John Coltrane at 100 — One Long Search

by Fritz Byers

On Wednesday, John Coltrane turns 100. He was born September 23, 1926, in Hamlet, North Carolina. He passed on July 17, 1967, in Huntington, New York, of liver cancer.

Forty years old. Take a moment with that. The whole arc of Trane’s artistic achievement – sideman to searcher to savant to a music so far out that some of his most ardent admirers couldn’t follow him there – happened inside a working life of barely twenty years, and a good deal of the most enduring aspects inside the last ten.

John became almost impossibly famous while he was alive, and the fame did something to him that it never quite did to Miles Davis (whom we spent a week honoring in May): it turned him into a symbol before it finished letting him be a musician. By the time of his death and increasingly in the decades since, he’s become a sort of secular saint – spiritual seeker, prophet of the horn, a musician whose late records get talked about in the language of testimony and witness more often than in the language of music.

He earned, perhaps even sought some of that; after all, he wrote a suite called A Love Supreme as an explicit prayer of thanksgiving, and he meant it, felt it deeply, and tried to live it against all the odds that being mortal flesh set against him. But in some ways the hagiography around John’s music is a way of not listening closely. It’s easier to revere a saint than to sit with a record and try to absorb it as a whole, as music and message.

Here’s where I want to start the week’s blog posts: before the reputation, before the incense, just the sound. Put on almost anything John played from the mid-'50s on and you’ll hear it right away – a tone of exceptional fullness and warmth, fluid across the whole range of the horn, capable of a kind of tenderness that is unlike any feeling conveyed by anyone who has picked up a horn. The sound, on its own and apart from everything he later did with it, is one of the great achievements in the history of the music. Thursday’s post will make that case directly, through a focus on a few records chosen in part for exactly that reason.

His sound endured, but John didn’t stand still, and the sound is only the beginning of the story, its foundation. After an apprenticeship with Dizzy Gillespie’s big band and some other work as a sideman, John first emerged with Miles Davis’s First Great Quintet, absorbing an economy and a discipline that weren’t naturally his; and, after Miles let him go in 1957 over his addiction, he expanded his presence during a lengthy stint with Thelonious Monk, whose harmonic daring gave John a freedom he’d not had before. In tomorrow’s post I’ll get into what each of these apprenticeships gave him.

Out of this came what Ira Gitler called “sheets of sound” – those dense, cascading, seemingly inexhaustible runs of notes that first announced John as something genuinely new.  The method was evident already on 1957's Blue Train and John pushed it to a kind of harmonic endpoint (or maybe a dead end) on 1959's Giant Steps, whose title tune is built on frenetic chord changes that are still a rite of passage for every serious jazz musician who comes along.

Then the turn: modal playing, first assayed alongside Miles on Kind of Blue, then, once he’d formed his own quartet, taken somewhere Miles never ventured. With the pianist McCoy Tyner, the bassist Jimmy Garrison, and the drummer Elvin Jones, John built a band that could sustain improvisation over a single scale or vamp for twenty minutes and never lose its footing – long unhurried explorations that eschewed the tight compression of a song form. (In clubs, these excursions might last nearly an hour, and even McCoy and Jimmy would eventually tire and step aside, leaving John alone with Elvin to thrash their way through the thickets of sound they imagined together.)

For many, this exploration reached its fullest expression of purpose in December 1964, when the quartet recorded A Love Supreme, a four-part suite of meditative devotion that remains, whatever else you make of it, one of the most emotionally direct statements ever put on a jazz record.

And then in the last two years of his life, John went further still, into a free, turbulent music that alienated some of his most devoted listeners.  He never stopped searching. That, more than any single style or period, is the thing that holds his career together. And, as I’ll try to articulate in Friday’s post, it’s why his music means so much.

It’s a different story than the one I tried to tell about Miles during his Centenary this past May. Miles kept scaling mountains, and then, after summiting them, abandoning them for wholly new challenges. It seems to me that, in contrast, John climbed one mountain the whole time, and he never once thought he’d reached the top.

So it’s a week of honoring John. Tomorrow, I’ll write about what John carried away from his time with Miles and, even more tellingly, from his time with Monk; Thursday, I’ll focus on a handful of records – not the ones everyone already reaches for – that repay real attention; and Friday, I’ll say why, a hundred years on, it’s all worth your time and attention.

And on this weekend’s Jazz Spectrums – Friday, Saturday, and Overnight – four hours each night, we give him the whole of the airwaves.