John Coltrane
John Coltrane\"I\'ve got to keep experimenting. I feel that I\'m just beginning. I have part of what I\'m looking for in my grasp, but not all."
John Coltrane
This phrase, from the liner notes of \"My Favorite Things\" clearly defines Coltrane\'s life and his search for the incorporation of his spirituality with his music. John Coltrane was not only an essential contributor to jazz, but also music itself. John Coltrane died thirty-two years ago, on July 17, 1967, at the age of forty. In the years since, his influence has only grown, and the stellar avant-garde saxophonist has become a jazz legend of a stature shared only by Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. As an instrumentalist Coltrane was technically and imaginatively equal to both; as a composer he was superior, although he has not received the recognition he deserves for this aspect of his work.
In composition he excelled in an astonishing number of forms � blues, ballads, spirituals, rhapsodies, elegies, suites, and free-form and cross-cultural works. The closest contemporary analogy to Coltrane\'s relentless search for possibilities was the Beatles\' redefinition of rock from one album to the next. Yet the distance they traveled from conventional hard rock through sitars and Baroque obligatos to Sergeant Pepper psychedelia and the musical shards of Abbey Road seems short by comparison with Coltrane\'s journey from hard-bop saxist to daring harmonic and modal improviser to dying prophet speaking in tongues. Asked by a Swedish disc jockey in 1960 if he was trying to \"play what you hear,\" he said that he was working off set harmonic devices while experimenting with others of which he was not yet certain. Although he was trying to \"get the one essential . . . the one single line,\" he felt forced to play everything, for he was unable to \"work what I know down into a more lyrical line\" that would be \"easily understood.\" Coltrane never found the one line. Nor was he ever to achieve the \"more beautiful . . . more lyrical\" sound he aspired to. He complicated rather than simplified his art, making it more visceral, raw, and wild. And even to his greatest fans it was anything but easily understood. In this failure, however, Coltrane contributed far more than he could have in success, for above all, his legacy to his followers is the abiding sense of search, of the musical quest as its own fulfillment.
John William Coltrane was born September 23, 1926 in Hamlet, North Carolina to John and...
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