More than almost any musical performer of the 20th century except perhaps Elvis Presley, saxophonist John Coltrane came close to achieving the status of a saint, both before and after his premature death. More importantly and realistically, Coltrane was a creative talent who evolved jazz and worked his way up to global fame by playing passionately and emotionally and composing blissfully.
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As early as his sax stint in a high school band in High Point, North Carolina, Coltrane found himself under the influence of Duke Ellington's suave altoist Johnny Hodges, whom the teenager had been hearing on the radio and on records. After graduation, Coltrane relocated with his mother to Philadelphia, where he studied further in music school. After a stint in the Navy, he found work with several rhythm-and-blues bandleaders including Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, who urged Coltrane to perform on tenor sax. The young saxophonist was introduced by his co-workers to such visiting bebop pioneers as Charlie "Bird" Parker, his most important alto inspiration after Hodges.
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Coltrane got to play Bird's music while working in progressive jazz ensembles with the Heath brothers and with Dizzy Gillespie in the late '40s and early '50s. During this period he was also encouraged in two seemingly contradictory activities: Eastern philosophy and meditation (by Gillespie and Yusef Lateef), and drinking (partly by bandmate Jesse Powell). Then it was back to Philadelphia and music school, where his education included exposure to French turn-of-the-century classical composers Debussy and Ravel (echoed in certain Coltrane ballads) and to the high, entrancing sound of the soprano saxophone.
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Coltrane evolved to flirtation with harder drugs (heroin) and a job with Johnny Hodges, where he further absorbed his early idol's lovely intonation, not unlike a tender human voice. Hodges, a veteran of the Duke Ellington Orchestra, admired the younger man's talent for finding new ways to harmonize old songs: he said that Coltrane's version of Duke's "In a Sentimental Mood" was "the most beautiful interpretation I've ever heard." Among his own lovely original compositions was a dedication to the woman Coltrane had begun courting, his soon-to-be-first-wife Naima. They married in 1955, shortly after his joining a quintet led by Miles Davis.
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By 1957 Coltrane had temporarily stopped smoking, drinking, and taking drugs (the last of which had lost him his gig with Davis). He and Naima moved to New York, where Coltrane hooked up with the eccentric but popular pianist Thelonious Monk, who encouraged him to explore sounds and approaches to solos beyond the limits of bebop. During a long stint with Monk at New York's Five Spot, Coltrane, becoming widely known as "Trane," recorded what many think of as his best "early" work, Blue Train on the Blue Note label. It featured four originals and showcased Coltrane's sensitive approach to a standard ballad ("I'm Old Fashioned") in the company of Lee Morgan, Curtis Fuller, Kenny Drew, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones.
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The volume and breadth of Coltrane's recorded work in 1957 alone exceeds that of many players' entire careers. It includes unusual team-ups --- with guitarist Kenny Burrell, tuba player Ray Draper, and the very different tenorman Paul Quinichette --- and certifies the increasing intricacy and density of Coltrane's expression, toward what critic Ira Gitler termed "sheets of sound."Returning to Davis in good grace the next year, Coltrane perfected his ability to build fascinating complex embellishments of already complex harmonies and to play through them precisely at lightning speed. On Davis's Kind of Blue recording in 1959, Coltrane found himself in company (including pianist and arranger Bill Evans) encouraging freedom from chordal convention and long lines of improvisation. The saxophonist's own Giant Steps, cut for Atlantic a month later, bore as its title tune a Coltrane creation whose fast-cycling modulations seemed to usher in a new harmonic molecular structure, daunting to the composer's most sophisticated colleagues.

In 1960, Coltrane continued to shift his focus, from elaborate chordal architecture to modal meditations over a limited number of chords. Despite the impossibility of pigeonholing him, he was easily able to secure his own long-term recording contracts with the Atlantic label, which favored his original compositions, and later with Impulse. By 1961 he was the second highest-paid recording artist in jazz, after his former employer Davis. Of course he began to attract more and more prime players to his projects, many of them heard in the Heavyweight Champion Atlantic/Rhino box set. But the so-called "classic" Coltrane Quartet comprised the strong, dynamic drummer Elvin Jones; pianist McCoy Tyner, whose trademark pounding left-handed fourth chords and rapid right-handed flurries laid a splendid foundation for Coltrane's solos; and either Steve Davis or Jimmy Garrison on bass. The Quartet's Live At Birdland, recorded in October of 1963, is called "arguably John Coltrane's finest all-around album" by jazz scholar Scott Yanow and includes a landmark journey into Latin jazz on Mongo Santamaria's "Afro-Blue."

In his later years, Coltrane's spiritual intensity was increasingly manifest on his albums and even in many of their titles, beginning with A Love Supreme, recorded with the Quartet at the end of 1964. He increasingly imported elements of world musics into his jazz, including African and Caribbean modalities and rhythms, Middle Eastern reed tonalities, pentatonic scales, and microtones and extended modal solos resembling those in Indian ragas.
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After the breakup of the Quartet in 1965 and during the following two last years of his life, Coltrane's collaborators included his second wife, pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane, and saxophonist Pharoah Sanders. The music they recorded pours out in lava-like flows of free jazz feeling and spiritual passion, with little attention to traditional melody or structure. Newcomers to Coltrane would do well to pick up The Ultimate Blue Train, which is a Blue Note reissue of 1957's "Blue Train" as an "enhanced cd," with video, interviews, and much background material, as well as alternate takes of this important product of Coltrane's earlier recording career. Coltrane's Sound, rereleased from a 1960 Atlantic album, is a fine momento of the "classic" John Coltrane Quartet in its heyday. A Love Supreme, which has been resissued by Impulse! on both cd and vinyl, shows Coltrane moving the Quartet towards his spiritual seeking purpose but is more accessible than his post-Quartet experiments.

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