30/06/2024
"Once you become aware of this force for unity in life, you can't ever forget it. My goal in meditating on this through music is to uplift people, to inspire them to realize more of their capacities for living meaningful lives. Because there certainly is meaning to life."
- John Coltrane
John Coltrane started playing at a very young age and settled on the alto sax by high school. He studied at the Granoff Studios and at the Ornstein School of Music, both in Philadelphia, and continued to play alto during one year with a Navy band in Hawaii. By the time bluesman Eddie Vinson hired him (as a tenor player) in 1947, Coltrane had come under the influence of Charlie Parker. In 1948, just before joining Dizzy Gillespie, John played with the Jimmy Heath group. While Parker and Gillespie had first excited him with the idea of musical exploration, it was with Heath that the experimentation began to take shape.
In 1955 Trane joined Miles Davis for two years, leaving to work with Thelonius Monk. His association with Monk was most fruitful - "I learned from him in every way. Monk was one of the first to show me how to make two or three notes at one time on tenor." That was the beginning of the approach writer Ira Gitler was to call the "sheets of sound" and the point at which Coltrane first began to be misunderstood and abused by the critical establishment, which misunderstanding would, for the most part, continue until his death and even now persists.
In 1961 Trane formed what was to be one of the most astonishingly able quartets in jazz history with McCoy Tyner, piano. Jimmy Garrison, bass; and Elvin Jones, drums. This unit remained intact for about five years (recording the whole time for Impulse). Beginning with the firm establishment of the group, Coltrane's music began to develop far faster than a speeding bullet. He was more and more opening up the expressive possibilities of the horn and the whole group was breaking down the strict rhythmic forms of be-bop.
In the final stage's of his evolution Coltrane was ironically, characteristically learning from the men he'd originally inspired, in effect given birth to. A whole "new wave" of players, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, Joseph Jarman, and others washed onto the scene and Coltrane, always open. was moved to add more and different percussion and another horn player, a young man from Little Rock Arkansas named Pharoah Sanders.
Ann Arbor Sun, September 27, 1974
John Coltrane at his home in Queens, New York, 1963. An outtake from “Ballads John Coltrane Quartet” Photo by Jim Marshall
