«Even if this is madness, there is a method». It is Polonius, a pedantic and nosy chamberlain, who whispers it in the second act of Hamlet, while he observes the prince of Denmark ranting with a book in his hands. Who knows if William Shakespeare would have ever imagined that, more than three centuries later, that line would become the perfect epigraph for a man born in a town that bears the name of his most famous tragedy.
So, on September 23, 1926, in an apartment at 200 Hamlet Avenue, in Hamlet, North Carolina, John William Coltrane was born into the world. Nomen omen, one might say.
One hundred years later, the saxophonist who many dismissed as an out-of-control visionary remains the living (and playing) demonstration that even the most daring madness, if studied with monastic discipline, possesses implacable rigor.
Friends called him Trane. And the nickname, for those who have a cinema habit, immediately evokes the Lumière brothers' train that breaks into La Ciotat station, frightening (at least according to legend) the spectators in the theater. Likewise, Coltrane's music fell on the twentieth century public like a locomotive launched at full speed: there were those who avoided it, those who cried foul, those who got on board without wanting to get off. It is no coincidence that one of his most beloved albums is entitled Blue Train.
John's childhood is marked by the sacred and by mourning. Both grandparents are pastors of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and the boy grows up among hymns and sermons in High Point, where he plays the clarinet and alto horn in a city band, before falling in love with the saxophone, seduced by Lester Young and Johnny Hodges.
Then, starting from December 1938, within a few months his father, an aunt and his grandparents died. Above all, his mother, his aunt Bettie and his cousin Mary Lyerly will be left to raise him.
In June 1943, as soon as he graduated from high school, he moved with his family to Philadelphia and found work in a sugar refinery. It seems like the incipit of a Dickensian Bildungsroman. But for his seventeenth birthday his mother gave him his first sax, an alto. Between 1944 and 1945 he took lessons at the Ornstein School of Music and his first professional gig (ironically, for those who write about films and spirits) was in a "cocktail lounge trio" with piano and guitar.
On June 5, 1945 the epiphany arrives: listen to Charlie Parker live. Years later, on the pages of DownBeat, he would remember that Bird had hit him right between the eyes.
On August 6, 1945, the same day the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima, Coltrane enlisted in the Navy to avoid being called up by the Army. Sent to Pearl Harbor, he joined the Melody Masters, the base's swing band, an all-white group: so as not to alarm the officers he was considered a simple guest. When he's not playing, he works in the kitchen and keeps watch.
On July 13, 1946, in Hawaii, he recorded his first notes, in an informal session with other sailors. In short, the modern jazz revolution begins in uniform, between one corvée and another.
Back in Philadelphia, thanks to the G.I. Bill enrolled at the Granoff School of Music, where he studied theory with guitarist and composer Dennis Sandole. He soon abandons the contralto for the tenor, the instrument that will make him immortal.
His friend Jimmy Heath swore that he practiced "twenty-five hours a day" and told of a night in a hotel in San Francisco: when the neighbors complained, John took the sax out of his mouth and continued for a whole hour to move only his fingers on the keys, in absolute silence. It also happened that he would fall asleep with the instrument between his lips or repeat a single note for hours.
Other than Oblomov. If anything, the obsessed young drummer in Whiplash comes to mind, with the difference that Coltrane didn't need any Terence Fletcher-style iron sergeant to shout at him: he had Fletcher in him.
The saxophonist Odean Pope will point to the pianist and theorist Hasaan Ibn Ali as one of the keys to his melodic thought. Meanwhile, Parker becomes an idol with whom he shares the stage from time to time, and collaborations with Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Bostic and Johnny Hodges arrive.
But there is also the dark side of the moon: since the end of the 1940s Coltrane has been fighting heroin and alcohol, demons that jazz of those years knew all too well.
In 1955 the telephone rings. It's Miles Davis, who is putting together a quintet with Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on double bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums. Two river sessions for Prestige, in 1956, gave birth to Cookin', Relaxin', Workin' and Steamin', titles that seem like the entries in an avant-garde recipe book.
However, in the spring of 1957 what will go down in history as the "first great quintet" broke up, also due to Coltrane's dependence.
The same year, John (married since 1955 to Naima, to whom he dedicated the ballad of the same name, one of his most beloved compositions) experienced his turning point. In the liner notes of A Love Supreme he wrote that in 1957 he experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening that would lead him to a richer, fuller and more productive life. He frees himself from heroin and alcohol.
And next to Thelonious Monk, at the Five Spot Café in New York, he plays throughout the second half of the year. For contractual reasons, the Five Spot quartet will only be able to officially enter the studio once. But the tape of a November 1957 Carnegie Hall concert, recorded by Voice of America, will resurface from the archives and be released in 2005.
In the meantime, for Blue Note, he signed Blue Train, with Lee Morgan, Curtis Fuller and Paul Chambers: the title track, Moment's Notice and Lazy Bird became standards.
Returning to Davis' court, now enlarged to a sextet with Cannonball Adderley, Coltrane participates in Milestones and Kind of Blue. And in 1958 the critic Ira Gitler coined the expression "sheets of sound", to describe those cascades of notes that seem to never end.
He will explain that there were a certain number of chord progressions to be played in a given tempo and that the notes did not always return in eighth notes, semiquavers or triplets: so he had to group them into irregular sets, of five or seven, to make them all fit. Sheets, indeed, but the kind that don't let you sleep.
Then comes Atlantic and with it Giant Steps (1960), his first album as a leader for the label entirely composed of original songs. The title track contains one of the most impervious harmonic progressions ever entered into the repertoire, so much so that it deserves its own name: the "Coltrane changes". For generations of musicians it will remain a trial by fire, an initiation rite.
In 1961, at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the album earned Trane the Edison Award.
And here the cinema enters through the main door. In October 1960 Coltrane recorded My Favorite Things, taken from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music, which had been on Broadway since the previous year. He does it on the soprano saxophone, an instrument then considered almost a relic of early jazz, with his new quartet: McCoy Tyner, Steve Davis and Elvin Jones.
Five years later Robert Wise will bring the story of the von Trapp family to the big screen with The Sound of Music and Julie Andrews will sing the same tune to reassure children frightened by the storm. But anyone who has listened to Trane's version knows that that list of small domestic joys has been transfigured into a hypnotic mantra, a dervish dance almost fourteen minutes long.
Coltrane's favorite things didn't fit in a string-tied package. They were infinity.
In May 1961 the contract passed to Impulse! and Coltrane reunites with the sound engineer Rudy Van Gelder and his studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, where he will record most of his masterpieces.
With Eric Dolphy as second voice, the group settles at the Village Vanguard and experiments without a net: Indian ragas, modal jazz, free suggestions. The blues Chasin' the Trane lasts fifteen minutes. On some evenings the double basses become two, to evoke the Indian water drum, and once even three, when Wilbur Ware takes the stage: Coltrane and Dolphy, the latter said, came down to listen.
The criticism splits. The critic John Tynan, on DownBeat, brands Coltrane and Dolphy as "anti-jazz" musicians. In France, moreover, Coltrane had already been greeted by boos during his last European tour with Miles Davis, in 1960.
But he carries on, determined to make each concert the total expression of his being.
In 1962 Jimmy Garrison took over from Reggie Workman and the Classic Quartet was born, with Tyner, Garrison and Jones. In the studio Trane also chooses a more measured path, so much so that Ballads arrives, the meeting with Duke Ellington (and his In a Sentimental Mood) and the album with the baritone Johnny Hartman, recorded on 7 March 1963.
The day before the quartet had recorded a session whose master would have been destroyed by Impulse! to free up storage space: a copy given by John to his wife will resurface in 2018 as Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album. Coltrane loved to have, in his words, a balanced catalogue.
In June 1964 the quartet recorded the music for Le chat dans le sac by Gilles Groulx, a jewel of the Quebec nouvelle vague, a session published only in 2019 under the title Blue World.
But there is also History, the one with a capital S. After the attack on the Baptist church in Birmingham on 15 September 1963, in which four African-American girls lost their lives, Coltrane composed Alabama, a lament whose phrasing has often been compared to the cadence of the eulogy pronounced by Martin Luther King for the four victims. Jazz becomes civil elegy.
On 9 December 1964, in Van Gelder's studios, the Classic Quartet recorded A Love Supreme, a suite in four movements (Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance, Psalm) conceived in the house in Dix Hills, Long Island.
It is an ode to faith, a declaration of love for God.
In the fourth movement, Psalm, the saxophone "recites" a poem written by Coltrane himself and printed in the liner notes: almost one note for each syllable, with the phrasing modeled on the words. Whoever sings prays twice, recites the adage attributed to Saint Augustine. Coltrane, who didn't sing, prayed with the tenor. And he agreed with Walter Pater, according to whom all art constantly aspires to the condition of music.
It will be the quartet's best-selling album. In the United States it will be certified gold and, in November 2021, platinum, the first jazz album of the 1960s to exceed one million units.
Yet the suite will be performed live in its entirety only very few times: the recordings in Antibes, in July 1965, and in Seattle, in October of the same year, remain famous, the latter re-emerging many decades later.
Cinema could not remain indifferent. Spike Lee wanted to title his Mo' Better Blues (1990) Love Supreme, but Alice Coltrane did not grant permission to use the title. The director inserted Coltrane's music into the film, however, with Denzel Washington as trumpeter Bleek Gilliam who learns, at a high cost, that music isn't enough to fill a life. Or maybe yes.
From then on the titles become a litany: Ascension, Meditations, Om, Selflessness, Dear Lord.
In June 1965 Coltrane entered the studio with ten other musicians, including Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Freddie Hubbard, Marion Brown and John Tchicai, to record Ascension, thirty-eight minutes of collective improvisation that divided the world of jazz like the Red Sea. In September Sanders permanently joined the band.
The critic Gary Giddins would write that those who had followed Coltrane to the edge of the galaxy now had to deal with a musician who seemed to have very little contact with Earth.
In the Trane library, the Gospel of Ramakrishna, the Bhagavad Gita, the Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, the Koran, the Bible, the Kabbalah, astrology, Plato and Aristotle coexist. In the notes to Meditations he declares that he believes in all religions. And in Om, recorded in October 1965, verses from the Bhagavad Gita and the Tibetan Book of the Dead resonate.
As in Baudelaire's Correspondences, scents, colors and sounds respond to each other: music becomes a form of knowledge.
Not everyone follows him. Tyner leaves the group complaining that he can no longer hear himself over two drums, Jones leaves at the beginning of 1966 claiming that only poets can understand that music. Yet Elvin himself, years later, would find one of the most beautiful definitions: of course it was very distant music, there was an extraordinary mind involved, and you wouldn't expect to see Einstein playing with pebbles.
Tyner will remember him as a scientist in the laboratory, always looking for a new direction.
His second wife, Alice Coltrane, comes to the piano; Rashied Ali on drums, with whom Trane will record the dizzying tracks of Interstellar Space as a duo.
In 1966, during the Japanese tour, he played a prototype contralto given to him by Yamaha. And to a Japanese critic who, at the press conference in Tokyo in July 1966, asked him what he would like to be in ten years' time, he responded laughing: "I would like to be a saint."
He believed, moreover, that certain sounds and certain scales could produce precise emotions. He dreamed of finding a method whereby, if he wished for rain, it would begin to rain at once; and if a friend fell ill, all he had to do was play a certain song to heal him.
Nietzsche wrote that without music life would be a mistake. Coltrane wanted music to correct life.
Life, however, cannot be corrected.
John Coltrane died of liver cancer on July 17, 1967, at Huntington Hospital on Long Island, at just forty years old. Almost no one knew about the disease and even Miles Davis confessed to being shocked.
At the funeral, in St. Peter's Lutheran Church in New York, the service opens with Albert Ayler's quartet and closes with Ornette Coleman's. A free requiem for the man who had opened the doors to both of them.
Then something happens that not even the most daring script would have dared to imagine. In San Francisco a congregation, the Yardbird Temple (from the nickname of Charlie Parker, equated with John the Baptist), begins to venerate him as God incarnate. When the group joined the African Orthodox Church, Coltrane was recognized as a saint: thus the St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church was born, where his compositions entered the liturgy.
The church specifies that it does not worship Coltrane, but honors him as a saint and spiritual guide.
