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Coltrane, John
1. Life.
Coltrane grew up in High Point, North Carolina, where he learnt to play the E♭ alto horn, clarinet and (at about the age of 15) alto saxophone. After moving to Philadelphia, he enrolled at the Ornstein School of Music and the Granoff Studios; service in a navy band in Hawaii (1945–6) interrupted these studies. He played the alto saxophone with the trumpeter King Kolax, then changed to the tenor to work with the alto saxophonist Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson (1947–8). He performed on both instruments while in groups led by the saxophonist Jimmy Heath, the trumpeter Howard McGhee, Dizzy Gillespie, the alto saxophonist Earl Bostic and lesser-known rhythm-and-blues musicians, but by the time of his membership in Johnny Hodges’s septet (1953–4) he was firmly committed to the tenor instrument. He leapt to fame in Miles Davis’s quintet (1955–7), but throughout the 1950s addiction to drugs and then alcoholism disrupted his career. Shortly after leaving Davis, however, he overcame these problems; in 1964 his album A Love Supreme celebrated this victory and the profound religious experience associated with it. Coltrane next played in Thelonious Monk’s quartet (July–December 1957). He rejoined Davis and worked in various quintets and sextets with Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans and others (1958–60). While with Davis he discovered the soprano saxophone, and purchased his own instrument in February 1960. Having led numerous studio sessions, established a reputation as a composer and emerged as the leading tenor saxophonist in jazz, Coltrane was now prepared to form his own quartet. Its long-standing members were McCoy Tyner (piano), Jimmy Garrison (double bass) and Elvin Jones (drums). Eric Dolphy also served as an intermittant fifth member. Coltrane turned to increasingly radical musical styles in the mid-1960s. Surprisingly these controversial experiments attracted large audiences, and by 1965 he was affluent. From autumn 1965 his search for new sounds resulted in frequent changes of personnel in his group. New members included Pharoah Sanders (tenor saxophone), Alice Coltrane (his wife, piano), Rashied Ali (a second drummer until Jones’s departure) and a number of African-influenced percussionists. In his final years and after his death, Coltrane acquired an almost saintly reputation among listeners and fellow musicians for his energetic and selfless support of young avant-garde performers, his passionate religious convictions, his peaceful demeanor and his obsessive striving for a musical ideal. He died at the age of 40 of a liver ailment. The Coltrane Legacy was issued in 1987.2. Music.
The success of Coltrane’s performances in the 1950s depended largely on their tempo: although mature in his ballad playing and often imaginative at medium tempos, he was frequently shallow in his fast bop solos. At times he rendered ballad themes with little or even no adornment, as in Naima (named after his first wife) (from the album Giant Steps, 1959, Atl.). In other ballads, such as Monk's Round Midnight (1956, Col.) on Davis's album ’Round about Midnight, he alternated paraphrases of the theme with complex elaborations in which brief thematic references served as signposts. In either case, his priority was beautiful sounds. However esoteric his music became in later years, Coltrane remained a great romantic interpreter of ballads. One of Coltrane’s main objectives was to elaborate the full implications of bop chord progressions. At moderate speeds he could do this without ignoring rhythmic and expressive nuance, for example in his widely varying improvisations on All of You (on ’Round about Midnight), Blues by Five (on Davis's album Cookin’, 1956, Prst.) and Blue Train (on Blue Train, 1957, BN). But the faster the piece, the more concentrated was his exploration of harmony at the expense of other considerations. Like Charlie Parker, Coltrane improvised rapid bop melodies from formulae: but unlike Parker he drew on a small collection of formulae, failed to juxtapose these in new combinations, and tended to place them in predictable relationships to the beat. Early solos on Salt Peanuts (on Davis's album Steamin’, 1956, Prst.) and Tune-up (from Cookin’) exemplify this practice, which culminated in a blistering performance in the title track on Giant Steps. This solo was impressive because of Coltrane’s huge driving tone, his astonishing technical facility and his complex harmonic ideas; but rigid, repetitious quaver formulae lay just beneath the surface. Whereas Coltrane was far more important as an improviser than as a composer, he did write several pieces that have become jazz standards and from May 1959 until his death the vast majority of his recordings as a leader were of his own compositions. By seeking to escape harmonic clichés with pieces such as Giant Steps, he had inadvertently created a confining, one-dimensional improvisatory style. In the late 1950s he pursued two alternative directions. First, his expanding technique enabled him to play what the critic Ira Gitler called ‘sheets of sound’, as exemplified in his very fast semiquaver runs during a live performance of Ah-leu-cha recorded at Newport in 1958 (ex.1). Such flurries gradually replaced the rhythmic clarity in Giant Steps and disguised his excessive reiteration of formulae. Second, when Miles Davis discarded bop chord progressions in favour of relaxed ostinatos, Coltrane abandoned formulae in favour of true motivic development. Davis’s So What (on the album Kind of Blue, 1959, Col.) was the first recording on which Coltrane systematically varied motifs throughout a solo (ex.2). This process became increasingly prominent in his most famous recordings, including My Favorite Things (on My Favorite Things, 1960, Atl.), Equinox (on Coltrane’s Sound, 1960, Atl.), Teo (on Davis's Someday my Prince will Come, 1961, Col.), Impressions (on Impressions, 1961–3, Imp.) and the album A Love Supreme (1964, Imp.). Initially he developed motifs only in performances when neither tempo nor harmonic rhythm was fast. Eventually Coltrane was also able to avoid repetitive responses at high speeds; for example, large portions of Impressions, played at a metronome marking of 310, gained coherence by his continuous, inventive manipulation of distinctive quaver formulae. (These recordings of the early 1960s are often described as being modal, the concept of which owes more to Tyner’s accompaniments – some of which suggest modal scales – than Coltrane's chromatic lines.)){kind=link}
Ex.2 Motivic relationships in
Coltrane's improvisation on So What, from M. Davis: Kind of Blue
(1959, Col.); transcr. A. White and B. Kernfeld
3. Influence.
Coltrane’s impact on his contemporaries was enormous. Countless players imitated his sound on the tenor saxophone, though few could approach his technical mastery. He alone was responsible for recognizing and demonstrating the potential of the soprano saxophone as a modern jazz instrument; by the 1970s most alto and tenor saxophonists doubled on this once archaic instrument. Finally, by selling hundreds of thousands of albums in his last years, he achieved the rare feat of establishing avant-garde jazz, temporarily, as a popular music.Bibliography
- I. Gitler ‘Trane on the Track’, Down Beat, xxv/21 (1958), 16–17
- A. Blume ‘An Interview with John Coltrane’, Jazz Review, ii/1 (1959), 25 only
- Z. Carno ‘The Style of John Coltrane’, Jazz Review, ii (1959), no.9, pp.17–21; no.10, pp.13–17
- J. Coltrane ‘Coltrane on Coltrane’, Down Beat, xxvii/20 (1960), 26–7
- A. Spellman ‘Trane: a Wild Night at the Gate’, Down Beat, xxxii/26 (1965), 15, 44
- F. Kofsky ‘Revolution, Coltrane, and the Avant-Garde’, Black Giants, ed. P. Rivelli and R. Levin (New York, 1970/R, 1980 as Giants of Black Music), 18–20
- A.N. White, ed. The Works of John Coltrane (Washington, 1973) [transcrs.]
- E. Jost Free Jazz (Graz, 1974)
- J.C. Thomas Chasin’ the Trane: the Music and Mystique of John Coltrane (Garden City, NY, 1975/R)
- C.O. Simpkins Coltrane (New York, 1975/R)
- D. Wild The Recordings of John Coltrane (Ann Arbor, MI, 1979)
- D. Baker The Jazz Style of John Coltrane: a Musical and Historical Perspective (Lebanon, IN, 1980) [incl. transcrs.]
- B. Kernfeld Adderley, Coltrane, and Davis at the Twilight of Bebop: the Search for Melodic Coherence (1958–59) (diss., Cornell U., 1981)
- B. Kernfeld ‘Two Coltranes’, Annual Review of Jazz Studies, ii (1983), 7–66
- L. Porter John Coltrane’s Music of 1960 through 1967: Jazz Improvisation as Composition (diss., Brandeis U., 1983)
- L. Porter ‘John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme: Jazz Improvisation as Composition’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, xxxviii (1985), 593–621
- B. Priestley John Coltrane (London, 1987) [incl. discography]
- E. Nisenson Ascension: John Coltrane and his Quest (New York, 1993)
- Y. Fujioka with L. Porter and Y. Hamada John Coltrane: a Discography and Musical Biography (Metuchen, NJ, 1995)
- L. Porter John Coltrane: his Life and Music (Ann Arbor, MI, 1998)
BARRY KERNFELD