Acknowledgment

By the time of his passing in 1967, just two months short of his forty-first birthday, the tenor (and sometime soprano) saxophonist John Coltrane had established himself as one of the very finest artists and composers in the history of jazz. With those accolades, I am restraining myself.

Before his death, some admirers pondered the possible significance that John Coltrane's initials were identical to those of Jesus Christ—blasphemous foolishness that shocked and dismayed a man who was by all accounts profoundly religious and genuinely humble. After his death, a church in San Francisco declared Coltrane its patron saint and retooled its liturgy around one of his chief achievements, the four-part suite A Love Supreme. Critics and historians, if not compelled to resort to such literally religious terms to comprehend Coltrane's greatness, nonetheless gravitate toward metaphorically religious language. Trane has quite soberly been declared a "jazz messiah" and, in Hegelian epochal terms, "the end of jazz history."

Indeed, to date Coltrane is arguably the last great innovator in jazz—a music that, rooted as it is in spontaneity and slaves' hope for a tomorrow brighter than yesterday or today, is innovative by definition. Coltrane's lifework ended in free jazz, an untethered form that ignored steady rhythm and encouraged instrumentalists to improvise together, all playing at once. His lifework began, professionally, in the bebop era towered over by alto saxophonist Charlie Parker. Partly because Parker so dominated the alto, Coltrane made the heavier, more insistent tenor saxophone his signature instrument.

If ever a musician mastered an instrument, John Coltrane mastered the tenor. As classical pianist Zita Carno wrote in 1959, in what remains one of the best technical studies of Coltrane's art, his range was a full three octaves up from the lowest note on the horn. Carno marveled at Coltrane's "equality of strength in all registers," his sound ringing as clear, full and unforced in the highest notes as it boomed and scudded at the very bottom. "His playing is very clean and he almost never misses a note." A note? The man almost never missed a split note—several tones played on top of one another. His "harmonic conception," Carno added, was extremely advanced. He achieved an immediately recognizable sound tone, sometimes denounced as metallic, but undeniably bold and markedly free of vibrato. Many saxophonists produce a reedy, sometimes sibilant and boozy sound. You might say they play their mouthpieces. Coltrane filled the entire horn.

And then there was the speed. Bebop, of course, required it—when Parisians first heard Charlie Parker, they could not believe he had only two hands. Later, with Miles Davis, Coltrane was a pioneer in modal jazz, which shuffles and roller-coasts up and down the notes in unusual scales. Coltrane often blitzed modes at a frantic bebop pace. He learned circular breathing (a technique of breathing in through the nose while exhaling from the mouth, thereby eliminating pauses) and could furiously unfurl long ribbons of notes so rapidly that they almost blurred into one. Thus critic Ira Gitler famously dubbed Coltrane's approach in one period "sheets of sound" and said the gushing bursts of his outpourings seemed almost "superhuman."

Coltrane studied piano, bass guitar, and harp theory, privately played the flute and bagpipes, and strove to assimilate all these instruments' capabilities into his saxophone. He was born into the blues and later immersed himself in Western classical music (especially Stravinsky and Bartok), Latin music, African and Indian music, drawing reverently, deeply on them all. He built up an astounding stamina that allowed him routinely to solo for 20 or 30 minutes and left him capable of three-hour sets.

But what is all this by way of acknowledging the greatness of John Coltrane? In the end, I can only resort to my own much feebler grasp of the instrument we call language. Coltrane's music brims and overflows with the genius of an enormous heart and soul. I cannot begin to name a favorite piece, or even a single favorite album. I would hate to live without his elegant, stately ballads (especially those recorded with singer Johnny Hartman); without the breathtaking courage and confidence of his attacks on the songs of Blue Train; without the aching mournfulness of "Alabama"; without the polyrhythmically beating African heart of The Africa/Brass Sessions or the swirling Indian intricacies of "My Favorite Things"; without Trane contrasting Miles Davis's mood or Eric Dolphy backing Trane's; without the driving prayers of A Love Supreme or the serene petition of "Dear Lord."

You know how sometimes when you dream, you fly? I am insomniac. The world looks different at night. There is no better time for solitary thinking. Or for dreaming—awake or asleep. Often I put the headphones on and listen to Trane in the night. I drift into that hypnagogic state between utter relaxation and the sweet oblivion of sleep. And with Coltrane pushing and pulling, blowing as if his life depended on it (as indeed in his estimate it did), I rise. I float, then soar. I glide. Roll. Dip. Dive. Shoot straight up, farther and farther, past wispy clouds into the fire of the sun. Then I plunge straight down, gain velocity, hurtle into beauty. But all without fear, with trust and acceptance, for I have wings: Coltrane wings. All I can ever do, all I would ever want to do, is hang on—or, no, no … let go. Let go with that endlessly fascinating and insinuating sound.

Resolution

It's no surprise that an artist as gifted and prolific as Coltrane (in 1965 alone he recorded 11 albums) has attracted jazz critics and commentators in abundance. Especially notable in its eloquence and placement of Trane in the big picture of his influence on music is Eric Nisenson's Ascension (St. Martin's, 1993; still in print with Da Capo, 1995). Until this year, two biographies of Coltrane had been published. Now we have what is surely the definitive biography: Lewis Porter's John Coltrane: His Life and Music.

Porter is an associate professor of music and jazz historian at Rutgers University. He has approached his task with extraordinary care and dedication. Porter worked on musical analysis and discographical research of Coltrane for 14 years before beginning this book. He tells us he has read hundreds of articles on Coltrane in English, French, Italian, and German. Concerned for inaccuracies in the earlier biographies, he not only conducted several fresh interviews, but reinterviewed living persons cited in those biographies and transcribed anew tapes of original interviews. He went to the trouble of tracing a Coltrane family genealogy back to the 1830s. He compiled an extensive chronology of Coltrane's life, replete with tour and show dates.

Accordingly, his book stands out for its meticulous detailing. It is now the baseline for establishing key Coltranian dates and events. No less, it stands out for its extensive and technical musical analysis of Coltrane's work (there are 18 pages, for example, devoted to A Love Supreme). For readers like me, who have mastered no musical instrument other than the stereo, most of these passages will be obscure. But they should be a treasure trove for trained musicians and students. No self-respecting conservatory library will be without the book.

That said, Porter's book is not especially well-constructed or imaginative. Without the reader's own love of Coltrane, he does not really come alive. Chapter 18 attempts to give some sense of "The Man: 'A Quiet, Shy Guy,' " but it consists of nothing more than quoted anecdotes strung together under the headings "Personality," "Sense of Humor," "Health Regimen," "Practicing," "Astrology," "Philosophy and Religion," and "Race and Politics." As for imagination, suffice it to say that the opening sentence of the book reads: "John William Coltrane, one of the great musical artists of the twentieth century, was born on September 23, 1926, in Hamlet, North Carolina."

Still, with the help of Porter and other more venturesome Coltrane writers such as Nisenson and Leroi Jones, we can get some idea of what formed the soul capable of producing such astonishing music. Coltrane's early years were those of a middle-class black family in the 1920s and '30s. Both his grandfathers were respected African Methodist Episcopal Zion pastors. His father earned a decent living for the family as a tailor. But when John was in his early teens, his father died of stomach cancer.

On this point Porter allows himself one of his very few probing biographical speculations. He notes that the young Coltrane around this time took up the alto sax, then the clarinet. Trane practiced obsessively from the beginning, "as if practicing would bring his father back, or maybe help him forget his father—as if, by succeeding in music, he could restore stability and control to his life." This seems eminently sensible and is corroborated by a high-school friend of Coltrane's, who told Porter, "For a while, I don't think he had anything but that horn."

As I have noted, Coltrane soon switched horns, to the tenor. Directly after high school, he and his mother moved to Philadelphia, which in the 1940s was a leading center of bebop. He was drafted into the navy in the waning months of World War II and, stationed in Hawaii, played in navy bands. Returning to Philly in 1946, he studied saxophone at the Granoff Studios, completing a four-year degree program with two classical music lessons per week. Meanwhile, he launched in earnest his professional career as a musician.

Coltrane was not a musical prodigy. He did not begin, Porter comments, with "obvious exceptional talent." Musician Benny Golson, also in Philadelphia during the 1940s, said, "Nobody had an idea that he would become the international icon that he turned out to be. Nobody!" So Coltrane would labor for a decade before he began to be recognized as a great jazz artist. At times he was reduced to "walking the bar" in showy bands. (In such bands tenor saxophonists especially were known for their theatrics, kicking over drinks and tearing off their shirts. This, to put it mildly, was not Coltrane's style.) At one point, he nearly gave up music, applying for a job at the post office. His ascent, darkly, was significantly slowed by alcohol and drug abuse.

Trane was a lifelong lover of sweets (especially sweet potato pie) and hater of dentists. He may have drunk heavily partly to dull toothache. The alcohol did him little good, but he nearly destroyed himself with heroin. Remember that Charlie Parker had unwittingly become a musician's role model of heroin use. As Porter observes, for "virtually every young player" who began in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there was pressure to try heroin. Though Parker eventually made public disclaimers that heroin did not improve his playing, younger jazz musicians desperately wanted to be like Bird.

Trane took up the drug by 1948 and, like Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Dexter Gordon, Chet Baker, and others, he got hooked. His playing, if he showed up, was unreliable. Clad in days-old, slept-in clothes, he dozed off on the bandstand and, Davis complained, sometimes picked his nose. He was an artist of recognized talent, playing with some of the greats, but his addiction was such a hindrance that Dizzy Gillespie nearly fired him, and Davis once did.

The key year in Coltrane's life was 1957. Supported by his first wife, Naima, and friends, that spring he shut himself away for days and kicked the habit. It was, in every sense of the word, a conversion. As Coltrane wrote in the liner notes for A Love Supreme (1964), "During the year 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening that was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music."

A practical Aristotelian, Coltrane became convinced that "you can improve as a player by improving as a person." Coltrane's was no trivial resolution. He believed music's capacities for enhancing this world were far from exhausted; indeed, his convictions concerning the power of music call to mind the mad dreams of other artists who entered a territory where inspiration and lunacy intermingle.

Music, he believed, could help bring social transformation and perhaps even end wars. He told an interviewer, "My goal is to live the truly religious life and express it in my music. If you live it, when you play there's no problem because the music is just part of the whole thing. … I think music can make the world better and, if I'm qualified, I want to do it." He searched for pitches and scales that would elicit specific "emotional meanings." He said, "I would like to discover a method so that if I want it to rain, it will start right away to rain. If one of my friends is ill, I'd like to play a certain song and he will be cured; when he'd be broke, I bring out a different song and immediately he'd receive all the money he needed." He told drummer Elvin Jones he suspected a particular combination of notes could make matter disintegrate. From the 1957 conversion on, he sought ceaselessly to reproduce a magical droning sound he heard in his mind.

Coltrane, an utterly serious man, was a priest with a horn. In the early 1960s he told Naima that from then on, 90 percent of his playing would be prayer. "That's what music is to me," he said later, "it's just another way of saying this is a big, beautiful universe we live in, that's been given to us, and here's an example of just how magnificent and encompassing it is."

Pursuance

Someone with such ambitious aims might be expected to pursue his craft with dedication. I said earlier that Coltrane practiced obsessively from the start. He was repeatedly heard playing in the backyard at 3 and 4 a.m. Neighbors of his boyhood home complained that he kept them awake; a pastor gave him the church key so he could practice there anytime and leave the neighbors at peace.

By the time he became a professional musician, Coltrane was easily playing more than eight hours a day. When he studied at Granoff, in Philadelphia, he arrived before the doors opened, then stayed until evening. Back at his apartment he would practice into the night—just fingerings, no blowing, so as not to disturb the neighbors.

Throughout his adult life he was inseparable from his saxophone. He left it strapped around his neck at the dinner table; Naima often removed the horn when he fell asleep with it on. At gigs, after he finished a solo, he frequently wandered off the bandstand and practiced in the men's room until his next part was due. He also played there during intermissions. He taped his performances so he could run them back, listening, adjusting, improving, relentlessly searching.

He spent hours experimenting with different mouthpieces and reeds. Porter, ever reliable for technical details, notes that sound varies from player to player because of individual air cavities and sinus passages. Mouthpieces and reeds allow some adjustment to these anatomical idiosyncrasies. Coltrane arrived a full hour before gigs and recording sessions to determine the right mouthpiece and reed for the occasion. Despite his disdain for dentistry, he had his top teeth filed into a slight curve to match the arc of the saxophone mouthpiece.

Coltrane had a gift, most defintely. But he really stood out for his passion, his headlong, nothing-held-back pursuance of accomplishing everything humanly possible with his call and his chosen instrument. That is why, after the late bloomer came into his own around age 30, the Philadelphia Tribune could fittingly headline: "Philly Jazz Artist Wailing Throughout the Entire Universe." The jazz critic Ralph Gleason once remarked to Miles Davis that his fusion jazz was so complicated he really needed five tenor players. In response, Gleason recalled, "[Miles] shot those eyes at me and growled, 'I had five tenor players once.' I knew what he meant."

Psalm

Let me get one thing perfectly clear: The mature John Coltrane was no classically orthodox Christian. Little has been written, with profundity, about his faith. Porter flatfootedly relays a passel of anecdotes. John Fraim gives attention to Trane's spirituality in Spirit Catcher: The Life and Art of John Coltrane (Greathouse Company, 1996), but not at all critically or probingly. Nisenson is the best I have read on this count, but his comprehension of religion is vastly exceeded by his grasp of jazz. Spiritually speaking, this Johnson awaits his Boswell.

But again, many details are available. I have said that Coltrane's roots were Christian. Both grandfathers were AME Zion pastors; he reported that his mother was "very religious." The boy Coltrane every Sunday sat in a small brick church in High Point, North Carolina, hearing his maternal grandfather preach. In his teen years he went to church on Tuesday nights, rehearsing with a community band conducted by the Reverend Warren Steele.

I do not know of his liturgical habits in adulthood, first in Philadelphia and later in New York City. It appears that he never entirely lost faith, though, and in any event, his 1957 conversion to a better life was self-interpreted in largely Christian terms of "grace" and gratitude to "the Father." Many of his mature compositions bore Christian names and themes, and one, "The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost," was ostensibly Trinitarian.

But Coltrane clearly rejected the exclusivity of Christ. In the liner notes to the album containing that Trinitarian title (Meditations, 1966), Trane tells Nat Hentoff, "I believe in all religions." There "certainly is meaning to life," but Coltrane wanted to get no more specific about it than to affirm a "force for unity." He once told an interviewer that in his late teens he "started to wonder about things" and "started breaking away. I was growing up, so I questioned a lot of what I found in [Christian] religion." In his early twenties he confronted Islam, which "took me to something I'd never thought about—you know, another religion? … I was disappointed when I found how many religions there were."

Disappointed or disturbed initially, Coltrane eventually adopted a kind of sixties perennialism, exemplified by his professed belief in "all religions" and the elaboration, "I've always felt that even though a man was not a Christian, he still had to know the truth in some way." He read eclectically, in the positivism of A. J. Ayer, in Indian Buddhism, in Gandhi, in Western and Eastern astrology. He enthusiastically inquired of one interviewer's birth date and, after the reply, exposited, "For the Orientals, that was the year of the serpents, that's very good for you! I also have my moon in conjunction with Mars in Taurus, in direct opposition with Saturn, the deadly planet, in Scorpio, the sign of death! Also I have my ascendant and my Venus in the sign of Virgo; three bad aspects of my birth chart. I won't live to be very old!"

Coltrane's sense of foreboding turned out to be true. But it may have predated his trust in astrology: his father and other close relatives had died early of stomach cancer. He would succumb to a liver cancer that may have metastasized from the stomach. Just months before the diagnosis and his too-soon death, Coltrane was asked at a Japanese press conference, "What would you like to be ten years from now?" It is indicative of the seriousness of his searching, ever intense if sometimes scattershot, that he responded, "I would like to be a saint."

I'm not ready to rebuild the Christian liturgy around John Coltrane. But I do know that some of the most remarkable and, yes, holy sounds I will ever hear came from his saxophones. His playing was prayerful—sometimes petitionary, sometimes praising, sometimes interceding, sometimes lamenting, but always striving as best he knew how toward the throbbing, vital core of the universe. With his saxophone like a kind of miner's lamp, Coltrane explored the darkest caverns of human pain and yearning; with it embodying church bells and slave spirituals and heavenly harp sounds, he draws us beyond the narcissism that so often preoccupies us with our comparatively puny and increasingly solipsistic selves.

Describing the motivation for Meditations to Hentoff, Coltrane (probably unconsciously) alluded to 1 Corinthians 13. "There are always new sounds to imagine, new feelings to get at. And always, there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we've discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more and more clearly what we are. In that way, we can give those who listen to us the essence, the best of what we are. But to do that at each stage, we have to keep cleaning the mirror."

He wanted to see through the glass less darkly. And with that horn, by God, he gave it his all.

Rodney Clapp is the author most recently of A Peculiar People: The Church As Culture in a Post-Christian Society (InterVarsity Press).

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