a leader, Blue Train. Other important albums from this period include Giant Steps and Coltrane Jazz, both from 1959.

Coltrane left Davis in 1959 and thereafter led his own ensemble. The key personnel in Coltrane's definitive quartet of the period, which stayed together from 1961 to 1965, included McCoy Tyner on piano, Elvin Jones on the drums, and Reggie Worhman on bass. Alto saxophonist Eric Dolphy played regularly with the ensemble until his death in 1964. In 1959 Coltrane started playing the soprano saxophone (an instrument that, except for Sidney Bechet, had been rarely used by jazz musicians). He soon recorded his most famous soprano sax solo, "My Favorite Things." Coltrane developed a distinctive soprano style, different from the one he favored on the tenor saxophone. His best-known works of this period include A Love Supreme (1964) and the collective free jazz improvisation Ascension (1965). In 1965 Coltrane's band underwent another change. His regular band members included Rashied Ali on drums, Pharoah Sanders as a second tenor saxophone, and on the piano, his second wife, Alice Coltrane. With this ensemble, Coltrane explored free jazz improvisation until his death from cancer.

In the little more than ten years of his active career, Coltrane's music underwent a number of metamorphoses. He first achieved renown as bluesy hard-bop tenor saxophonist. After 1957 he began to develop a new approach in which his solos were filigreed with myriad broken scales and arpeggios played extremely rapidly—this became known as his "sheets of sound" approach. In 1961 Coltrane began to play solos of unprecedented length, often lasting twenty or thirty minutes. If some found these solos to be soporific and self-indulgent, others were mesmerized by their sweep and intensity, and Coltrane acquired a number of avid fans. His best solos in the early 1960s were often gentle and powerfully introspective. By the mid- 1960s Coltrane was playing free jazz, where his former lyrical style was often replaced by a harsh and turbulent soloing.

Coltrane, often simply called "Trane," was by far the most popular jazz musician to emerge from the New York City jazz avant-garde of the late 1950s and 1960s. His personal and communicative style, his spiritual quest, and his early death, in addition to the virtuosity and grace of his solos, contributed to a Coltrane "cult" that has not abated in the decades since his passing. His influence on subsequent musicians, which has been immense, includes not only his musical ideas but his taking of extended solos and his view of jazz as an ongoing quest for spiritual knowledge and self-wisdom.