“[John] Coltrane — and especially the Coltrane of Giant Steps — continues to inspire countless
budding saxophonists and players of other instruments as well. His sound, once
so harshly criticized and even branded ugly, has become part and parcel of the
sound of jazz, and his extensions of the possibilities of his instruments have
been absorbed into the working vocabulary of the music, though some of the
things he could do with a horn remain out of reach.”— Dan Morgenstern, Living with Jazz: A Reader (2004)
Saxophonist John Coltrane died at age 40 of liver cancer in Huntington, NY, on this day in
1967. If jazz might be said to have a Summa
Theologica, it might be Coltrane’s A
Love Supreme, his classic 1965 album on the glory of God. This gentle,
introspective spirit had great reason to be thankful for God, as—having lost
high-profile jobs with Duke Ellington and Miles Davis in the 1950s because of
his heroin addiction—he had finally managed to pull himself together and get clean.
His spiritual journey was matched by his ceaseless
musical experimentation as a sideman and, after 1960, a bandleader and composer
in his own right. His layered “sheets of sound” technique has been described in
many ways over the years, but perhaps never so memorably as by Coltrane
himself: “I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at
once.”
In 1995, Coltrane was honored by the United States
Postal Service with a commemorative postage stamp. In 2007, the Pulitzer Prize
Board awarded him a posthumous Special Citation for his “masterful
improvisation, supreme musicianship and iconic centrality to the history of
jazz.”
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