Coltrane, the acceptable face of the avant-garde

‘It was with Coltrane’, wrote the English poet and jazz critic Philip Larkin, ‘that jazz started to be ugly on purpose.’ In the introduction to All What Jazz, a compilation of Larkin’s Daily Telegraph music reviews, the author lamented that John Coltrane’s ‘metallic and passionless nullity gave way to exercises in gigantic absurdity, great boring excursions’. In the story of jazz, post-Trane, ‘all was chaos, hatred, and absurdity’.

And yet, 100 years after the saxophonist’s birth – and almost 60 years since his death – his reputation as one of the most significant musical geniuses of the 20th century appears inarguable. In 2021, his 1965 magnum opus A Love Supreme was certified platinum for one million US sales, while Blue Train was certified gold back in 2001, with Giant Steps following in 2018. His centenary – which he shares with bandmate Miles Davis – is being marked with concerts everywhere from the Barbican in London to the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. So how did this avant-garde spiritual searcher, whose talent has now reached mythic status – he has even been canonised by the African Orthodox Church – become the acceptable face of jazz?

‘By the time I began listening to jazz in the early ’70s,’ wrote the late cultural critic Greg Tate in 2006, ‘you felt Coltrane’s influence everywhere in African American culture – in the music, the politics, religion, literature, visual arts, even food.’ Tate said that Coltrane brought ‘a self-improvement ethic’ to his art. The sounds he made from his horn were ‘unique because his artistic pursuit was ultimately of things that art can at best only poetically suggest, a breech-birthed unity between humanity and cosmological creation itself’. Coltrane confirms the lofty ambitions of his pursuit in the liner notes to A Love Supreme. He writes: ‘DEAR LISTENER: ALL PRAISE BE TO GOD TO WHOM ALL PRAISE IS DUE. Let us pursue Him in the righteous path.’ ‘This album is a humble offering to Him,’ he goes on, before concluding with the exhortation: ‘May we never forget that in the sunshine of our lives, through the storm and after the rain – it is all with God – in all ways and forever.’ It’s not entirely surprising that not everyone loved these, in Larkin’s words, ‘portentous demonstrations of religiosity’.

John William Coltrane was born in the Jim Crow South in a small town called Hamlet, North Carolina, on 23 September 1926. At that time, almost half of all 120 million Americans lived in rural areas and the first ‘talkie’, The Jazz Singer, would not arrive until the following year. He was an only child and when he was a few months old the family moved 90 miles north to High Point, a city near Greensboro. Both his grandfathers were Methodist ministers and this was to influence his music greatly. In a 2001 interview, Alice Coltrane – John’s second wife and a hugely influential harpist in her own right – told the author Ashley Kahn that John’s mother used to talk about the religious quality of his playing. According to Alice, she would say: ‘You can hear it. It’s like he’s giving a sermon. You can hear God’s names; you can hear people calling for the Lord when he plays.’

When he was around 12 years old, his father, grandfather, grandmother and uncle all died within a two-year period. As a result, he lived with extended family while his mother moved to Philadelphia for work. In 1943, after graduating from high school, he joined her in the north. He studied music with a private saxophone tutor (having switched from clarinet) while working menial jobs.

In 1945, two things happened that would change his life forever. First, he saw Charlie Parker for the first time with his neighbour and close friend Benny Golson. It completely dazzled them. Second, he joined the US Navy and was stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. It was here that he played in bands constantly and upped his game. The earliest recordings we have of his playing are from his time in the navy and they are examples of classic wartime swing. Of course, it was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor which brought the US into the Second World War. But as a sign of how much had changed in the 20 years since the war, Coltrane biographer Eric Nisenson described his 1966 tour of the country as ‘the event that was probably the greatest single triumph of his life’. Japan’s newspapers clearly had more receptive critics than did Britain’s.

The late 1940s and early-to-mid-1950s were a time of learning and gestation. He studied music in Philadelphia on a programme paid for by the G.I. Bill and played in both big and small bands. He even got to play with Parker a few times. Fellow Philadelphian Jimmy Heath joked that the quiet student practised ‘25 hours a day’. His big break came when he got a call from Miles Davis in 1955 to play on a recording date for Columbia. In Davis’ autobiography, he wrote that he used Coltrane for a gig at Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom (where Malcolm X was later assassinated) in 1950, in a band that included Sonny Rollins and Art Blakey. ‘All of them were using a lot of heroin at the time, so being around them a lot like I was just got me into it deeper,’ he wrote.

Both men had grown musically in the intervening years. The trumpeter had been signed by the Columbia executive George Avakian after a particularly hot performance at the Newport Jazz Festival. That first session would become ’Round About Midnight (not released until 1957), which includes the spellbinding rendition of ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’. This was a period when things moved very quickly in jazz. A musician might lead a session in the morning, play as a sideman on another recording session in the afternoon, before playing two sets in the evening, either as leader or sideman. Many of them had to score heroin in between times to stop the shakes.

All of which is to say that between 1955 and 1960, Coltrane was a very busy man. He recorded hours of music for Prestige, much of which was released as albums not under his creative direction after his contract expired. He recorded one album for Blue Note, the powerful, bluesy Blue Train. He wrote four of the five tracks on that record, which, as record producer Michael Cuscuna noted, was ‘very rare in the 1950s’. Speaking of the title track, Cuscuna said, ‘while it’s kind of easy to play the blues, this has a suspended and haunting kind of quality to it’. Coltrane toured and recorded with Davis extensively, notably playing on Milestones and Kind of Blue, and recorded albums with Thelonious Monk and Milt Jackson. On the latter, Larkin opined: ‘Bags and Trane offers a unique mingling of his bleak tone with Jackson’s luscious vibraharp. As a novelty it has much to commend it. As a taste of things to come it is a thought glacial.’

Crucially, though, in 1959 and 1960, he recorded Giant Steps and My Favorite Things, respectively. On the song ‘Giant Steps’, he introduced the world of jazz to what became known as ‘Coltrane changes’, an unusual harmonic progression. With his recording of the Rodgers and Hammerstein song from The Sound of Music, he had a radio hit – a waltz vamp with piercing soprano sax. These were hinge albums, after which he started collaborating with free-jazz maverick Eric Dolphy on Olé Coltrane and Africa/Brass, which boasts an enchanting version of the English folk song ‘Greensleeves’.

Even as his music became more avant-garde, there were moments of straight-ahead tenderness: ‘In a Sentimental Mood’ with Duke Ellington has rightfully become a cult classic for its bewitching beauty, while Ballads and John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman are both full of charming yet fresh interpretations of standards. On Crescent and A Love Supreme, however, we have a very different musician: vast expansive improvisations, religious meditations, and a man clearly searching for something more than a purely material experience. By this time, Coltrane had recommended free-jazz musicians such as Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders to his label Impulse!. His band throughout most of the sonic searching was in place by the end of 1961: McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. Tyner and Jones left the band by the end of 1966. His final group was made up of Rashied Ali on drums, Garrison on bass, Sanders on saxophone and his wife Alice on piano.

In 2008, the drummer Jimmy Cobb (who played with Coltrane on Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue) was asked about the saxophonist’s transition to free, unstructured improvisation. ‘I didn’t know what it was like. Most people didn’t. But I knew he was after something, and he was going to get it. He would play a full 20-minute solo on the stand and then come down and go and stand in the corner and practise during the intermission. So he was after something and he wasn’t going to stop till he got it.’

This determination to follow his calling in the face of criticism and contrary to the financial pressures of the music industry endeared him to radical black movements, which were full of rage at a country in which they were still treated as second-class citizens, even after the Civil Rights Act was signed in 1964. Miles Davis wrote that ‘Trane’s music and what he was playing during the last two or three years of his life represented, for many blacks, the fire and passion and rage and anger and rebellion and love that they felt especially among the young black intellectuals and revolutionaries of that time. He was expressing through music what H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers and Huey Newton were saying with their words, what the Last Poets and Amiri Baraka were saying in poetry. He was their torchbearer in jazz, now ahead of me… Afro hairdos, dashikis, black power, fists raised in the air.’ Davis said that A Love Supreme, ‘which was like a prayer’, even influenced ‘many intellectual and revolutionary whites and Asians’, ‘those people who were into peace, hippies’. Davis wrote that he was proud of him, even though he preferred Coltrane’s earlier music.

In Cultural Amnesia in 2007, the author Clive James concurred with Larkin that the ‘gut-churning hideosity’ of Coltrane’s music was only memorable as a ‘lesion to the inner ear’. And yet, as James admits, this movement from easy-listening jazz to free jazz had a ‘political component as well as an aesthetic one, and it was the political component that made it impossible to argue against at the time, and makes it difficult even now’. Black dignity was that component. ‘A cause well worth making sacrifices for’, in James’s words, but ‘the joy of the music was one of the sacrifices’. ‘Swing was the essence of enjoyment.’

But that was Coltrane’s great achievement: bringing a level of swing into uncharted waters. I am sympathetic to both Larkin’s and James’ critiques of free jazz – too often it sounds awful. And while some of Coltrane’s later explorations make for seriously difficult listening, there are shimmering moments of joy pulsing through much of it. Particularly on A Love Supreme, he managed something almost impossible: to bring real meaning, hope, and, most importantly, good music that pleases the ear, into a postmodern rule-free artistic mode. In that sense, he charted a path few others have been able to follow.