John Coltrane at 100 with Simon Spillett

 © Introduction. Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected, all rights reserved.

"Hello Steve,

Hope all's well with you.

As it's John Coltrane's 100th anniversary I thought you might like to share this essay on Jazz Profiles. It was written for a UK-released boxed set 'Trane '90' (Acrobat Records) back in 2016. I think ten years on it still holds up. … There's absolutely no pressure on this. I just wanted it to go to a good home. 

With my best wishes as ever.

Simon"

This is a rather long piece which I am transitioning - mostly successfully - from a Word Document to a format that displays on my blogging platform. You will find some line breaks and paragraphing glitches, but in the main it is very readable which I hope does justice both to the topic and the author, Simon Spillett. 

By way of background, I once said of composer-arranger and saxophonist Bill Kirchner: “He is a Jazz writer who plays the soprano saxophone.” Bill wrote back at once and corrected me: “I am a musician who writes about Jazz.”

Assuredly, I won’t make that same mistake about Simon Spillett.

Simon Spillett is a Jazz tenor saxophonist who heads up his own UK based quartet and big band, as well as being an authority on the music of many of the great Jazz musicians from the second half of the 20th century, both in Great Britain and in the USA.

In addition to fronting his own quartet and big band, Simon has won several awards for his music, including the tenor saxophone category of the British Jazz Awards (2011), Jazz Journal magazine, Critic's Choice CD of the Year (2009) and Rising Star in the BBC Jazz Awards (2007).

He is the author of The Long Shadow of the Little Giant: The Life, Work and Legacy of Tubby Hayes which is in its second edition and Further Shadows: Essays on British Modern Jazz, 1950 - 1975.

You can locate a number of his pieces in my previously published anthologies on Jazz saxophone. Based in the UK, Simon uses English spelling.

© -  Simon Spillett, copyright protected, all rights reserved; used with the author’s permission.

“Gentleness in the heart of hardness:  John Coltrane - man, musician and myth”

No man in my experience is less like the impression he first creates than Coltrane.

Gene Lees, Jazz News, 1961

I heard hundreds of tenor players emulating him, copying him note for note. Sometimes I feel like saying, 'There is only one John Coltrane; you should listen and learn from him and otherwise let him be.'

Jimmy Guiffre, 1974

I don't think people are necessarily copying me. In any art, there may be certain things in the air at certain times.

John Coltrane, 1964

“Whether we come to him from the Serious or the Cool side [of jazz], there he is: monolithic, seemingly unmovable.” 

So wrote journalist John Truitt in an article on John Coltrane in Jazz Review in August 2003. The saxophonist also graced the magazine's cover: one of a series of iconic images taken by photographer Chuck Stewart in the early Sixties, clad in an open-necked white shirt and a chalk-striped, high-buttoned sports coat, his head turned to one side, his wide, luminous eyes and smile-less face peering off camera. 

If a picture truly can paint a thousand words, then that one shot tells us more about John Coltrane than any source other than his music itself. The Coltrane of folk-legend that is. That plain, almost solemn mien instantly conjures a sound within our ears – that of a performer dedicated to exploring music to the nth degree; of improvisational flights at once questing and intense; of an art form that is nothing less than deadly serious. 

Just as those photographs that capture Louis Armstrong's toothy laughter convey his joyful, irrepressible sound, or those of an Afro-haired Miles Davis encapsulate a certain time and place within the trumpeters path towards super-stardom, then Coltrane's images almost always provide the same, unfailingly stoic impression. Rarely do we see him crack his face. Indeed, Coltrane the man can frequently appear as immovably monolithic as his music.

While there is a certain comfortable inevitability in this – after all, with Coltrane's music, stylistic changes notwithstanding, we happily know what we're going to get, that is intensity, vision and unswerving commitment to annexing new ground – the notion of our understanding of him now being some sort of fait accompli is ultimately rather depressing. “There must be a hundred hours of Coltrane available on a variety of labels. Millions of words have been written about him and his music. And we've seen all the great photos of him,” wrote veteran record producer Joel Dorn when assembling an anthology of the saxophonists work in 1993. Although this observation has an inbuilt redundancy to it (Dorn's words were written prior to the rediscovery of tapes like the Monk/Coltrane Carnegie Hall concert, for instance, and of photos from the second recording date for A Love Supreme), it remains fundamentally true. We feel we know Coltrane; we know his records, his sound, his face, his compositions, his story, even when they're repackaged, as his records so often are, or recounted anew, as his life has been at least three times in biography form since the mid-1990s. 

We know the trajectory of his career: the apprenticeships with Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Bostic and Johnny Hodges; the breakthroughs that occurred during his stints with Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk; the formation of the “classic” quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones; the final “free” phase in which he moved wholeheartedly into the realms of pure sonic exploration. 

Sometimes, the records are remastered and sometimes the story is freshly-spun, as in the novel Jazz-meets-Marx pocketbook John Coltrane: jazz, racism and resistance (Redwords, London, 2001) or Paolo Parisi's delightful cartoon history Coltrane (Jonathan Cape, London, 2102).

Occasionally “new” snapshots surface too: Coltrane onstage: Coltrane backstage: Coltrane with other jazz legends: Coltrane relaxing: Coltrane in and out of focus. All the same, the story doesn't really change. How can it? Even the two existing film documentaries on his life and work  - The Coltrane Legacy and The World According To John Coltrane - somehow fail to reveal more than we already knew (another is in preparation at the time of writing.)

So now, in what would have been his ninetieth year had he lived, there exists a very real dilemma in assembling new compilations of already extant material, and in writing of his recorded legacy: what can these reappraisals add to our understanding of Coltrane, if anything? Is there any new way to view this most imposing of monoliths? What angles are there left to explore? Is there, in short, anything more anyone can add to – or find within - the subject of John William Coltrane?

There is in jazz criticism, as in all variants of journalism, a base tendency to simply repeat and amplify. Charlie Parker was, we're often reminded, a tragic visionary, God-gifted yet sabotaged by his own indulgence; Miles Davis was a style-setting master of musical reinvention, shedding phases of his career like snakeskin; Chet Baker a pretty boy talent gone bad, and so on. Unfortunately, death planted not only full-stops on the lives and careers of these men, it also cut short many writers opinions of what their music was all about. Since his passing in 1967, John Coltrane has been increasingly easy to parse: the spiritual aspects of his later music, publicly overt since A Love Supreme but present in actuality since much earlier, and his own declaration that he would like to be “a saint” effectively sealed the deal. Here was a God-head, a shaman, a prophet, an otherworldly being, beyond genuine human comprehension. As James Lincoln Collier observed in The Making of Jazz (Granada Publishing, London, 1978), during the later part of Coltrane's life there was a marked tendency to put him well above the level of a mere jazz icon. “[One writer] placed him in a pantheon along with Muhammed and Jesus”, wrote a disturbed Collier, who saw no evidence for Coltrane being anything superior than  “an ordinary mortal human being...a decent, perplexed man struggling with demons he never quite defeated.” (Collier's chapter on Coltrane – subtitled A Jazz Messiah -  at times appears to infer that, by the end of his life, the saxophonist was suffering from a delusional mental illness).

At the time Collier wrote those words – the 1970s – demons were entities rarely associated with Coltrane's name. Quite the opposite. In 1971, one Franzo King and his wife Marina established The Church of Saint John Coltrane Will-I-Am in San Francisco, following “conversion” while witnessing a performance by Coltrane's quartet in the mid-1960s. Although the church remained tiny (and was, significantly, not endorsed by the saxophonist's family) it showed the level to which fan-worship had ascended: jazz obsession had come a very long way from scribbling 'Bird Lives' in a New York subway.

If King's reaction was a case of musical adoration in extremis, other far more prosaic observers of Coltrane's progress were impressed enough by what might be termed the saxophonist’s “aura” to abandon their usual, critic-speak reactions for something equally out of the ordinary. For instance, a sober reviewer like Charles Hanna of the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune – hardly DownBeat - felt no qualms in comparing Coltrane to James Joyce. Others delved freely into the esoteric: when reviewing the album Coltrane Live at Birdland in the British magazine Crescendo in 1964 – and remember this was a trade publication aimed squarely at working musicians and not a hipsters guide to what was hot  – Tony Brown declared “the only way to listen to this is to throw off jazz preconceptions, to make a conscious effort not to assess and analyse; in fact, to let the sounds wash over one and do what they will. They may evoke thoughts, mental pictures and emotional states if you let them.”

Strong stuff, smacking more of Haight-Ashbury in '67 than Wardour Street the year after Profumo, and all the more remarkable for being sandwiched between Brown's plain, functional reviews of Nelson Riddle's soundtrack to What A Way To Go and Ron Goodwin's score for the film 633 Squadron. 

That Coltrane's music could have a transformational, even transcendent effect on its listeners is not in doubt, nor is there any real argument that its spellbinding qualities lured many who heard it, even in the most secular of places, into both quasi- and directly-religious analogies. One of the earliest biographies, Chasin' The Trane by J .C. Thomas (Doubleday, New York, 1975) is subtitled The Music and Mystique of John Coltrane and through wide-ranging personal testimony successfully marries these two facets into a convincing narrative. More recent efforts, notably Ben Ratliff's Coltrane: The Story of A Sound (Faber and Faber, New York, 2011) and Ashley Kahn's A Love Supreme: The Creation of John Coltrane's Classic Album (Viking Penguin, New York, 2002) have concentrated more on the nuts and bolts of the saxophonist’s music, with Ratliff in particular trying to make tangible sense of the motivations that lay behind the still perplexing post-Ascension phase of Coltrane's music, a period for far too long clouded by pseudo-religious rhetoric and blatant avoidance of technical analysis. 

In Kahn's book, rather unsurprisingly it is those who witnessed Coltrane's final moves in person who come out with the most provocative reflections. Saxophonist Dave Liebman, a musician whose career has been divided equally between jazz performance and jazz education concedes “that last stage of Coltrane was an enigma to everybody, including musicians,” almost as if this was a musical journey which had become so personal, so intrinsic to Coltrane's beliefs that there was no point in attempting to rationalise it through normal methods (Ravi Shankar, who Coltrane had long idolised, remembers his one and only encounter with the tenorist's band, late in 1965, as having a similar impact “[giving] me a negative feeling at times, but I could not quite put my finger on the trouble.”) 

Another saxophonist, Frank Lowe, a musician who had benefitted directly from Coltrane's largesse towards the younger members of New York's avant-garde scene in his final years, and who, on the face of it, launched his own career carrying on where Coltrane's left off (in the late 1960s he was working with Alice Coltrane's band including three members of the final regular John Coltrane line-up), is also notably pragmatic. Talking of the almost overblown reverence in which the recording A Love Supreme is now held, he observes “I saw people taking to it like it was a shrine, and sometimes I can't take it. It was like the album was losing some of its other essences, like it's just music for you to enjoy, too.”

Enjoy might seem a word rather out of place in appreciating Coltrane's music. More often than not, as Lowe noted, Coltrane's output is regarded as music to be worshipped, revered, held up as a definition of how a jazz musician should continually challenge himself and the audience, used as an allegory explaining the entire transient re-inventive nature of the art form, and to some, of life's journey itself. At times, separating Coltrane's music from the these ideals other find within it is difficult – as indeed it is trying to extricate Coltrane the man from Coltrane the great thinker, the guru, the spiritual guide. But it can be done. For example, as well as being venerated for its extra-musical qualities his work has – somewhat ironically given how autodidactic and personal its nature – become the very bedrock of jazz academia, with Coltrane lionized as jazz's greatest ever super-student. Coltrane compositions like Giant Steps and Countdown have become test-pieces for those on jazz courses the world over, to the disgust of some (trombonist Bob Brookmeyer once huffed “it's II-V-I [chords]. It turned me off right away. I never learned it. I never played it. I never will.”) while the general tenor of Coltrane's approach to his trade – that jazz should be treated as a perfectible craft, requiring a musician to practice the most difficult of things until he or she has them fully understood – is perhaps the most significant contribution made by any major jazz name in raising the bar of expectation for subsequent generations of improvising musicians. Several of his compositions from the late 1950s Giant Steps-era are centred on solving particular harmonic riddles that fascinated him, an academic approach if ever there was one, creating what was in essence a “system” of jazz – i.e. something that can be learned by others.

In that sense, even now, posthumously, Coltrane continues to teach lessons that remain eternally valid. But, even here, he's a mighty tough act to follow. Indeed, his ability to apply himself so rigorously to the task of learning can seem as much daunting as inspiring: Coltrane can appear almost superhuman in his single-mindedness and capacity to process information, adding yet another layer to his “mystical” aura.

Of course, there is a robust and highly pertinent argument that, as the overall single guiding rationale of his career was self-development, Coltrane himself might have baulked at the idea of being such a pervasive influence. “I don't set standards of perfection for everyone else,” he once told writer Nat Hentoff.  The Scottish tenor saxophonist Bobby Wellins – a player about as far removed from Coltrane as one could imagine, both geographically and stylistically – once remembered “an article in which somebody who played with Coltrane was talking about these young guys coming up who were out-Coltraneing Coltrane? Apparently, Coltrane was very sad, not at being out-Coltraned but because, as he said, 'Have these people got no minds of their own?” And I think that's very significant.” 

Perhaps we can never truly understand what caused Coltrane to drive himself so hard. Some have suggested obsessiveness - possibly even a case of O.C.D. - where practising was concerned. The stories of his falling asleep with his tenor in his mouth are well known, as are those of him visiting relatives and then excusing himself to go and practice elsewhere in their homes. Selfishness? A form of musical narcissism or mere dedication? For some the end result was the same, regardless: Benny Green called Coltrane's epic-onstage cadenzas “remarkable example[s] of the tail wagging the dog”, music made by “a man transported by self-absorption into a room on his own, where he can blow his instrument and finger runs and arpeggios for the sheer pleasure of it.” Those close to the saxophonist, such as Wayne Shorter, believe something else - that such excess was a mask for his awareness of a foreshortened life; “He had to make people think he was obsessive...he was working, purifying himself.”

Whatever its motivation, Coltrane's enormous technical ability was a natural magnet for admirers, converts and disciples, as well as detractors – and continues to be. It was small wonder: just as he himself had been drawn to icons like Lester Young and Charlie Parker as a young man, then still younger players were drawn to him. From the late 1950s to the end of Coltrane's life, he affected the musical aspirations of legions of tenor saxophonists, both at home in the USA and abroad. In England - Alan Skidmore, Evan Parker, Paul Dunmall: in New Zealand - Brian Smith: in Argentina - Gato Barbieri: in Germany - Peter Brotzmann and Gerd Dudek: in Norway - Jan Garbarek.

Even those who were older than Coltrane or who had already established prominent musical careers and their own distinctive musical voices came to admire him. The master of all tenor saxophonists – indeed, the father of the instrument as a viable jazz voice – Coleman Hawkins once famously queried a saxophone mouthpiece manufacturer with the words “what is John doing and what [mouthpiece] is he doing it with?” Ben Webster was also a fan (a candid photograph of the two men embracing exists). Dexter Gordon, one of Coltrane's own heroes, freely borrowed back from his successor. Stan Getz – possessor of a sound Coltrane admired deeply -  remarked in DownBeat “that Coltrane, he's a wonderful player.” Sonny Rollins too was immensely moved by Coltrane, although his relationship with his opposite number was a little more multi-layered, at one point passing through a period of critic-induced rivalry (Martin Williams' essay Sonny Rollins: Maturity and Form in the Bop Idiom [sic.] published in 1959, the year of Rollins' retreat from performing and recording, actually concludes with statement “the insider, the 'hippy' of modern jazz, has all but abandoned Rollins now. The 'hippy' has turned to John Coltrane.”)

But just as Coltrane had the capacity to inspire and ignite, his musical strength and stamina could derail others: witness the progress of Harold Land, Don Rendell and Bill Perkins after they focused in on Coltrane. Look too at Art Pepper, whose naturally elegant, blue and bittersweet playing could be transformed into self-indulgent, grotesquely ineloquent and self-conscious distortion when under Coltrane's spell.

It was easy to understand the pull though: in pushing himself to the limit, both technically and emotionally, Coltrane was showing what was possible in others. In essence, this made him both the uber-student of jazz and the uber-teacher, a position from which it appears ultimately impossible to remove him. But there was something else too. Another tenorist Jack Montrose, a West-Coast veteran whose music during the 1950s was polite to the point of near-kitsch, went though a phase in which Coltrane dominated his thinking, before conceding that it wasn't mere technicalities that made him special. “John had a sound without historical evolution – totally unique, and it went with what he played. The ideas couldn't be produced with any other sound, which is true of every great player.” (In 1961, Joe Goldberg said more or less the same: “If you try to imagine a Coltrane line played by Coleman Hawkins or Lester Young, you will realize that his unique tone is as perfectly functional a vehicle for his ideas as anyone ever had.”)

Nor could this gravitas be reproduced by emulating the most obvious of accompanying gestures, as Junior Cook, long-term tenor with Horace Silver and a close friend of Coltrane's, remembered: “Another thing [other players] misinterpret is Trane's long solos. He was capable of playing that long, he had so many different things to say, but for most people it would be to their advantage not to stay out there that long. You've seen them, the bobbing weaving moves. The choreography's great – but how about the notes?” The conclusion of men like Montrose and Cook was - Coltrane's way was his, not truly theirs, or, as Frank Lowe put it, after years of studying his approach, “Coltrane is a lock. Like you can't get out of it.”

Debate about the merits and demerits of Coltrane's music ranged far wider than among other saxophonists, of course, especially as he began to gain ground in the early 1960s. Sometimes he was dealt with tangentially; in the sleeve notes to a Ben Webster album issued in 1960, veteran scribe Leonard Feather took a side swipe: “I made a note to send a copy [of this album], as soon as it's released, to a young tenor player I heard at Birdland the other evening. He was making up to 32 notes per measure with a stovepipe tone, absolutely no relationship to the harmonic structure of the piece on which he blew, and a complete rejection of emotion coupled with an evident desire to implant out and out ugliness as the mood of the moment. He is the idol of many jazz fans and has been praised by supposedly reputable critics. If he were willing to learn, he could gain more out of a study of eight measures of Ben…than I gained from eight minutes of his tortured mind at work.”

For his part, Buddy Rich ridiculed Coltrane outright in DownBeat's Blindfold Test, dismissing one of his soprano solos with the put-down “I imagine they had great difficulty keeping the snake in the basket”. Another Swing Era icon (and one of Coltrane's boyhood heroes) Artie Shaw was more contemplative, praising Coltrane's bravery in addressing the pressure of on-stage invention, even if his efforts fell flat: “I hesitate to use the word 'genius' but I would certainly call John Coltrane a great craftsman and a highly specialised person. As an artist, Coltrane was creating in public and was not expecting to create a classic each time he picked up his horn.” 

Even among the avant-garde, there was occasional bitchiness and jealousy. Sun Ra, the futuristic, space-obsessed bandleader in whom Coltrane had taken a great interest, and whose unit often worked in an almost covert, subterranean manner, openly accused the saxophonist of stealing his ideas. “He never gave me a cup of coffee,” Ra complained. 

Those operating at the other end of “modern” jazz were sneering too, such as Andre Previn, whose rigorous classical training had perfectly equipped him to comprehend Coltrane's interest in modes and atonality. Reacting to the recording Dahomey Dance, he spat vitriol at its “ugly sound [and] what they call superimposed changes, which, in plain English means wrong,” tagging Coltrane as “just this side of unbearable.”

If Coltrane's lengthy, exploratory solos can be said to have permanently unhinged one of jazz's most controversial Pandora's Boxes for other performers, for non-musician listeners, his explosive, emotive, engorged, direct and unbridled playing created almost as many emotional responses as were humanly possible. Some danced to it, as did a man in a loin cloth who jumped on-stage at The Jazz Gallery in New York during one of Coltrane's first engagements with his own band in 1960, chanting the saxophonist’s name over and over.  “The audience reaction was like a revival meeting,” remembered the groups then pianist Steve Kuhn. Others, like the aforementioned Franzo King were altered spiritually by hearing Coltrane in-person. British saxophonist Tubby Hayes – who had initially reacted sceptically to Coltrane's early 1960s innovations – wrote of seeing crowds of young students with the word 'Coltrane' sewn into their sweaters at a Birdland gig in 1964 “shouting out encouragement.”

Some, however wanted simply to shout him down, like DownBeat's John Tynan who rallied against Coltrane's “anti-jazz” and “nihilistic” tendencies in print, acting stung as if the saxophonist had personally affronted his sensibilities. Coltrane's album reviews could cause splenetic disagreements and controversy too, even death threats: when Don Ellis dared to criticise what he saw as “filigree and decoration” at the core of  the 1965 album The John Coltrane Quartet Plays, he received an indignant, racist letter from another musician, Detroit trumpeter Charles Moore, that actually concluded with the words “you must die.” If Moore's threat were more symbolic than actual, it nevertheless showed the depth of belief– or rather, the level of ardent respect – Coltrane could count on from his followers. 

Records were one thing: for some forced to hear Coltrane live through mere circumstance, the experience was close to torturous. Recording the saxophonist at New York's Village Vanguard in 1961, legendary engineer Rudy Van Gelder recalled “one of the waitresses in the place holding her ears and saying 'I can't stand it any more.'”

Occasionally, Coltrane faced unmasked hostility from those who'd come to hear him, even those who'd booked him; there is an especially intriguing anecdote about a performance in a Newark nightclub, The Front Room, in late 1966 – deep in Coltrane's final, pure-sound stage - when the venues manager angrily told the saxophonist to return to playing recognisable material, only to terminate the engagement the following night. According to Leonard Feather, Coltrane's only defence was “we're not playing that kind of thing any more.”

He faced outrage abroad as well as at home. During his one and only visit to the United Kingdom in 1961, Coltrane played Glasgow, a Scottish city famed for its verbal candour, prompting one man attending his concert to “confront” him backstage. We know this because the same individual – one Wellington Holiday – wrote to Jazz Journal magazine the following year, evidently with some pride, to report on his conversation with Coltrane.

“[He] was rather taken aback finding me at his elbow,” Holiday remembered. He then tackled Coltrane on the subject of Elvin Jones (“the worst professional drummer I have ever heard in my life”), concluding by asking “if the set was going to continue in a similar manner [to which] Coltrane replied, 'Ah, don't know man.”

A less secure artist – or more pointedly a lesser man – might have reacted more demonstrably. This apparently was not Coltrane's way, either before and after his explicit religious reawakening in 1957. His close friend and fellow saxophonist Jimmy Heath remembers a night when “with Miles, a white fan came up to him and said 'I don't like that music you're playing. It sounds like nigger hate music.' John told me, 'Jim, I didn't know what to say. I was shocked and just walked away.' I know he was hurt. There was no hate in him.”

Unfortunately outright hate and fear – primitive instinctive reactions to anything that threatens human understanding and safety, albeit physical or psychological – were reactions Coltrane met often in print, sometimes at the hands of the most intelligent, most articulate, well-rounded writers. Take Philip Larkin's assessment of him, written for The Daily Telegraph in 1967 but rejected by the papers editor.

Larkin wanted to rail against:

“That reedy, catarrhal tone, sawing backwards and forwards for ten minutes between a couple of chords...that insolent egotism, leading to forty-five minute versions of My Favourite Things until, at any rate in Britain, the audience walked out, no doubt wondering why they had ever walked in; that latter day religiosity exemplified in turgid suites such as 'A Love Supreme' and 'Ascension' that set up pretension as a way of life; that wilful and hideous distortion of tone that offered squeals, squeaks, Bronx cheers and throttled slate-pencil noises for serious consideration – all this, and more, ensure that, for me at any rate, when Coltrane's records go back on the shelf they will stay there.”

Critique such as this, especially when taken in context (it was written soon after Coltrane's death) goes far beyond its author’s mere subjectivity and seeks, in no unguarded manner, to effectively destroy a musician's work, achievements and reputation. Larkin, as is well known, was a man of pungent views often unstintingly put and, again in context - 1967 was the apex of the avant-garde – one can sense how Coltrane's example represented a wider soiling of his expectations of jazz as an art form.

Larkin had a fellow sceptic in The New Yorker's Whitney Balliett who around the same time as The Daily Telegraph essay wrote how “born poets like Coltrane sometimes misjudge the size of their gifts, and in trying to further them, to ennoble them, they fall over into sentimentality or the maniacal. Coltrane did both, and it is ironic that these lapses, which were mistakenly considered to be musical reflections of our inchoate times, drew his heaviest acclaim.”

Derogatory press about Coltrane's accomplishments didn't end at his passing though. It had always been part and parcel of his musical progress since joining Miles Davis in 1955 (during the late 1950s/early 1960s he was variously described as sounding like “one big air-leak” and “an electric fan turned on and left on”) and had gained in frequency and volume as his musical canvass broadened. Continuing posthumously, critics were now able to score their bulls-eyes unimpeded by sentiment or the physical presence of their subject. With the fall-out from Coltrane’s early death still continuing to settle unevenly on jazz, forty years later no lesser writer than Clive James delivered a definitive harangue against his confused, truncated final phase; 

“There is not a phrase to be remembered except as a lesion to the inner ear, and the only purpose of the repetitions is to prove that what might have been charitably dismissed as an accident was actually meant. Shapelessness and incoherence are treated as equals. Above all, and beyond all, there is no end to it. There is no reason except imminent death for the cacophonous parade to stop. The impressiveness of the feat depends entirely on the air it conveys that the perpetrator has devoted his life to making this discovery: supreme mastery of technique has led him to this charmless demonstration of what he can do that nobody else can. The likelihood that nobody else would want to is not considered.”

“Charmless demonstration”; “a lesion to the inner ear”; “insolent egotism”: “pretension as a way of life”. These are not mere dismissals or a humble admittance that, whatever effect Coltrane may have had in his later years, one had to respect his musical pedigree – no, these sound-bites are more like barbs to the skin of Coltrane's legacy, as if both Larkin and James were attempting to alert listeners they thought gullible and market-led to the fact that, yes, the emperor really had gone out stark naked.

What is even more regrettable is that neither of these appraisals appears to display any genuine knowledge of – or indeed, research into – Coltrane's motivations. To onlookers like Larkin and James, surface was all. 

One could convincingly argue that a musician should allow his or her music to speak solely for itself, and that knowing either its cultural, historic or personal background is actually external to any appreciation of that music on its own merit. This argument falls down flat however when confronted with another base-level human quality equally as powerful as the hostility and aggression shown by Larkin and James – curiosity. 

The word itself has an especial resonance in Coltrane's case: those who knew him recorded his nature as pathologically needy where intellectual stimulation was concerned. He read widely on various subjects including philosophy, astrology, numerology, mathematics and religion; he possessed a telescope and was interested in space; the Theory of Relativity, and Einstein in particular, were regular talking points. All this accompanied - and at times overlapped with -  his musical curiosity so that the titles of his compositions would periodically betray his reading matter or current non-musical interests: Fifth House for astrology: The Red Planet and the album Interstellar Space for astronomy: entire suites for his spiritual preoccupations, even a theme inspired by an exotic living room rug, Living Space. Alice Coltrane also remembers her husband formulating compositions around the dimensions of buildings. The couples son, Ravi, has discovered that certain cellular motifs in Coltrane's later music are configured in a way that shows an awareness of The Golden Mean, a Greek philosophical construct that is said to be able to define the proportions of beauty itself. If correct, this suggestion could validate one of Coltrane's harshest critiques, that made by Melody Maker's Bob Dawbarn, who in 1961 suggested that the saxophonists music “belonged to the realms of higher mathematics.” 

Curiosity about Coltrane himself was present the moment Miles Davis picked him for his quintet in autumn 1955, the final step taken on the long escalator ride to top-floor jazz visibility. Much of it was piqued by the contradictions he represented. Reading any of the biographies of Coltrane one encounters time and again a conundrum commented on by all manner of people who knew him - family, fellow musicians, fans, deejays, record label bosses, journalists - that of how music so overtly passion-driven, outwardly belligerent and at times shreikingly intense could come from one so fundamentally shy, quiet and passive. Indeed, the common thread in J. C. Thomas's Chasin' The Trane is exactly this. In summary: most writers wanted to know who was Coltrane, who was he really, and how did someone like him come to the musical conclusions he did? The latter is a question we can largely answer in definable, technical terms, clearly and without any ephemera, certainly when addressing Coltrane the craftsman between, say, 1957 and 1963. 

How Coltrane the humble man got to be Coltrane the awesome, enigmatic deity in the years beyond that is another matter altogether.

The easiest route to these answers would appear to be obvious: read or listen to Coltrane's interviews. He gave many over his career, especially from 1960 onwards, often in well-circulated journals like DownBeat, sometimes in more mainstream newspapers, both at home and abroad.(Significantly, he was often afforded more column inches in overseas publications.) Like his music, quotes taken from these interviews have come to define him and his place in jazz history: think of his well-known thoughts on Thelonious Monk, on Miles Davis, on Elvin Jones, on Rashied Ali and a terse, usually single-sentence statement comes to mind: slabs of speech rather than sheets of sound.

The irony here, of course, is that in this mismatch of musical prolixity and verbal economy Coltrane the man was once again so unlike Coltrane the musician (I know of only one spoken introduction on a live Coltrane recording, and that is an apology for a miscued start.) The fact remains that Coltrane was not always a good interview subject. Early on this may have been attributable to his general shyness. It could also be reasoned that having taken so long to reach the front rank of the music, and having seen how his two main employers – Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk – dealt with the press - one taciturn, the other pointedly outspoken - he simply realised that interviews didn't really amount to much whatever way you took them. Once in a while, though, a writer could prize him open. 

Canadian Gene Lees, one of the most perceptive and honest documenters of the 1960s American jazz scene, and one-time editor of DownBeat, was intrigued to find out more about Coltrane after a friend remarked “that knowing him was an enriching experience,” so much so that one evening in 1961 he invited to saxophonist to dine with him and his wife.

Lees had initially thought the tenorist “a musical fraud” and “dangerous” yet that night spent in his company away from the bandstand (they listened to Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra and discussed drug addiction among other things) resulted in a sea-change, with the journalist turning the experience into the article Coltrane – Man and Music for the English magazine Jazz News. This piece is one of the best portraits of Coltrane ever assembled and is mandatory reading for anyone wishing to pierce the veil of his character. After a careful and sensitive exploration of the dichotomy of such outré music emanating from one so withdrawn, Lees couldn't help but fall into the trap of romanticised imagery: “For myself, when I see him on a bandstand, those powerful biceps and the big chest making his suit seem not quite large enough, and those dark shirts he wears making him look like a working man ill-at-ease in his Sunday best, I know now what to listen for: the gentleness in the heart of the hardness.”

Other, perhaps less patient writers, were looking not for generalities: they wanted facts. What was Coltrane doing? How was he constructing his music in appreciable, acknowledged musical language? In short what were his methods? How did he come up with his approach to improvisation: what was his thinking behind his compositions, the place of his music within the jazz tradition, his latest recording, his choice of sidemen? After Coltrane's death, Nat Hentoff would remember the frustrating routine of calling him to get background information for sleeve notes on his new LP. Coltrane was always reluctant to talk music, ceding only when Hentoff – one of his most vocal supporters – insisted “But John, I have the gig.”

Sometimes, he simply had to speak up. In spring 1962, Coltrane and Eric Dolphy were asked by DownBeat to, in effect, answer the “anti-jazz” charges made against them the previous year by the same magazines John Tynan.

The resulting article – plainly titled John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy Answer The Jazz Critics, should anyone mistake its intent – made fascinating reading, serving almost as a blueprint for future Coltrane interviews. In it he talks in terms that are more holistic than technically explicative, stating that “the main thing a musician would like to do is give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows of and senses in the universe. That's what music is to me - it's just another of saying this is a big, beautiful universe we live in, that's been given to us...” Clearly his thinking was moving beyond the mere mechanics of music. The inference was clear: if you're talking about something as broad as the universe, things like explanations of specific methods are redundant, right?

Later on in his career, it appears that Coltrane fell almost totally for the convenience of “letting the music speak for itself.” There are examples too of unwillingness to talk turning to mistrust; for all his magnanimity, he could, when the mood took him, even ignore those seeking to further understand his music. DownBeat's Don Michael got cold-shouldered by him for a several weeks during the early 1960s, being told by Elvin Jones that Coltrane “feels he can't talk to you because you're with DownBeat. Even though he likes you personally, he's decided that jazz criticism is all wrong and since you're a critic he just can't talk to you anymore.” (Coltrane later wrote to DeMichael to apologise). 

Sometimes, he let his weariness of the expectations of the artist/press relationship show through; in August 1962, the John Coltrane Quartet were booked to appear at Leo's Casino in Cleveland, Ohio. The DownBeat correspondent for Cleveland, Doug Ramsey asked the saxophonist for an interview to discuss the gig but he demurred. Was Coltrane finally bored of questions, Ramsey wondered. “Why? Shouldn't I be? I can't explain anything; it's all in the music. Come to the club and hear the music.”

Fittingly, this is a statement that could almost be a word-for-word response from Miles Davis or Thelonious Monk. In fact, “Come to the club and hear the music” could serve as an encapsulation of Coltrane's ideals: the word 'club' not used in its literal sense but serving as a generalised area of art (jazz) with 'music' meaning style, personal development, emotional content. In other words – listen, you tell me how you feel, rather than me tell you what to expect.

Inclusiveness rather than cliquishness was very important to Coltrane, not only in music but in spiritual terms too. British saxophonist Evan Parker notes that “he was...interested in a kind of world ecumenical version of religion. So there was a kind of universality about his approach which touched a lot of people.” Not for nothing was one of his later compositions titled Welcome.

While this vision chimes in perfectly with the general, mid-1960s, Age-of-Aquarius onwards trend towards a more sweeping view of spirituality, community and purpose (Coltrane's A Love Supreme had as much a cult-following in the hippy communes of California as it did in the reactionary black neighbourhoods back east), it eventually began to cloud his later interviews. Most famously, in Japan in 1966 Coltrane was asked what he'd like to be ten years hence. He replied “a saint.” Ten years earlier, he might have said “a better saxophone player” or some such practical ideal. Another late Coltrane interview, with left-winger Frank Kofsky, ranges freely on subjects from civil rights and hearing Malcolm X to the musics of other non-American cultures. Undoubtedly, as illuminating as these conversations are (Coltrane and Malcolm X in the same building is not to be taken lightly), these are plainly not the places to get specifics on Coltrane's art. He'd now abandoned that sort of expose, just as he'd left behind the kind of repertoire that the Newark nightclub manager had wanted. 

That said, even in earlier interviews, such as the candid and charming conversation with August Blume taped in 1958, Coltrane fitfully comes across as equally fascinated by non-specific musical goals: yes, he talks chords but he also talks about “truths” in music. “To play truths, you've got to live as much truth as you can,” he tells Blume. This choice of word appears prophetic, almost as if he'd had an insight into the hippy vibe of following decade. Indeed, eight years later, he was still expanding this philosophy, telling Nat Hentoff “there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we've discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more and more clearly what we are.”

By this point Coltrane's words were doubtless more resonant to the listener in search of spiritual enlightenment (the above quote comes from the broiling, intensely complex 1966 album Meditations) than a fellow performer looking for a route into his music, although in essence the message was the same: keep going, keep striving, keep looking.

So, with Coltrane by the end of his career tending to offer the cryptic and, it has to acknowledged, the sometimes unhelpful in the way of answers to those who interviewed him, it was perhaps no surprise that some who revered his music now began to elevate him further still. After all, a man whose statements are more concerned with generalities than specifics is all the more open to interpretation than one who is stridently dogmatic. “John didn't talk much,” observed writer Joe Goldberg, who met him in the early 1960s,  “but everyone thought they knew what he meant.” In effect, his fans could “read into” such him, they could become followers, disciples, making him into whatever they perceive him as or, crucially, need him to be. 

The “canonization” of Coltrane - as well as the occasional sycophantic absurdity that accompanied it – is well documented in Ben Ratliff and Ashley Kahn's biographies, both of which attest that Coltrane the man and jazz saxophonist by 1965 onwards was in danger of being obscured by Coltrane the leader, the beacon for civil rights, the auteur building a multi-ability, all-inclusive musical utopia (his long term friend Jimmy Heath called Coltrane's later units, usually aided and abetted with troupes of percussionists of varied skill levels, “anti-poverty bands”).

For an insight into Coltrane the man rather than Coltrane the assumed visionary we have to go back a little further in time, to the juncture at which admiration had yet to turn to obeisance and where there was still room for the secular as well as the sacred.

In 2006, the French publishers Buchet Chastel compiled the book Three Wishes, a collection of photographs and musicians' wish lists from the archive of Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, the philanthropic English aristocrat who had acted as patron, confidant and, at times, nurse maid to many of New York's jazz community from the 1950s up to her death in 1988. 

Nica was most famously associated with Thelonious Monk, with whom she formed a lasting friendship built firmly upon both parties respect for the others eccentricities. During the late 1950s, Monk would take along his new tenor player to the baronesses apartment to rehearse, hang-out, talk life, relax. She was an inveterate snap-taker and Three Wishes includes wonderfully candid images of Monk and Coltrane in repose and performance. In one photo, Coltrane kneels down in the back ground playing his horn, while Monk lounges on a sofa surrounded by magazines including Playboy.

Nica didn't just catch her visitor’s images: she also caught their dreams. In what soon become a tradition, musicians who made their way up to her place were obliged to pen their three wishes in a  guest book. The main body of these wish lists was taken down between 1961 and 1966, with the aim to eventually produce a book, which Nica herself was destined to never complete. John Coltrane was one of around 300 musicians to be asked his wishes: in a little over forty words, they enable us to see a side of Coltrane the man that never peaked through in more formal and expansive interviews. His wishes read:

1. “To have an inexhaustible freshness in my music. I'm stale right now.”

2. “Immunity from sickness or ill-health.”

3. “Three times the sexual power I have now. And something else too: more natural love for people. You can add that to the other.”

Wish one is nothing new: Coltrane spoke openly many times about wanting to progress musically. The appended “fourth” wish of “more natural love” offers a pre-echo of way his thinking was headed post-A Love Supreme, while wish two - “immunity from sickness or ill-health” - can be interpreted in two ways: was he asking for the strength to carry his music onward, already, as friends like Wayne Shorter believe, that he knew he had short time left ahead: or was he looking toward the sainthood he revealed as an ambition in 1966?

By far the most intriguing – even startling -  of the three wishes is number 3 - “three times the sexual power”.

When first read, this is a statement so bald and out of keeping with the folk-image of John Coltrane as to be seriously discomforting. The very name John Coltrane has, for close to half a century, been more associated with piousness, discipline, abstinence from vices, deep, all-encompassing, God-fearing dedication than personal pleasure seeking. Indeed, as Gene Lees sketched him “[he] isn't an a 'character'; he isn't a spectacular oddball.” His off-stage habits were, as we know, from the late 1950s forward, remarkably clean for a jazz man of his generation and working environment: after 1957 he no longer took drugs (although there are unconfirmed tales of LSD trips taken during 1965, supposedly during a visit to then boho-central Seattle): he didn't drink: his language was moderate and not full of the expletive-driven put-downs of Miles Davis: he did smoke a little – cigarettes, cigars and eventually a pipe – but that, other than his sweet tooth, appears to be it as far as what might be termed recreational indulgences go. But sex? John Coltrane? Really?

It's tempting to dismiss Coltrane's wish as a put-on. We know that he had a quiet, sometimes stone-faced sense of humour, so was this simply his way of giving Nica a chuckle? However, there is an underlying earnestness, not to mention a choice of language that suggests otherwise. Sexual wishes are not alien in the contributions of other musicians in Three Wishes, although these tend to be expressed more indirectly, along with general desires for personal relationships and love, or as clear spoofs (Kenny Clarke's three wishes are all “Brigitte Bardot”). Coltrane's is the only entry to use the word “sexual” explicitly, making it stand out all the more. 

It's unnecessary, of course, to point to evidence that Coltrane had a sex life – sons Ravi, Oran and John Junior are proof enough – but one can't help wondering to what end Coltrane wished for “three times the sexual power” and why the number three? Although no specific date for Coltrane's wishes appears to be identifiable, if they were documented during the early 1960s, then he was at a turning point maritally, with his relationship with first wife Naima beginning to disintegrate. The marriage ended in 1963, by which point Coltrane had begun a new relationship with pianist Alice McLeod, who would become Mrs. Coltrane in 1965. 

Unlike his regular quartet drummer Elvin Jones, a man of enormous sexual charisma who, according to biographer J. C. Thomas would through playing alone could “[seduce] the girl sitting at a nearby table who'd quickly follow him out the door,” there appears to be no case for Coltrane using his fame, public prominence and on-the-road itinerary to influence the flow of his relationships. “When out of town, instead of chasing girls or warming barstools as other musicians are prone to do, [Coltrane] spends his off hours in his hotel room, practising,” reported Gene Lees in 1961. Intervals on gigs were usually spent in the same, focused manner, or, if not in playing in often alarmingly deep-end conversation on all manner of topics. Self-improvement rather than self-gratification was clearly an intoxicant for him.

Indeed, what there isn't on Coltrane, but which there is in veritable heaps around Chet Baker, Lee Morgan, Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz, Art Blakey, Miles Davis and others, is what might be labelled by the common press as “dirt”. No OD's: no crime: no vengeful girlfriends. Again, as Gene Lees noted, the moral clarity of Coltrane's character made him “difficult to portray” (best not to anticipate a Hollywood bio-pic.) It also made him near-on impossible to assail personally.  The only suggestion of anything which could be seen as a stain on his otherwise unimpeachable personal life (post-1957) is that made by J. C. Thomas in Chasin' The Trane, an allegation of an extra-marital affair which persisted off-and-on from 1960 until 1966. Thomas refuses to name the woman involved, dubbing her simply Trane's Lady, and to this writers knowledge neither the Coltrane family nor any other biographer has ever commented on who she was/is, or indeed on whether she was/is telling the truth about her “relationship” with the saxophonist. Thomas does, however, reproduce excerpts from her diary, one of which alludes to a physical encounter. The details need not detain us here – nor are they to dwelt on out of respect for the living members of the Coltrane family – but significantly Coltrane is described as possessing “ways of extreme tenderness.”

Three scribbled wishes and one, perhaps not entirely accurate, recollection from an anonymous source might not seem a lot to go on in furthering our understanding of Coltrane's character but these brief vignettes do give us some insight into facets that carried over between man and musician. His “extreme tenderness” was hardly oblique: turn to his 1962 Ballads album, one of the greatest recitals of American popular song ever committed to tape, to witness it in excelsis. Some critics treated Ballads as the shedding of a veil, as if Coltrane had always kept his lyricism well-hidden: hearing earlier recordings like Soultrane (1956), Monk's Mood (1957) and Naima (1959) one finds it was there all along, hiding in plain view. 

Those in the know saw this as Coltrane's greatest musical asset, underpinning all he did top to bottom. “The most lyrical player in jazz,” Ornette Coleman once remarked of Coltrane, a compliment made all the more valid by Coleman's capacity to recognise melodic beauty in non-standard forms. (More perceptive critics recognised Coltrane's lyricism too: Joe Goldberg, writing in the notes to the Prestige album Lush Life, thought it was a product of the saxophonist’s on-the-road, dues-paying, dance band gigs twenty years earlier.)

Yet, one wonders how much the rawly driven, relentless Coltrane spilled over from stage to his private life. Other questions are prompted: is the old chestnut that a musician makes love like he plays a false trail? Along with “extreme tenderness” did the wild, colt-like energy of Chasin' The Trane pass over? Or the raw mood-over-technical considerations of later albums like Sun Ship and Om? After all, this is all music from the same man, hard as it may be for the casual listeners to make the connection. And did Coltrane's passionate playing ever cause him to face a similar the line of curious inquisition as that which, according to J. C. Thomas, Elvin Jones experienced time and again during his time with the saxophonist’s quartet: “Elvin, can you fuck a woman like you've been fucking those drums all night?”

Jones, of course, was as close to Coltrane as it was possible to be (it was once estimated that he had played My Favourite Things with the saxophonist around 1500 times). “Things came together in a physical, intellectual, and emotional way that surpasses anything that ever happened to me,” the drummer remarked on his five year association with the John Coltrane Quartet. 

Like others, he soon saw in his leader all the otherworldly aspects that have since become common touchstones when discussing Coltrane. “If there's any such thing as perfect man, I think John Coltrane was one,” he once wrote. “And I think that kind of perfection has to come from a greater force than here on earth.” Comments like this pitch us right back into the world of the esoteric, of Coltrane saint and superhuman, the prophet, the lonely pioneer, the island, the monolith. A world away from a man wishing for more potency.

It would be folly to argue with the drummer’s assessment – he was there, most of us were not – but surely there has to be somewhere to now look to find, or at least renew, the connection to Coltrane the man, the sheer grafter, the craftsman, and to point up how his innovations didn't happen in isolation but in collaboration.

The trouble is retrospection invites not only revision but repetition: interviews with McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones since the 1960s have tended to go over old ground about their former leader – fascinating old ground but old ground nonetheless – sometimes through no fault of their own (some interviewers truly are in the wrong job). Ironically enough, some of the most revealing contemporary interviews and articles about Coltrane come from non-American publications, with the general consensus being that European jazz writers took a tad more trouble to unpick their subjects. During the 1960s, McCoy Tyner was twice interviewed by the English music weekly Melody Maker: in 1967 shortly after Coltrane's death and earlier in July 1964, around the time the Coltrane quartet was completing the album Crescent. Both pieces give little-quoted insights into Tyner's relationship with his boss, with the first also providing a glimpse of the pianist in familiar surroundings. Ray Coleman had buttonholed Tyner during an interval on a Coltrane gig at New York's Half Note, something of a spiritual home for the band, and found himself charmed by “one of jazz's most creative modern pianists.”

The key aspect of Coleman's interview is that, pre- the hype about “the classic quartet” and Coltrane's ascendancy to God-like status, he does what very few journalists ever do when talking about John Coltrane's band: he asked Tyner what he was putting in, rather than getting out of working with the saxophonist. “I think we inspire John. The overall sound we get is as a group,”  the pianist maintained. “Some people have suggested otherwise – that we are merely accompanists. That is just not true.”

“As musicians,”  Tyner concluded, “I really believe John needs us and we need him. All our ideas meet.”

Bearing in mind that these observations were made as Coltrane was about to write A Love Supreme, a suite thought to be so personal to him that even his record label credited the released version simply to John Coltrane rather than the quartet, they have huge significance. As Tyner rightly observed, Coltrane may have been the nominal leader, thus attracting the majority of press interest in the band, but it was as a unit that they facilitated both his and their own ideas. (Years later Tyner recalled the band as “like four pistons in an engine. We were all working to make the car go.”)

Three years later, in August 1967 - barely a month after Coltrane's passing - Melody Maker's Valerie Wilmer caught up with Tyner in New York, at the centre of a jazz scene still reeling: “It's impossible to walk a block or enter a club without running into an expression of disbelief, an indescribable sense of loss,” she began before asking the pianist to convey his feelings about losing the man he described as “an elder brother.”

“Let me sum up in this way: I think that if anyone wants to know how the three of us – Elvin, Jimmy and myself – felt about John, listen to the music and you can hear the love and respect we had for each other. The music can speak more than any of us. It's like somebody you love deeply – you can't describe it. Whatever there was to be said, John Coltrane said it.”

“The music can speak more than any of us.” Once more, we return to what appears to be a universal truth within Coltrane's art: that words fail to capture the emotion and meaning of his music. What they can capture, though, is historic context: indeed, ninety years after Coltrane's birth and nearly fifty since his death, certain observations about Coltrane's work and musical passage are now sacrosanct. We need no longer fear a Philip Larkin jumping out to convince us to the contrary. We've seen where jazz has gone since and therefore have no need to either promote Coltrane for for personal or political reasons, as did some of his most vocal endorsees in the 1960s, such as the poet Amiri Baraka. We can see clearly where he began and  just how far his musical development went.

For example, nobody can really argue against the truth that of all the major jazz innovators of the 20th century, none moved faster, or abandoned more of what they already did spectacularly well in order to pursue something new than John Coltrane. True, Miles Davis may have gone through more periods of redefinition, simply because he lived for longer, but Coltrane in his 40 years on earth, in a recorded career of around a dozen years moved like proverbial lightning. Yes, he was a slow starter (he joined Davis's quintet aged twenty-nine: Miles had joined Charlie Parker aged nineteen) but once at the front of the pack the velocity at which he developed remains virtually unrivalled in jazz. For instance, Charlie Parker's style was, to all intents and purposes set by 1945: of course it broadened and deepened over the remaining ten years of his life but it was at root basically identical to that on his earliest records. Now take Coltrane and go to, for instance, his solo on, say, John Paul Jones by the Paul Chambers quartet (March 1956) and sit it alongside -  to pick another random example -  Impressions (November 1961). To those in the know, there exists a connective thread, but to ears listening only superficially, separated by a mere five years these two improvisations could well be the work of two different men. As those who bought his “latest” album and then headed out to a club to hear him in person often found out, Coltrane's music frequently developed in a jet-stream. (“Trane ain't waiting,” the bassist Richard Davis once cautioned swing trumpeter Roy Eldridge when he complained Coltrane was getting too far out.)

Although there is little doubt that he himself saw his work as part of a continuum rather than a separate stream, you can also make a iron-clad case for John Coltrane being the last true jazz innovator, Think about it: post-1967 what “new” things came along that weren't fundamentally either an amplification of an existing concept (Keith Jarrett out of Bill Evans) or a semi-dilution of the idiom (jazz-rock, fusion)? If one is forced to accurately define the term “innovator” in a 20th century jazz context, the qualifications are likely to include the stipulation that their music be made acoustically, with already established instruments or instrumentations: Armstrong, Parker, Davis, Monk, Coltrane and Ornette Coleman are all in this club, as are Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Bill Evans, Sonny Rollins, Cecil Taylor, Coleman Hawkins, Bud Powell and Art Tatum. None however, pushed the music further along the track than Coltrane, who drove it so far that it ultimately began to fragment. 

That Coltrane reached the logical conclusion of many things within jazz is also a given; he played bebop harmony into an endgame; he took modal improvisation to the point where there was an inevitable spill into unfettered chromaticism; he even took the hackneyed format of 'horn and rhythm section' to the brink of implosion, like some astral body collapsing under the weight of its own brilliance. 

He also took the most elemental things in jazz, such as phrasing, tonality, rhythm and inflection and put them through a rigorous process that demanded total renegotiation. What was once done was now undone, utterly, irretrievably, permanently; where once there had been bar lines, there was eventually what Coltrane called “multi-directional rhythm”: where there had been the tempered scale, now there was simply sound. Where there had been ordered composition, there were collaborative improvised explorations. He even re-jigged the notion of influence: once upon a time other musicians had been his inspiration (Bird, Miles, Monk), but in the end Coltrane's art claimed such things as mathematics, numerology and the Theory of Relativity as its cues.  In sum, Coltrane examined and exhausted virtually every component part of the musical world in which he'd apprenticed and practised his craft. Even those diametrically opposed to his methods saw this clearly: Coltrane had given, in the words of Benny Green, “as graphic an illustration of jazz in the instant before dissolution as any I can remember hearing.”

“Where next?” created a whole new set of problems. There is deep irony in the fact that so much of what Coltrane inferred in this later work - the “freedom” of multi-ability, all-inclusive, music making, of modes, of pan-rhythmic approaches, of quasi-spiritual or indeed overtly religious musical homages - was taken up by lesser hands, fuelling the avant-garde free-for-alls of the late 1960s, as well as endless 1970s fusion jams on two-chords, jazz “concept” albums and “suites” of questionable length and harmonic content. 

In this sense, certain components of Coltrane's musical legacy do him a disservice. Nor can he truly be held accountable for some of the things that have happened directly in his name since his death – after all, just as some listeners don't “get” Coltrane, some musicians who claim him as an inspiration miss his message by a mile. (This is an ever present danger: think of all the flak the late Michael Brecker received for creating “clones” in the 1980s. At its worse, this obscured the fact that Brecker himself was one of the most creative and distinctive voices of his generation).

Perhaps the biggest incontestable fact we face with Coltrane is that, try as many might, nobody, but nobody, has ever played the tenor and soprano saxophone quite like him. Indeed, one could argue that he was, through sheer hard graft, musical vision and physical stamina the full-stop of jazz saxophone, planted firmly at the end of a sentence reading Sidney Bechet-Coleman Hawkins-Lester Young-Charlie Parker-Sonny Rollins-John Coltrane.

Just look at his disciples, slavish or otherwise, and the tangential off-shoots that come from his example: there are few saxophone players who can have claimed to have advanced the instrument (or their part of jazz) who have not in some way drawn on John Coltrane's innovations, from those who've explored its sonic capabilities (cued by Trane post-'65) like Evan Parker and Peter Brotzmann, to those who streamlined Coltrane's middle-period towards a codified language, such as Chris Potter, Bob Berg and Michael Brecker. He's even touched more popular saxophone voices: the late Grover Washington, Courtney Pine, even David Sanborn all come in some way from him (as unlikely as it seems, we also have to acknowledge that musicians of Kenny G.'s generation did not take up the soprano because of Sidney Bechet – Coltrane's in there too, albeit diluted to a trace element). 

And, whether they know it or not, the next generation of jazz saxophone players will be equally informed by his example, not just through academic study but through sheer implication. John Coltrane not only changed the attack, sound and speed expected of his instrument, he changed what  jazz musicians expect of themselves: by throwing down a trail of stylistic, technical and emotional gauntlets over his twelve-year recorded career, Coltrane was, in effect, saying “this can be done: try it.” And, as far as is humanly possible, people have. That they continue to do so some five decades after his death is a sure fire sign that Coltrane's general guiding spirit is, in the words of one reissued collection of his music, more lasting than bronze.

And so to the music. The majority of the recordings on this four-disc celebration of Coltrane in his 90th year are familiar to his fans and followers. As such, there can be no real revelations, save perhaps for the fact that coalesced as a representative body of work, it sounds no less impressive, no less passion-filled, no less 'modern' now in the early 21st century than when it was first issued fifty-plus years ago.: 

Allowing for the usual copyright considerations and public domain deadlines, it does not purport to present a comprehensive account of all his major musical shifts  - his later work, including A Love Supreme and the blindingly beautiful Interstellar Space sit outside its boundaries, as, alas, does the original studio recording of My Favourite Things, not issued in the UK until 1964 – yet in what it does capture, it affirms McCoy Tyner's declaration that Coltrane had indeed “said it all.” 

This really is music which really does require little additional commentary, except perhaps to explain its programming. Here, we can appreciate Coltrane's innovations in sequence, something he wasn't able to offer us during his own lifetime, when the machinations of the various record labels to whom he was signed meant that his records were often issued out of strict discographical order, buffering the “new” and “old” Coltrane's together.

The first three discs, assembled to showcase Coltrane as sideman, leader and collaborator respectively, take us through each facet chronologically, so that we witness his move from neophyte new star (1955-56) to major new voice (1957-58) and onto outright innovator (1959-beyond). Classic Coltrane performances with both his key employers Miles Davis (So What) and Thelonious Monk (Trinkle Tinkle) reveal just what he took from their musical challenges and vice versa. We can then see how he used these influences in other settings. We are also reminded of Coltrane's place in the greater jazz lineage: before joining Miles, he had worked with Dizzy Gillespie; after leaving Miles he would spend six months with Thelonious Monk, meaning that, Charlie Parker aside, he had served musical time with the three most significant innovators of Bebop's first and second waves. Small wonder he became a pace-setter himself given this apprenticeship.

The twelve tracks on which Coltrane collaborates with other leaders – Sonny Rollins, Tadd Dameron, George Russell, Art Blakey, Cecil Taylor and Milt Jackson among them – give a flavour of the intense mid-to-late-1950s period when he became everyone's favourite horn-for-hire. The breadth of this music – from Russell's grand, sophisticated reworking of Manhattan to a loose, blues jam with Hank Mobley, Al Cohn and Zoot Sims – gives ample evidence of how flexible and co-operative an individual stylist like Coltrane could be: indeed, far from being unmoved by the contexts in which he finds himself, he seems right at home, whoever the leader. These tracks reveal other things, including an example of Coltrane's sometimes cryptic sense of humour: Grand Central, with a tenor solo using an early example of the soon-to-be-infamous Giant Steps harmony, is a subtly disguised self-dedication – Grand Central=Railway Station=Train=Trane.

Coltrane's own work as a bandleader on record began three years prior to him “going live” with his own regular group. Disc Two sample sessions both pre- and post- this watershed, including performances from Coltrane's eponymous 1957 debut (a remarkable album in that it was recorded just days after he'd kicked heroin cold turkey), the classic Blue Note one-off Blue Train and the feel-good Soultrane album, one of a sequence of casual sets he taped for Prestige Records in the late 1950s.

As his ambitions and band leading requirements begin to crystallise, the music moves to take in excerpts from the manifesto statement Giant Steps LP upwards through the formation of the classic quartet with Tyner and Jones and finally onto his recording affiliation with the Impulse label, who documented the sprawling landmark Africa (his first experiment in large-scale ensembles) and Chasin' The Trane, a fifteen-minute blues improvisation that marked the golden moment when Coltrane's bar-walking, R&B past collided with his avant-garde present to suggest a path towards future innovations.

This disc also catches Coltrane's growth as both an instrumentalist – Blues For Bechet is an early soprano outing titled in honour of one of Trane's inspirations – and as a composer: his harmonic-movement-in-thirds fixation is explored exponentially through Straight Street and Moment's Notice (both 1957) upward to Giant Steps (1959).  

Here is a good place to note that even this development was not without precedence; many cite Art Tatum's version of Have You Met Miss Jones as the inspiration for Coltrane's great harmonic breakthrough on Giant Steps. Others find similarity within the pages of Nicolas Slonimsky's  Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns, a study book Coltrane paid close attention to. Another potential source has recently come to light, identified by British saxophonist and bandleader Pete Long: try to hear Billy May's 1941 composition Measure for Measure, penned for Glenn Miller. Nestled inside May's archetypal swing band scoring is a brief harmonic passage – fittingly played by the Miller's saxes – that works along similar harmonic lines to Giant Steps. Could Coltrane have heard this as a teenager? We'll never know for sure, although knowing of his capacity to store and synthesise musical information from all over the place, it must remain a possibility.

The fourth disc collects music that threads in between Coltrane's great studio and live albums; indeed some of it even pre-dates the era in which he came into his own. By the time he joined the Miles Davis Quintet in September 1955 (the band’s first gig in Baltimore took place five days after its new saxophonist celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday), Coltrane had already been a professional musician for over five years. The early, journeyman stage of his development is still somewhat clouded in mist, but his first two major jazz associations pre-Davis, with Dizzy Gillespie and ex-Ellington altoist Johnny Hodges, are immortalised on private tape and radio broadcasts. While neither example heard here could be said to truly represent an ascendant jazz giant, Birks' Works and Don't Blame Me both have their crystal ball moments. On the Gillespie theme, a minor blues, Coltrane briefly hints at exotic scales, a foretaste of a future preoccupation, while on Don't Blame Me, a feature number from a Hodges dance date held a year before Miles hired him, he confirms his place in the tenor saxophone time-line (the phoney applause appears to be overdubbed at a a later date): as much Dexter Gordon and Gene Ammons as there is in him here, there is equal part John Coltrane. Listen to those fleeting arabesques between his melody statements and the melancholy, singing tone. Familiar? To hear this side of Coltrane surface in true maturity, go forward to his Ballads album of 1962. Like all true jazz innovators, Coltrane may have abandoned the use of certain musical devices in his quest forward, but he never truly forgot them.

In many ways, this final disc is the most revealing of all those included in this set, not simply because it sketches in Coltrane's early steps, but because its final titles map the route towards further innovations that lay ahead. Live versions of two of Coltrane's touchstones – My Favourite Things and Impressions – both recorded in the breakthrough year of 1961 are especially telling. On the former, Coltrane filters lyricism through the newly opened modal route: on the latter, with his friend and fellow explorer Eric Dolphy present, he begins to loosen his musical tie, taking in the vocalisations, time-stretching and raw emotional candour of the then “new wave” of jazz.

Body and Soul, the final track, dates from a June 1962 broadcast at New York's Birdland, and appropriate to its title, is a performance showing how the body (technique) of Coltrane's music was now melding with its soul (emotion). Indeed, everything that Coltrane needed to press ahead toward his musical future is firmly in place on this intensely songful performance: the “classic” quartet is there, as is a ready ability to move from open, static vamps to dense harmonic movement (the Giant Steps-sequence during the middle-eight bars). The collective energy, too, suggests many things to come.

The future was a destination Coltrane only half-reached. Dead at the age of forty, he had, in the opinion of some literally played himself to a standstill. Close to the end, we known he was utterly exhausted.  “John wanted to rest,” McCoy Tyner revealed in 1967. “He had been going so strong for all these years and done a lot of travelling and I think he was just tired. He wanted a mental rest too, which is not so strange…sometimes I think that an artist, just like anybody else, needs a rest. A lot of people might consider it unusual because in this business we have to strive so hard in order to survive.” (There is a suggestion that had Coltrane gone on he would have wanted to operate along the lines of a classical recitalist rather than a jazz bandleader, with greater stipulations about how and where he worked).

There can be no argument that of those striving so hard within mid-twentieth century art, few strove harder than John Coltrane. He embraced the here and now in a way that redefined the “sound of surprise” nature of the jazz itself, and yet he saw himself and his music as part of the genres transitional, fluid, on-going lineage. And just as he renegotiated traditional cadences in musical harmony, he saw self-development as infinite. “There is never any end. There are always new sounds to imagine, new feelings to get at”, he said the year before his death, by which time he may well have foreseen the end of his physical being. “You just keep going. You keep trying to get right down to the crux.”

Had he lived, John Coltrane would now be ninety years of age. Would he still be performing, I wonder? Would the speed of his musical reinvention have continued  at its comet-like pace, slowed down, burned out or even atrophied? Would he have embraced the electronics and jazz-funk of the 1970s, or finally travelled to Africa as he so wished? Would he have remained a patron of the avant-garde or retreated, as some of his acolytes maintain he wanted to, back into the styles he'd explored earlier? How would he have weathered the fashions of fusion or the neo-conservatism of the post-Marsalis age? Would he have become as revered, sainted and separate as he now is had he lived? Would he have at last found “the something that hasn't ever played been played before” he so publicly sought.

These questions are unanswerable, of course: ultimately Coltrane is gone. His music cannot grow, it cannot, in the true sense, live on. It is now definable, codified, catalogued. It exists within boundaries both historic and stylistic. In sum, it “belongs” - in as much as art can belong to anything - to a specific time and place. It is, sadly but truthfully, something with a recognisable beginning, middle and end, not an infinite resource.

But the lessons Coltrane – man and musical benchmark – can continue to teach us are for the ages: humility, self-sacrifice, dedication, application, kindness, altruism, optimism and belief, both in self and in something external, higher, something - if you have faith - spiritual. Significantly, to some who knew Coltrane, his core message was not about God at all, but humanity: “Live cleanly. Do right...You can improve as a player by improving as a person,” he once told Nat Hentoff. 

If this all sounded a little too like evangelism at times, it nevertheless worked. Writing in the 1970s, Hentoff, who'd penned several sleeve notes for the saxophonist's albums, confessed “I am not religious in any traditional sense. My only faith is in what man can do. And it is only a very small number of men who can nurture that faith. John Coltrane was one of them. I remember hours in the dark of a night club during which I was, quite simply, listening with awe. Awe at how much that man kept finding to say and kept making me look for in myself.”

“If we must deny Coltrane his sainthood,” wrote James Lincoln Collier in The Making of Jazz, “we still must see him as a kinder and more honourable man than most.” Perhaps then, that is Coltrane's greatest gift: to inspire those who encounter his work to measure and improve themselves. It's a heady proposition: life-altering, non-verbal enlightenment from a preacher whose pulpit was more often than not “in the dark of a night club.” There is irony in that setting too. Some of Coltrane's most transcendent moments came on what was, for some who were in his audience, just a night out, a chance to talk, to seduce, to drink, to smoke, to have fun, to be entertained, to forget their own care for a while. “I heard John Coltrane in New York doing unbelievable things,” Ronnie Scott once remembered, “but nobody stopped drinking.” Jazz musicians had always faced this reality. Coltrane was no exception. He may well have agreed with fellow saxophonist Charles McPherson, who summed up the paradox of playing in clubs like this; “You're talking about God up there and they're [the audience] talking about 'Let's fuck...'”

Even in death though, the secular and spiritual can collide: in 1968, Coltrane was elected into Playboy magazines Jazz Hall of Fame, not perhaps the natural resting place for a musician whose existence had been so inextricably bound up with near-puritan-like levels of religiosity. Nat Hentoff's appreciation accompanying the induction ensured that bare facts juxtaposed naked flesh: “Coltrane's trademark was his unique sound, which bespoke a relentless search for perfection, yet was always, even in the most elevated realms of abstraction, compellingly passionate and alive.”

And so it has remained. For this writer Coltrane was – is – always will be - the greatest exemplar of the truth of jazz music. He never stood still, even when progress threatened every stability in his life, both professional and personal: he confronted every obstacle within the business of jazz with vision, courage and patience. He mastered, truly mastered, and in some ways, transcended his instrument. He made music himself and vice versa. In that sense, despite all the changes through which passed, he remained the same man. “Coltrane was always Coltrane,” his friend Sonny Rollins once said. “He was unique when I first heard him in the early 1950s...even in his later years, his music always was Coltrane.”

It strikes me then that Coltrane at ninety would not be so very different to Coltrane at thirty or forty: an inspiration, albeit older and wiser, a sage even, leading, as ever, by example. 

The last words here should be his. Interviewed by Val Wilmer in November 1961, he touched on the subject of age (he was then thirty-five), remarking “I know that I've got a long way to go. Maybe when I'm sixty I'll be satisfied with what I'm doing, but I don't know...I'm sure that later on my ideas will carry more conviction.”

Coltrane may never have reached sixty; the conviction of his ideas though, and the ideals he represented, travel on regardless.

Simon Spillett

August 2016

DISC ONE: Stablemates – Coltrane the sideman

1. Stablemates (Golson)

The Miles Davis Quintet

Miles Davis (trumpet); John Coltrane (tenor sax); Red Garland (piano); Paul Chambers (bass); Philly Joe Jones (drums)

November 16th 1955, Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, New Jersey

Take from: Prestige LP 7014 – Miles

2. Trane's Blues (Coltrane)

The Miles Davis Quintet

Personnel and location as track 1

May 5th 1956

Taken from: Prestige LP 7166 – Workin' with the Miles Davis Quintet

3. Dear Old Stockholm (Traditional)

The Miles Davis Quintet

Personnel as track 1

June 5th 1956, Columbia Studios, New York City

Taken from: Columbia CL949 – 'Round About Midnight

4. Well, You Needn't (Monk)

The Miles Davis Quintet

Personnel and location as track 1

October 26th 1956

Taken from: Prestige LP 7200 – Steamin' with the Miles Davis Quintet

5. Monk's Mood (Monk)

The Thelonious Monk Trio

Thelonious Monk (piano); John Coltrane (tenor sax); Wilbur Ware (bass)

April 16th 1957, Reeves Sound Studios, New York City

Taken from: Riverside RLP 12-235 – Thelonious Himself

6. Trinkle Tinkle (Monk)

The Thelonious Monk Quartet

Personnel and location as track 5 but add Shadow Wilson (drums)

Circa. July 1957

Taken from: Jazzland JLP46 – Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane

7. Straight, No Chaser (Monk)

The Miles Davis Sextet

Miles Davis (trumpet); Cannonball Adderley (alto sax); John Coltrane (tenor sax); Red Garland (piano); Paul Chambers (bass); Philly Joe Jones (drums)

February 4th 1958, Columbia Studios, New York City

Taken from: Columbia CL 1193  - Milestones

8. So What (Davis)

The Miles Davis Sextet

Personnel and location as track 7 but Bill Evans replaces Garland and Jimmy Cobb replaces Jones.

Taken from: Columbia CL 1335 - Kind of Blue

9. On Green Dolphin Street (Kaper, Washington)

The Miles Davis Quintet

Miles Davis (trumpet); John Coltrane (tenor sax); Wynton Kelly (piano); Paul Chambers (bass); Jimmy Cobb

March 22nd 1960. Konserthuset, Stockholm, Sweden

Taken from: Acrobat ACQCD 7076: The Miles Davis Quintet featuring John Coltrane: All of You – The Last Tour

DISC TWO: Straight Street – Coltrane the leader

1. Straight Street (Coltrane)

The John Coltrane Sextet

John Coltrane (tenor sax); Johnny Splawn (trumpet); Sahib Shihab (baritone sax); Mal Waldron (piano); Paul Chambers (bass); Albert 'Tootie' Heath (drums)

May 31st 1957, Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, New Jersey

Taken from: Prestige LP 7105 – Coltrane 

2. Moment's Notice (Coltrane)

The John Coltrane Sextet

John Coltrane (tenor sax); Lee Morgan (trumpet); Curtis Fuller (trombone); Kenny Drew (piano); Paul Chambers (bass); Philly Joe Jones (drums)

September 15th 1957, location as track 1

Taken from: Blue Note BLP 1577 – Blue Train

3. Good Bait (Dameron)

The John Coltrane Quartet

John Coltrane (tenor sax); Red Garland (piano); Paul Chambers (bass); Art Taylor (drums)

February 7th 1958, location as track 1

Taken from: Prestige LP 7142 – Soultrane

4. Giant Steps (Coltrane)

The John Coltrane Quartet

John Coltrane (tenor sax); Tommy Flanagan (piano); Paul Chambers (bass); Art Taylor (drums)

May 5th 1959, Atlantic Studios, New York City

Taken from: Atlantic SD 1311 – Giant Steps

5. Naima (Coltrane)

The John Coltrane Quartet

John Coltrane (tenor sax); Wynton Kelly (piano); Paul Chambers (bass); Jimmy Cobb (drums)

December 2nd 1959, location and issue as track 4

6. Blues to Bechet (Coltrane)

The John Coltrane Quartet

John Coltrane (soprano sax); McCoy Tyner (piano); Steve Davis (bass); Elvin Jones (drums)

October 24th 1960, location  as track 4

Taken from: Atlantic SD 1382 – Coltrane Plays The Blues

7. Africa (Coltrane)

The John Coltrane Quartet and Orchestra

John Coltrane (tenor sax); Booker Little (trumpet); Britt Woodman (trombone); Carl Bowman (euphonium); Julius Watkins, Donald Corrado, Robert Northern, Robert Swisshelm (french horns); Bill Barber (tuba); Eric Dolphy (flute, alto sax, bass clarinet): Pat Patrick (baritone sax); McCoy Tyner (piano); Reggie Workman, Art Davis (basses); Elvin Jones (drums)

June 7th 1961, Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey

Taken from: Impulse A(S)6 – Africa/Brass - John Coltrane Quartet

8. Chasin' The Trane (Coltrane)

The John Coltrane Trio

John Coltrane (tenor sax); Jimmy Garrison (bass); Elvin Jones (drums)

November 2nd 1961, The Village Vanguard, New York City

Taken from: Impulse A(S) 10 – Coltrane: Live at the Village Vanguard

DISC THREE: Just Friends – Coltrane Collaborations

1. Tenor Madness (Rollins)

Sonny Rollins Quartet with John Coltrane

Sonny Rollins (tenor sax); John Coltrane (tenor sax); Red Garland (piano); Paul Chambers (bass); Philly Joe Jones (drums)

May 24th 1956, Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, New Jersey

Taken from: Prestige LP 7047 – Sonny Rollins: Tenor Madness

2. Bob's Boys (Mobley)

The Prestige All-Stars

Al Cohn, John Coltrane, Hank Mobley, Zoot Sims (tenor saxes); Red Garland (piano); Paul Chambers (bass); Art Taylor (drums)

September 7th 1956, location as track 1

Taken from: Prestige LP 7074 – Tenor Conclave

3. Soultrane (Dameron)

The Tadd Dameron Quartet

Tadd Dameron (piano); John Coltrane (tenor sax); John Simmons (bass); Philly Joe Jones (drums)

November 30th 1956, location as track 1

Taken from: Prestige LP 7070 – Tadd Dameron with John Coltrane: Mating Call

4. Two Bass Hit (Gillespie, Lewis)

The Red Garland Quintet

Red Garland (piano); Donald Byrd (trumpet); John Coltrane (tenor sax); George Joyner (bass); Art Taylor (drums)

December 13th 1957. location as track 1

Taken from: Prestige LP 7209 – High Pressure: The Red Garland Quintet with John Coltrane

5. Pristine (Coltrane)

The Art Blakey Quintet

Art Blakey (drums); Donald Byrd (trumpet); John Coltrane (tenor sax); Walter Bishop Jr. (piano); Wendell Marshall (bass)

December 1957, unidentified studio, New York City

Taken from: Bethlehem BCP 6027 – Art Blakey: Big Band

6. West 42nd Street (Harden)

The Wilbur Harden Quintet

Wilbur Harden (flugelhorn); John Coltrane (tenor sax); Tommy Flanagan (bass); Doug Watkins (bass); Louis Hayes (drums)

March 13th 1958, location as track 1

Taken from: Savoy MG 12127 – Mainstream 1958

7. Manhattan (Rodgers, Hart)

George Russell and his Orchestra

George Russell (arranger and conductor); Art Farmer, Doc Severinson, Ernie Royal (trumpets); Bob Brookmeyer, Frank Rehak, Tom Mitchell (trrombones); Hal McKusick (alto sax); John Coltrane (tenor sax); Sol Schlinger (baritone sax); Bill Evans (piano); Milt Hinton (bass); Charlie Persip (drums)

September 12th 1958, unidentified studio, New York City

Taken from: Decca  DL 9216 - New York/N.Y. - George Russell

8. Just Friends (Klenner, Lewis)

The Cecil Taylor Quintet

Cecil Taylor (piano); Kenny Dorham (trumpet); John Coltrane (tenor sax); Chuck Israels (bass); Louis Hayes (drums)

October 13th 1958, Nola Studios, New York City

Taken from: United Artists UAL 4014 – Hard Driving Jazz: Cecil Taylor Quintet

9. Bags & Trane (Jackson)

Milt Jackson and John Coltrane

Milt Jackson (vibraphone); John  Coltrane (tenor sax); Hank Jones (piano); Paul Chambers (bass); Connie Kay (drums)

January 15th 1959, Atlantic Studios, New York City

Taken from: Atlantic SD 1368 - Bags & Trane: John Coltrane and Milt Jackson

10. Grand Central (Coltrane)

The Cannonball Adderley Quintet

Cannonball Adderley (alto sax); John Coltrane (tenor sax); Wynton Kelly (piano); Paul Chambers (bass); Jimmy Cobb (drums)

February 3rd 1959, Universal Studios, Chicago

Taken from: Mercury MG 20449 – Cannonball Adderley Quintet in Chicago

DISC FOUR: Impressions – Coltrane broadcasts and private tapes

1. Birks' Works (Gillespie)

The Dizzy Gillespie Septet

Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet); J. J. Johnson (trombone); John Coltrane (tenor sax); Milt Jackson (vibraphone); Billy Taylor (piano); Percy Heath (bass); Art Blakey (drums)

February 3rd 1951, Birdland, New York City

2. Don't Blame Me (Fields, McHugh)

Johnny Hodges and his Orchestra

Johnny Hodges (alto sax); Harold 'Shorty' Baker (trumpet); Lawrence Brown (trombone); John Coltrane (tenor sax); Call Cobbs (piano); John Williams (bass); Joe Marshall (drums)

Circa. June 1954, unidentified venue, Los Angeles

3. Max Is Making Wax (Pettiford)

The Miles Davis Quintet

Miles Davis (trumpet); John Coltrane (tenor sax); Red Garland (piano); Paul Chambers (bass); Philly Joe Jones (drums); Steve Allen (announcer)

October 18th 1955, 'The Tonight Show', Basin Street, New York City

4. Tune Up (Vinson)

The Miles Davis Quintet

Personnel as track 3

December 8th 1956, The Blue Note, Philadelphia

5. Bye Bye Blackbird (Dixon, Henderson)

The Miles Davis Quintet

Personnel as track 3 except Bill Evans replaces Garland

May 17th 1958, Cafe Bohemia, New York City

6. My Favourite Things (Rodgers, Hammerstein)

The John Coltrane Quintet

John Coltrane (soprano sax); McCoy Tyner (piano); Reggie Workman, Art Davis (basses); Elvin Jones (drums)

July 1st 1961, Newport Festival, Newport, Rhode Island

7. Impressions (Coltrane)

The John Coltrane Quintet

Personnel as track 6 but omit Davis and add Eric Dolphy (alto sax)

November 22nd 1961, Kulttuuritalo, Helsinki, Finland

8. Body and Soul (Green, Heyman, Sour)

The John Coltrane Quartet

Personnel as track 7 but omit Dolphy and replace Workman with Jimmy Garrison

June 2nd 1962, Birdland, New York City

Impressions: Coltrane broadcasts and private tapes

1. Birks' Works (5.14) February 3rd 1951 – The Dizzy Gillespie Septet

2. Don't Blame Me (2.51) June 1954 – Johnny Hodges and his Orchestra

3. Max Is Making Wax (3.00) October 18th 1955 – The Miles Davis Quintet

4. Tune Up (5.40) December 8th 1955 – The Miles Davis Quintet

5. Bye Bye Blackbird (6.45) May 17th 1958 – The Miles Davis Quintet

6. My Favourite Things (16.16) July 1st 1961 – The John Coltrane Quintet

7. Impressions (7.48) November 22nd 1961 – The John Coltrane Quintet (Helsinki)

8. Body and Soul (9.54) June 6th 1962 – The John Coltrane Quartet