A 1960 album whose title piece cycles at speed through a chord sequence moving in major thirds (1960)
Giant Steps — the harmonic obstacle course every jazz student is made to attempt.
Popular music · Jazz & blues
John Coltrane
1926–1967 · American
Hard bop, modal jazz and free jazz
John Coltrane, known as Trane, moved in a decade from a sideman in Miles Davis's quintet to the most influential saxophonist of his generation and a figure of near-religious devotion. His classic quartet recordings, above all the 1964 suite A Love Supreme, fused modal improvisation with an explicit spiritual purpose before he pushed into free jazz shortly before his early death.
How to spot them
- ▸Tenor saxophone, and the soprano saxophone he almost single-handedly revived in jazz
- ▸'Sheets of sound', the phrase coined by critic Ira Gitler for his cascading runs
- ▸The classic quartet: McCoy Tyner (piano), Jimmy Garrison (bass), Elvin Jones (drums)
- ▸Impulse! Records, nicknamed 'the house that Trane built'; earlier Prestige, Atlantic and one Blue Note date
- ▸Explicit spirituality — a suite of thanksgiving, and a church in San Francisco that venerates him as a saint
Songs & albums
A 1959 ballad named for his first wife (1960)
'Naima', written for Juanita Naima Grubbs and closing the Giant Steps album.
A 1960 recording turning a Rodgers and Hammerstein waltz from a stage musical into a long soprano-saxophone modal vamp (1961)
'My Favorite Things', from The Sound of Music — the record that made the soprano saxophone his second horn.
His only album as leader for Alfred Lion's label, cut in 1957 with Lee Morgan and Curtis Fuller (1957)
Blue Train — the one Blue Note date under his own name.
A four-part suite of 1964 in movements titled Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance and Psalm (1965)
A Love Supreme, recorded in one December 1964 session and offered as a thanksgiving to God.
A 1963 elegy in ballad form for four girls killed in a Birmingham church bombing (1964)
'Alabama', said to follow the cadences of Martin Luther King's eulogy.
A 1965 session for double quartet, issued as one unbroken piece of collective free improvisation (1966)
Ascension — the record that split his audience and announced his late free period.
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Hamlet, North Carolina, in 1926 and raised in High Point; he played alto in a navy band before switching to tenor
- •Miles Davis sacked him in 1957 over heroin and drink; he got clean that year and described a spiritual awakening
- •He spent much of 1957 playing with Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot Café in New York
- •Ira Gitler coined 'sheets of sound' for his style in a 1958 sleeve note
- •He played on Miles Davis's Kind of Blue (1959) before leaving to lead his own group
- •His second wife Alice Coltrane was the pianist in his final band; their son Ravi Coltrane, a saxophonist, is named after Ravi Shankar
- •He died of liver cancer on 17 July 1967, aged 40
- •The African Orthodox Church's Saint John Coltrane Church in San Francisco venerates him as a saint
- •He received a posthumous Pulitzer Prize Special Citation in 2007 and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997
Drill it — 8 cards
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Sources
- John Coltrane — Blue Note Records
- Ben Ratliff — Coltrane: The Story of a Sound