John Coltrane

John William Coltrane was born in Hamlet, North Carolina in 1926 and grew up in High Point, where he played alto horn and clarinet in a community band in his early teens before switching to the alto saxophone. After moving to Philadelphia and serving briefly in the Navy, he began working his way through the bebop circuit, working with Dizzy Gillespie and Eddie Vinson before a crucial tenure with Miles Davis starting in 1955. It was with Davis that the wider jazz world first heard the ferocious, searching tenor style that would become one of the most recognizable sounds in the music's history.

The Prestige years from 1957 to 1958 produced a prolific body of work in the hard bop idiom, but the real turn came with his signing to Atlantic in 1959. Giant Steps, recorded that year, introduced a new harmonic system based on major third substitutions so advanced that some of the finest pianists of the era were caught off guard at the sessions. My Favorite Things the following year introduced his soprano saxophone work and the modal approach that would define the classic quartet era.

The first Impulse! years, from 1961 to 1965, represent the period most listeners return to. With McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums, Coltrane made records that spanned the full range from the tender ballads of Ballads and the intimacy of the Johnny Hartman session to the sustained spiritual intensity of A Love Supreme. The album was recorded in a single December session in 1964 and became the most celebrated jazz album of the post-bop era.

After Ascension in 1965, Coltrane moved decisively into free jazz territory, bringing in new collaborators and exploring a more collective, less structured approach to improvisation. The records from this period remain challenging and divisive, but the best of them, particularly Meditations, Interstellar Space, and the posthumous live recordings from Japan and the Olatunji Concert, show an artist still developing rapidly. He died in July 1967 of liver cancer, at forty. The posthumous catalog has continued to grow as new recordings surface, including a 1965 Seattle performance of A Love Supreme released in 2021.