This Day in Jazz History (Birth of John Coltrane, Saxophonist Supreme)

Sept. 23, 1926— John Coltrane, a saxophonist, bandleader, and composer who, after overcoming a heroin addiction in his early 30s, achieved a spiritual awakening that fueled his subsequent jazz masterpieces, was born in Hamlet, NC.

Early on, the musical promise of this country boy was recognized by a bandleader only four months his senior: Miles Davis. But six years of dependence on heroin and alcohol turned Coltrane into an unsteady, unreliable member of the Davis quintet, leading to his abrupt ouster.

The way back nine months later into the good graces of the bandleader he called “Teacher” was harrowing: locking himself in his mother’s room in Philadelphia and, without medication or medical assistance, quitting his chemical dependence cold turkey.

For the decade remaining before he died of liver cancer, “Trane” gave thanks to God for his liberation from drugs, and sought a purity in sound that mirrored his ecstatic spiritual vision.

Particularly in albums like the Grammy-nominated A Love Supreme (1965), listeners discerned a spiritual path of devotion and redemption, open to all. In fact, for more than half a century, the African Orthodox Church, founded by Black Episcopalians critical of what they saw as racism in the larger denomination, has even officially canonized him, naming its San Francisco house of worship in his honor.

Not everyone felt well-disposed towards the even greater religious intensity his work assumed in the last couple of years of Coltrane’s life. Critic Stanley Crouch, for instance, for all his appreciation of the musician’s early work, dismissed his late ventures as “naive submission to actual noise and incompetence.”

But few would deny that Coltrane was relentlessly dedicated to practicing his craft, as well as pursuing a musical question as unexpected as his spiritual one.

“Sheets of sound” is how Downbeat jazz critic Ira Gitler described the vertical improvisational style emanating from Coltrane’s saxophone—dense layers of scales, modes and keys over an entire progression. It proved extremely influential. 

But Coltrane was uninterested in repeating himself, and his devotees could hardly keep up with his innovations over the course of the 25 albums he released as a bandleader in his abbreviated lifespan.

Even with the Great American Songbook, the corpus of popular standards that jazz has plumbed for years, Coltrane created something unique with his 1961 interpretation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things.” He transformed that approximately three-minute chestnut from The Sound of Music into what Sam Stephenson called, in a 2014 blog post for The Paris Review, “a thirteen-minute warhorse of dominion.”

Like Davis, Coltrane was connected to the area of New Jersey where I live: Bergen County, NJ. Together they worked Cookin' with the Miles Davis Quintet in autumn 1956 at the Hackensack home studio of legendary jazz recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder. Leading his own band, Coltrane created three albums in Van Gelder’s later Englewood Cliffs studio, including, most notably, A Love Supreme.

(For a good, concise summary of Coltrane at his zenith, I recommend Patrick Jarenwattananon’s September 2010 blog post on—what else?—“Your Blog Supreme.”)