Toward the end of John Coltrane’s 1966 album Meditations, the saxophonist stops playing. So do bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones, mainstays of Coltrane’s fierce quartet, making what would turn out to be its last recordings as a unit. Two added guests, saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and drummer Rashied Ali, stop playing as well. Only pianist McCoy Tyner continues, and does he ever.
You can imagine Coltrane leaning back, taking it all in, listening to Tyner, who seems to draw on everything that came before him, from all music. It’s Beethoven and Chopin and Debussy, Ellington and Tatum and, yes, Tyner himself, all synthesized into a fissioning universe of virtuosic wonder.
When Tyner concludes his solo, how does Coltrane respond? He plays a couple of understated three-note licks, slightly trilling, like an imam reciting the Quran, or a cantor chanting the Torah, or a pujari making an offering.
He responds with prayer.
All of this happens in just a few brief minutes, bridging the album’s final two seamless sections, bearing the titles “Consequences” and “Serenity.” And it’s stunning. Revelatory.
Though as we mark 100 years since Coltrane’s birth on September 23, 1926, a monumental landmark for a monumental legacy, this “Consequences” moment might seem inconsequential, a minor blip in a recorded catalog that comes close to 200 hours and includes some of the most significant, revolutionary performances in all of modern music. Consider his time with Miles Davis’ 1950s quintet, the harmonic masterclass “Giants Steps,” the enchanting transformation of “My Favorite Things,” the smokey beauty of his collaboration with singer Johnny Hartman, the rich larger-ensemble discoveries of Africa/Brass, the ever-evolving, ever-curious explorations of Impressions and Interstellar Space. And of course there’s both A Love Supreme, indisputably one of the most important musical works of these past 100 years, and its fiery companion, Ascension, for many the standard of “free” improvisational jazz.
It’s easy to be overwhelmed, swept up, even intimidated, lost in the majesty, in the power, in the pure expression of all this. Much of it is designed to do just that.
But moments such as the one above abound through Coltrane’s catalog, and with them come experiences of wonder and awe as grand as that of his most noted accomplishments. They are there for you, if you are open to finding them—or to them finding you.
That’s exactly what happened, with startling frequency, in a trek through the entirety of Coltrane’s music, taken over a matter of months, album by album, session by session, in chronological order, starting with his early gigs as a young man and going through the abundant posthumous releases, in concert and in the studio. For every grand statement, it seemed, there were a dozen smaller gestures that rose up and grabbed attention—and likely hundreds more that passed by unnoticed, casualties to, well, casual listening. Another time through and very likely others of those would catch the ear. In any case, finding these moments became a mission, and one full of delights.
In the Navy
Somewhere on this planet right now there are people who can say, “My father/grandfather/great-grandfather/uncle/cousin/whatever played on John Coltrane’s first recording.”
They are the relatives of five Navy sailors who on July 13, 1946, at Manana Barracks in Hawaii, accompanied their fellow member of the Navy band Melody Masters in a jam session through a handful of popular tunes—“It’s Only a Paper Moon,” “Sweet Lorraine,” and such, which made it to tape. Having that in your family bragging rights is like getting to say your grandfather pitched to a teenaged Willie Mays, or typed up Martin Luther King Jr.’s first sermon. It almost doesn’t matter whether the results were good or not. In the case of “Hot House,” the Tadd Dameron tune based on Cole Porter’s “What Is This Thing Called Love” and turned into a bebop standard via a Charlie Parker-Dizzy Gillespie version, the performance is, well, about what you might expect from six young servicemen. A smoking version of Parker’s “KoKo” is the treasure, pure be-bop energy, with Coltrane on alto at the front, the rippling runs clearly showing the roots of the sheets of sound to come. Not to mention that Coltrane then used the GI Bill to pay for his studies at the Granoff School of Music in Philly, where he moved after high school.
Beer For My Horses
For an artist indelibly associated with such titles and concepts as “A Love Supreme,” “Om” and “Meditations,” you’d be right to raise an eyebrow or two at “Beer Drinking Baby” and “You Stole My Wife — You Horse Thief.” But here we are, in 1949. “Beer” has him in a small group on a recording date with singer-pianist Billy Valentine. Coltrane’s playing is utilitarian, just fills between the vocal lines and a restrained, even tentative solo. But what strikes is his tone, rich and clear, more Ben Webster or Dexter Gordon than Charlie Parker, the early indications of how his sound would develop.
For the latter novelty, he was a member of Dizzy Gillespie’s orchestra. He doesn’t take any solos here, but clearly this was crucial experience with the innovator, on which he was paired on alto with another Philly kid and future star, Jimmy Heath, whose own band Coltrane had been playing in at the time.
Here’s Johnny
Yes, that’s how he was billed at times—Johnny Coltrane—as a young man playing with alto sax player and bandleader Johnny Hodges. Check out “In a Mellow Tone” from a 1954 concert bootleg. About two thirds through the Duke Ellington song, Coltrane takes a tenor solo. He’s playing it straight, nothing special, but then you can picture Hodges giving him a nod, cutting him loose, and there he goes, flying through the rest of his solo. Turns out that Coltrane obsessives have, well, obsessed over this solo, transcriptions of it studied for clues about what was to come.
The Genome
You know how the biggest things can strike you when you have no expectations? That’s exactly the case with putting on Bags & Trane, an okay-ish set pairing Coltrane with Modern Jazz Quartet vibist Milt “Bags” Jackson, recorded at the start of 1959. Well, “no expectations” is not quite right, but there was the expectation of nothing more than a nice time listening to these two see what they could do together.
After all, in just months, Coltrane would play on both Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and his own Giant Steps, two landmarks of modern jazz, gateways to so much that was to come, from them and others. But there, right at the start of the opening title track: D#-E-F# — three little notes, as simple a triplet as you can play, repeated a couple of times. Then down a fourth to G#-B-C#. Couldn’t be more basic. But wow! It was like stumbling on a code to Coltrane’s music, or isolating something in his DNA, a key to hearing Coltrane, really hearing Coltrane. It was stunning to come across, informing the whole experience of listening to these many hours of music. Anyone who knows the key parts of the catalog will understand, will get it, will hear this—and then revel in how it turns up in many different forms, simple and complex, throughout the rest of this master’s canon. Go listen to it. Like, now. You’ll get it.
Earwitness
Some things heard in this trip inspired awe, some amusement, some a sense of wonder, some a yearning. One inspired envy. On the album Live at Birdland, Coltrane took on “I Want to Talk About You,” a song by silk-voiced singer Billy Eckstine, original released by “Mr. B” back in 1945, and recorded in an earlier version by Coltrane in 1958 and again in a few live versions. On this October 8, 1963 Manhattan club date, Coltrane plays it light, playful, dancing around the romantic melody, before peeling off flurries of notes as the band (Tyner, Garrison, and Jones) intensifies with him before he heads out on his own, alone, lost in his creativity, untroubled by anything around him. It’s one thing to picture the musicians. But oh, to have been there in the audience, witnessing this! Just imagine!
This album also includes two studio recordings, notably “Alabama,” his somber contemplation of the church bombing, a eulogy for the four girls killed there. You can hear him fighting against rage, channeling this into one of his most restrained expressions of fury, as sad as his music got, and as beautiful.
The Whole of Creation
Enough with the spoilers. Let’s face it, some—maybe all—art is best first experienced without pre-knowledge, for surprises to be, well, surprising. That feels the case particularly with the experience of listening to Live in Seattle, recorded at the Penthouse club on September 20, 1965, with Coltrane joined by Tyner, Garrison, Jones, and Sanders, plus Donald Garrett on bass and clarinet. So let’s suggest that before reading on, you give yourself a well-deserved break and give the album a spin or a stream, with particular focus on the 36-minute piece “Evolution.” We’ll wait….
Okay, back? Amazing, right? Caught your breath yet? Just those first minutes of “Evolution” alone seem to echo the creation of life itself, and then it goes from ethereal clouds to burbling, trilling, rippling currents to galaxies exploding galaxies—it’s hard to compare this to any other music in any form, including Coltrane’s own.
But then that bit in the middle, where Coltrane—it must be Coltrane, right?—starts growling, groaning, moaning, like he’d reached the limits of expression he could achieve with his sax and just had to let something else out, something primal, something cosmic. And then someone else joins him, Sanders maybe. And another. And it sounds like three of them are just reaching deep inside and releasing, well, everything. Pain, yes, but also elation. It’s the flip-side of A Love Supreme and its chant, but perhaps this informed and energized the remarkable, complete live performance of that masterpiece recorded at the same place, the Penthouse, several days later and finally released in 2021.
The Sound of (Coltrane) Music
In the version of “My Favorite Things” heard on the Live in Japan set documenting a series of 1966 concerts, Coltrane plays a beautiful, even revelatory rendition. That shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, his 1960 recording of the Sherman Brothers’ Disney tune was arguably his most popular item, a sure-fire crowd-pleaser. But here’s the thing: He doesn’t really play the song until a full 55 minutes into this remarkable performance.
When her husband takes things back, again it’s just with a short bit of the melody. You have to wonder why he’s even playing it at all. Is it because it’s expected? Is he teasing the fans who do expect it? Mocking them? Being churlish? Obstinate? Is he sick of the song? Whatever it is, his playing is dense, searching, even manic. But then, almost out of nowhere, at 55:25, there it is! A full verse and chorus to which you could sing along, if you wanted. But you wouldn’t, because what you’re hearing is simply wonderful, a pretty melody and sweet sentiment that has been invested with new depth and heart. It’s as if it took that near-hour prelude to get to this, a trip way out into space and on his return to Earth to see home in new, wonderful ways. That’s also a good way to describe the whole of his musical life—and thanks to these recordings, we get to go along for the ride and experience these transformations whenever we like.
Well, that’s not exactly true. He does touch, barely, perfunctorily, on it earlier. But even that doesn’t come until more than 18 minutes into the piece, following a nearly 15-minute bass solo by Jimmy Garrison that opens the piece and then nearly four minutes of Coltrane—in a very rare performance on alto that he’d been given, rather than the soprano that with the original recording became a signature of his—leading to increasingly intensifying improvisation by the group, at this time also including Pharoah Sanders, pianist Alice Coltrane, and drummer Rashied Ali. Same for Sanders, who takes the next extended solo, finishing with a couple of phrases from “My Favorite Things,” almost shrugged off, as he hands things over to Alice, who doesn’t play the tune at all in her segment.