Who knows if jazz would still exist today if 1926 hadn't existed? Within four months, two musicians were born who were to become the yin and yang of modern improvisation: the cool, economical, rational trumpet Apollo Miles Davis was born on May 26th, followed on September 23rd by the saxophone Dionysus John Coltrane, who strives for spiritual freedom. The two played together for five happy years starting in 1955 with a short break.
Their relationship was characterized by mutual respect, but also by a certain strangeness. A representative example of this is the anecdote in which Coltrane justified his exuberant solos to his bandleader by saying that he simply didn't know how to stop. To which Davis replied: âMaybe youâll try taking the saxophone out of your mouth?â
But deep in his heart, the sarcastic trumpeter knew that it was Coltrane's inexhaustible flow of ideas and his constant search for new means of expression that made it impossible for him to stop. The man from Hamlet, North Carolina, already had one foot in infinity at the end of the 1950s. âThe beauty of a woman left him cold because he had already been seduced by the beauty of music,â Davis said of his quiet colleague with the manic enthusiasm for practice, who worked on improving his instrument mastery even during concert breaks.
At the zenith of their joint work, the trumpeter and the tenor saxophonist gifted the world with probably the most famous recording in jazz history, the 1959 album âKind of Blueâ. In the same year, Coltrane recorded the masterpiece âGiant Stepsâ under his own name (also hard to imagine if 1959 hadnât existed!). The title speaks volumes: it not only rushed through wildly changing chords like in the title track of the album, but also heralded the eager progression from the legendary first Miles Davis quintet. In 1960, Coltrane left the band after a European tour, ready to show his full potential after his early apprenticeship with Dizzy Gillespie and perfection alongside Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis.
He laid the decisive foundation stone in 1957 when he not only recorded the great hard bop record âBlue Trainâ, but also gave up heroin and alcohol while going cold turkey. Thanks to the grace of God, he experienced a spiritual awakening, the saxophonist describes the turning point in his life in the accompanying text to âA Love Supremeâ.
When he released his best-known work, the four-part Suite in Honor of the Supreme Being, in January 1965, he was at the peak of his career. The album became manna for the emerging hippie movement. Readers of the influential journal Down Beat elected Coltrane as the first living musician to be included in the magazine's Hall of Fame. The creator also meant well for him in his private life: in 1963 he found a congenial partner for life and music in the pianist Alice McLeod; he became a father for the first time. The couple had three sons.
However, the saxophonist, who had a huge radio hit with his version of the musical song âMy Favorite Things,â performed on the nasal soprano, did not make himself comfortable in family life. Quite the opposite: The years between his departure from Davis and his far too early death from liver cancer on July 17, 1967 seem as full, crowded and unheard of in their artistic output as his solos, which blur into iridescent sound surfaces. It more than lived up to its nickname âTraneâ â this train had no brakes.
The grandson of Methodist preachers transformed his instrument into a mouthpiece of global ecstasy, with sonorous whispers and screeching cries, seething eruptions of sound and sequences of notes at the speed of light. In his recordings he addressed the entire planet. His records and pieces during this phase had titles like âIndiaâ, âAfro Blueâ and âOlĂ©â. At some point it took two drummers in the band to counteract the brass power, which had been doubled by Eric Dolphy and Pharoah Sanders. It's no coincidence that Coltrane's last studio album was called Expression. His late work was a single expressive declaration of love to the universe.
The extent of his influence on the cultural history of the 20th century is impressively underlined by a book published by his son Ravi to mark his 100th birthday. âColtrane: The Definitive Visual Celebration of the Legendâ (Ten Speed ââPress) combines iconic photos of the master at work in the studio and on stage with essays from prominent Coltrane disciples.
Guitarist Carlos Santana compares the saxophonist's importance for our physical and emotional new understanding of the world to Albert Einstein, while Patti Smith describes him as the spiritual leader of her generation. âHis work demanded a lot, but also gave a lot - an evolutionary process in which the listeners grew,â writes the singer - and cannot help but find a bittersweet irony at the time of his death. âHe was here, then gone, lost in the summer of love.â Gone in the Summer of Love, 1967.
One can happily speculate about what would have happened next for the jazz saint, who died at the age of just 40 and in whose name a church community was even founded in San Francisco: Would his music have even been able to increase in intensity? Might Coltrane have chosen the opposite path, towards fragile, tender tone poems full of affection and sadness, such as the love song âNaimaâ or the moving dirge âAlabamaâ for the victims of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham? Or would he have only played for himself, his higher self and the members of his wife Alice's ashram?
What is certain is that he is now being remembered with numerous recording releases and concerts on the occasion of his 100th birthday. The first release of the legendary âTiberi Tapesâ, which the saxophonist Frank Tiberi recorded with his voice recorder between 1960 and 1964 from various Coltrane live shows, is planned for November 2026. Especially in Germany, you can look forward to performances by the radio big bands from WDR and HR with Coltrane conjurers Chris Potter and Isaiah Collier or a tour by tradition keeper Branford Marsalis.
The US saxophonist is also releasing a recording for the Coltrane Centennial, âDedicated to Youâ (Blue Note/Universal), in which he, together with his quartet and singer Dianne Reeves, charmingly nostalgically recalls the 1963 ballad album âJohn Coltrane and Johnny Hartmanâ.
Trumpeter Nicholas Payton and the fusion collective Butcher Brown, on the other hand, treat the legacy less reverently: on the double LP âA Supreme Blueâ (Concord Jazz/Bertus), the sextet re-recorded the two key works âKind of Blueâ and âA Love Supremeâ piece by piece â with deep rumbling dub reggae basses, James Brown grooves, vocoder voices and reverb tails like from a hip-hop production. The recording shows in a beautifully danceable way what Miles and Trane's music got rolling almost 70 years ago: funk, techno, ambient, post-rock or chanting. Without 1926, the world today would undoubtedly be a lot quieter, poorer and soulless.
