John Coltrane at 100: Part 2 — An Apprentice’s Lessons

by Fritz Byers

John Coltrane came to Miles Davis’s band in the fall of 1955 more or less by default, a result of Miles’s moving to Plan B after Sonny Rollins, Plan A, withdrew from circulation to kick a heroin habit — Sonny would spend part of the next year working construction and boxing in Chicago as a way of staying clean, an application of the same discipline that would lead to his famed self-imposed exile on the Williamsburg bridge, insisting to himself that, despite the widening acclaim from fans and musicians alike, he was falling short of his own lofty standards. With Rollins unavailable, Miles’s drummer, Philly Joe Jones, who’d shared a bandstand or two with John in Philadelphia, suggested him to Miles, and Miles took a chance, trusting an instinct for fallow or hidden talent that governed his entire musical career.

This time, Miles got a twenty-nine year old who was, by every reliable account, not yet fully formed, a player of obvious drive, vision, and harmonic curiosity, still pursuing the sound he could hear but not yet play, still discerning the shape of the music that was beckoning him. Miles heard the promise and kept John around anyway, and what followed is one of the most consequential mentorships in the music. Miles gave John the space to reach and fall short, and to reach again, and at the same time he held John to a needed rigor, a discipline that honored the music and rested on the necessary fidelity to its traditions of virtuosity.

The discipline showed in a thousand small, telling moments, some of them tender, some bracingly abrupt.  My favorite: in those years (and really, throughout his sadly brief career) John struggled to know when a solo was finished. He would play past the point where his ideas had been resolved, still chasing one more variation, then another, unable to find the right time to rest. He asked Miles, and Miles’ advice, as he sets it out in his autobiography, was characteristically blunt: Try taking the horn out of your mouth.

It’s a joke, yes, but it’s also the sort of exchange that made this pairing so fertile. Miles’s entire aesthetic was built on knowing what to leave out, and John’s nature drove him to say everything there was to be said, and then to add a P.S. or two. You can hear that tension productively at work in the First Great Quintet’s records: Miles’s spare, unhurried phrases set against John’s search for more notes, more harmonic ground to traverse, more of everything. Miles never asked him to stop searching, but by his example Miles impelled John to begin finding ways to shape it, to add contour, texture, and a satisfying arc toward the conclusion.

John’s lessons with Miles ended in 1957, when Miles dismissed him over an addiction that had been undermining the band and John’s prodigious gift. John went home to Philadelphia and went full-on cold turkey, alone, locked in an upstairs bedroom in his mother’s house — an ordeal he would later describe, in the liner notes to A Love Supreme, as a spiritual awakening, a turn toward thanksgiving that reshaped everything he made afterward.

Ponder this for a moment: the year of his life that John would later call the hinge of his whole existence began with Miles Davis showing him the door, telling him to get straight.

Later that year, sober and resolute, John went to work with Thelonious Monk, first in the studio on the sessions that produced Monk’s Music and the record later released as Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane, and then, that summer and fall, in the fabled residency at the Five Spot Café. Where Miles taught John restraint, Monk taught him to open the aperture entirely. John said it several times, in various ways, that leave nothing for interpretation: Monk was “a musical architect of the highest order.” Monk taught him “in every way – through the senses, theoretically, technically.” And Monk showed him realms of music he “didn’t know about at all.”

Monk’s method, as many have described, wasn’t lecture, it was demonstration. He would sit at the piano and simply play the answer to whatever problem John brought to him — a chord voicing, a way to navigate a thorny passage, a way to imply two or three harmonies inside a single melodic line. Again and again, the answer involved a note that theory said didn’t belong — a minor second left unresolved, a “wrong” note treated not as an error to correct but as a color worth keeping. Monk had built an entire vocabulary, an entire musical sensibility, out of trusting those impulses over what the changes supposedly demanded.

What John absorbed in that year wasn’t Monk’s economy — their instincts on that score ran in opposite directions — but the deeper freedom beneath it. By the end of his year with Monk, John could do on the tenor what Monk did at the keyboard: stack implication on implication, and trust that the ear would follow him and hear the surprising beauties. John’s harmonic imagination famously ran rampant, while Monk’s was spare, but the willingness to chase a harmony nobody had sanctioned and trust that it would resolve into something true is the whorl of Monk’s fingerprint on John’s musicianship.

John went back to Miles in January 1958, shortly after the extended gig at the Five Spot ended.  He carried with him the whole of both apprenticeships: Miles’s discipline about space and shape, now permanently in the blood, and Monk’s harmonic daring, now permanently in the mind and spirit. Everything that followed — Kind of Blue, Giant Steps, the classic quartet and its sonic cascades — is the product of these lessons, filtered through an imaginative, driven genius.