When John Coltrane died 50 years ago this July, the New York Times wrote that he “was considered one of the most gifted modern jazz musicians of this decade.” It was a reserved, careful judgment—was considered not was; of this decade not of all time. In the years since, the qualifiers have all fallen away. Rarely is there a word of doubt about Coltrane’s greatness, and for good reason. But could it be that the overwhelming admiration for the saxophonist has been bad for jazz, a choking incense-cloud of reverence that has suffocated others’ efforts? Could it be that Coltrane, most of all, would have had us move on?
Coltrane was only 40 years old when he succumbed to liver failure almost certainly caused by his years of heroin use—a habit he had kicked less than a decade before without resort to rehab or benefit of anything less demanding than willpower. But his short life encompassed worlds of jazz.
Perhaps more than any other musician, Coltrane straddled the major jazz idioms. As a kid he listened to the hot jazz of Sidney Bechet; with a Navy band at the end of World War II, he participated in the last gasp of the Swing Era; in the postwar years he was an acolyte of Charlie Parker and would play in Dizzy Gillespie’s bebop big band. Before he became the quintessential hard-bop saxophonist, Coltrane was comfortable kicking up jump blues with King Kolax and, with Johnny Hodges, blew barrel-house tenor worthy of Illinois Jacquet. By remarkable contrast, within a few years he had finished an apprenticeship with the high priest of modernism, Thelonious Monk, was an essential voice on the ultimate document of cool jazz, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, and would be at the very front of the jazz avant-garde.
Through this “huge musical ascent,” as Nat Hentoff put it, Coltrane radically altered “all previous jazz definitions of ‘acceptable’ sounds and forms.” It’s arguable whether Coltrane had as much impact on jazz as Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, or Louis Armstrong before him. But one thing is clear: No one since Trane has come close to the saxophonist in shaping the sound and structure of modern jazz.
Which isn’t to say there haven’t been efforts to move jazz away from Coltrane’s dominant idiom: Miles Davis experimented with rock and funk; for decades the avant-iest have tried to take Trane’s abstractions to greater extremes; traditionalists have tried to revive pre-Coltrane notions of swing; some saxophonists have looked for inspiration from alternative masters, such as Sonny Rollins and Benny Golson. But none of these efforts has pushed Coltrane aside. None has made Coltrane passé. Indeed, a young saxophonist who does his best to mimic Trane may succeed or fail at the challenge, but he won’t sound dated. The Coltrane sound has proved as durable as the B-52 Stratofortress: It has been the new—the modern—in jazz for half a century.
Musicians copied just about everything they could from Coltrane—and not just from his own playing. Decades’ worth of drummers have emulated the sound of his mature-period drummer, Elvin Jones. It wasn’t just the roiling, crashing, polyrhythms they copied, though they certainly did that. They also copied his drum kit—in particular that, instead of a bass drum, he used a floor-tom-tom on its side. Noting that this had become almost universal practice for modern jazz drummers, Jones would later laugh: He had used a tom as a kick-drum not by choice but by necessity—his larger bass drum wouldn’t fit in the trunk of the car they were using to tour.
The influence of Coltrane is stamped into the popular impression of how jazz is performed. One of the many times The Simpsons affectionately mocked jazz, the cartoon featured a jazz concert in a Springfield theater: The marquee promises an eight-hour show at which two songs will be played. Blame Coltrane. When jazz was dance music the pop imperative of a three-minute song prevailed. Even come bebop it was rare for a musician to take a solo longer than a chorus or two. It was Coltrane who stretched the notion of how long a solo could be, doing so to an extravagant extreme.
At times Trane defended that “stretching out,” saying it was an effort “to explore all the avenues that the tune offers.” Other times he acknowledged that he was long-winded. He told of how—after someone at the Apollo said, “Man, you play too long”—he tried shortening his solos, playing in minutes “all the highlights of the solos that I had been playing in hours.” It made him think: “if I’m going to take an hour to say something I can say in 10 minutes, maybe I’d better say it in 10 minutes.”
Earlier in his career he expressed a certain bewilderment at his own musical logorrhea, saying that once he got going he just didn’t know how to stop. To which his boss at the time, Miles Davis, caustic as ever, said, “Why don’t you try taking the horn out of your mouth?”
In those epic solos, Coltrane would play further and further “out”—outside the melody, outside the harmony, outside the rhythm. But Coltrane had the credibility to be abstract: He was one of the most technically accomplished, harmonically sophisticated musicians jazz ever knew. Imagine that Jackson Pollock, before starting to splatter, had been the most skilled draftsman of his generation.
Coltrane’s notes came in such coruscating torrents that writer Ira Gitler christened them “sheets of sound.” The label stuck, more often cited with dismay than approbation. (One writer I knew whose tastes ran to Ellington and Basie expressed his Coltrane disdain by speaking, yes, of the saxophonist’s sheets of sound, but with the double-e in “sheets” replaced with a short i.)
Even in the age of bebop and hard-bop, Coltrane’s velocity was breathtaking. Combined with an original harmonic concept—obsession, really—that featured a peculiar progression of chords, even the best of fellow musicians often struggled to keep up. The speed and complexity of the passing chords are on vivid display in the title track of the album Giant Steps, recorded in 1959. Coltrane burns through the chord changes at a relentless pace; then it’s the brilliant pianist Tommy Flanagan’s turn to solo. Flanagan barely makes it through a chorus before he’s lost, offering hesitant chords, grasping hopelessly for some purchase. A supremely confident Coltrane comes tearing back, rescuing Flanagan from an embarrassment typical of musicians trying to keep up with the demands of Coltrane’s music.
Trane soon saw his hyperkinetic, harmonic athleticism as a musical hindrance. “My approach was so limited then,” he said just two years after the release of Giant Steps. “Limited in what way?” asked journalist Michiel de Ruyter. “I was working strictly from a chordal, sequential progression pattern, you know?” Coltrane said. He realized that without melody, even the freshest chord sequences are soon exhausted. “But to write melodically is really the best way.”
Coltrane wasn’t wrong: Some of his most satisfying records are those—such as his pairing with Duke Ellington and his session with singer Johnny Hartman—that put him in heightened melodic contexts that radically restricted his more self-indulgent instincts.
Alas, for all those glimmers, Coltrane never did achieve the melodicism he admired. His own tendencies were much too busy. Take a late performance of his best original melody, “Naima,” recorded in concert in Belgium in 1965. Trane presents the theme, and then pianist McCoy Tyner solos. When Coltrane at last begins to improvise, poor serene, lyrical Naima quickly transforms into something shrieking and frenzied. The saxophonist keens repeated figures, counterattacking with honking notes on the bottom of the horn. Instead of melody there is wailing, squawking, and barking. Is it angry, as many critics perceived it, or ecstatic, as many musicians experienced it?
Some critics denounced Coltrane as “anti-jazz” for moving aggressively away from swing and for doing so with a tenor tone that lacked the voluptuous warmth of a Ben Webster. Others championed his changeability and celebrated his anxious, searching sound. For all the debate, Coltrane found an audience, establishing his most successful template—one he had trouble escaping—with his unlikely modal-mantra take on “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music. He showed that modern jazz could be, if not exactly popular music, popular nonetheless.
Whether listening to the more audience-friendly Coltrane discs or the saxophonist’s strangest excursions, there may have been no critic who disliked Coltrane more than British poet Philip Larkin, who had a sideline in the sixties writing about jazz for the Daily Telegraph. He and his pal Kingsley Amis shared a horror of modern jazz in general (an animus Amis expressed in a character’s dismal New York jazz club crawl in One Fat Englishman) but he particularly disliked Coltrane. He captured a core complaint of the many critics disdainful of Coltrane and put it with an unapologetic bluntness: “It was with Coltrane,” Larkin wrote, “that jazz started to be ugly on purpose; his nasty tone would become more and more exacerbated until he was fairly screeching at you like a pair of demoniacally-possessed bagpipes.” The saxophonist indulged himself in “exercises in gigantic absurdity, great boring excursions on not-especially-attractive themes during which all possible changes were rung, extended investigations of oriental tedium, long-winded and portentous demonstrations of religiosity.” Infamously, this was the sort of assessment Larkin offered in lieu of eulogy on the occasion of Coltrane’s death. The Telegraph chose not to publish it.
Nowhere was Larkin more wrong about the saxophonist than in his claim that the legacy of Coltrane’s music was all “chaos, hatred and absurdity.” It’s the hatred bit that is off. Coltrane was the gentlest jazz giant, generous to a fault, reluctant to speak ill of other musicians (or even critics). His spiritualism may have been something of a hodgepodge, but he was serious in his conviction that what was supreme was love. It wasn’t in anger but in innocence that Coltrane told an interviewer “I want to be a force for real good.”
The divided critical reception of Coltrane’s own day has long since given way to a near-unanimous adulation. But one wonders: Has that been an unalloyed good? Or has Coltrane-worship made new (and new-old) directions in jazz seem like apostasy? There are reasons to think Coltrane would be the last to embrace his eminence in the canon.
Coltrane’s questing was so relentless that critic Joe Goldberg wrote in 1965 that in the previous six years, “he has run through several musical ideas so rapidly that a given Coltrane record may be obsolete before its release.” Or as Ted Gioia has since put it, “Coltrane changed styles more frequently than some saxophonists change reeds.” And all those styles have their avid admirers and imitators.
This rapid succession of styles may be a clue to the durability of Coltrane’s influence on modern jazz musicians: He offers a variety of approaches to emulate. The fleet-fingered scale-runners find an Everest of virtuosity to summit. Those with less skill can at least adopt the distinctively brittle tone that Coltrane maintained through his many evolutions. Even those who can barely play their instruments other than to make dying-elephant noises find validation in the master: The great virtuoso himself gave credence to the debilitating notion that one doesn’t need first to master one’s instrument before achieving the freedom of pure abstraction. In his last years, Coltrane encouraged to take the stage with him a motley parade of players whose concept of free jazz expression was to move the keys on their horns and blow (at length, natch).
Coltrane’s commitment to change didn’t mean that he knew where his music was headed. “I’ve had a strange career,” he told Leonard Feather in 1966. “I haven’t yet quite found out how I want to play music. Most of what’s happened these last few years has been questions. Someday we’ll find the answers.”
Perhaps no one would have been less happy than Coltrane himself with the way his various styles and sounds became and remain the dominant idioms of jazz. How strange that the legacy of a man who raced through half a dozen generations of jazz in a mere decade is a music that has been remarkably static for half a century.
Eric Felten is managing editor of The Weekly Standard and host of the magazine’s “Confab” podcast.
