5 Trane’s Passionate Journey

For John Coltrane, recording Kind of Blue was one of the most significant events of his life as a jazzman. In retrospect, Coltrane must have felt that recording the album was like the inevitable end of one journey and the beginning of a new one. It would set the course for the rest of his career and propel him toward the innovations that would change jazz and define his career as a leader. The path by which Coltrane arrived at Kind of Blue is as important to understanding his music as an awareness of the path that he would take thereafter.

A few years ago I wrote a book about John Coltrane titled Ascension—John Coltrane and His Quest. I still believe most of what I wrote about Trane then. Despite any changes that have occurred in my thinking about Coltrane since writing Ascension, he is a pivotal figure and is far too important to ignore in telling the story of Kind of Blue. There are many who believe that Coltrane’s voice dominates the album. I am not certain of that, but it is true that on Kind of Blue we hear for the first time the direction he would pursue after leaving Miles’s group.

My thinking about Coltrane has evolved since completing Ascension. One of the important lessons I have learned from listening to jazz all these years is the inevitability of change, including my own feelings about the music and the players who have mattered most to me. It is impossible to fight against change, so the best way to deal with it is to embrace it. Thus, when I write a book, all I can claim is that it represents my ideas and feelings about its subject at the time. Those ideas and feelings are not immutable but are, rather, in a constantly fluid state. This is especially true for my ideas regarding someone like Coltrane, since nobody embodies the idea of evolution and perpetual change more than he; as Coltrane changed, so did my thinking about him, and those ideas continue to evolve. I believe this has been true for most of his devoted listeners.

In addition to my responses to the music itself, I have found that the ideas of others have helped sharpen my own point of view, their opinions sometimes acting as a challenge, at other times solidifying and reinforcing my perspective. Probably one of the main reasons for the current turn in the evolution of my feelings about Coltrane and his music is the series of conversations I have had with my friend Nick Catalano. To name a few of his activities, Nick is a professional saxophonist, a jazz writer (he has a column in a New York weekly newspaper), and a professor at Pace University in New York. He also recently published the definitive biography of Clifford Brown. Though he is extremely knowledgeable about jazz and has an appreciation of its development that is both broad and deep, he does not care much for Coltrane; nor is he much of a Miles Davis fan, either. Discussing Coltrane with Nick has in some ways strengthened my love of Trane’s music, but it has also caused me to reconsider it. In particular, I wonder whether in my enthusiasm I have overlooked Coltrane’s tendency to be self-indulgent in some of his music, focusing on his own inward journey instead of communicating with an audience.

Ascension is concerned mainly with Coltrane’s spiritual quest and how it affected his life and music. The decisive experience in this quest occurred in 1957. Until then he had been a journeyman saxophonist, respected but not considered especially original or innovative; in addition, he was a hopeless drug addict and alcoholic. But after his spiritual epiphany of 1957, he became within just a few years the most important artist in jazz. This amazing transformation is one of the most fascinating stories in jazz history.

Coltrane’s epiphany was the starting point for a spiritual quest that created in him a new and different reason to play music, a reason that went beyond simply communicating with and moving his listeners. For him, playing improvisational jazz became a journey within, an attempt to use the intensity that he brought to his music as a form of trance. To be more precise, he played in order to sustain that inward journey, seeking nothing less than the mind of God. That is why he played solos of such great length (half an hour, sometimes even much longer) and with such apocalyptic fury. It was impossible for those in the audience to be merely passive observers; all one could do was hold on for dear life. The experience of listening to Coltrane’s music was more like a trip in a rocket ship to some strange corner of the universe than anything resembling “entertainment.” Later in his career, Coltrane would go even more deeply within himself, this time to a place where he seemed almost to lose track of the difference between music and pure sound.

Thus, the puzzling question about Coltrane is this: Was he an artist or a kind of shaman, or was he simply self-indulgent? The answer is by no means apparent. One thing is certainly true, however: after Charlie Parker, Coltrane is one of the two most significant and influential saxophonists in the jazz scene. (The other is Sonny Rollins.) During the 1960s in particular, Coltrane cast a long shadow, and not merely over the world of jazz. He became a cultural hero to both African Americans and the young people of the counterculture. Much of his music during his ascendancy is undeniably beautiful, sometimes even breathtaking, but his performances could at times be brutal experiences for many listeners. However one feels about it, there is little doubt that the course Coltrane pursued during the most important years of his career began with Kind of Blue.

John Coltrane was born in Hamlet, North Carolina, on September 23, 1926, the same year as his future boss, Miles Davis. He began playing the alto saxophone in high school but was no prodigy. After his mother moved to Philadelphia, John followed suit and wound up studying at a local conservatory. When he was nineteen he entered the navy, where he played in the navy band. Some rare Coltrane recordings in the 1940s reveal that at this time he was, like most modern jazz musicians, deeply influenced by Charlie Parker. There was no clue that this young man would eventually become one of the most original and innovative musicians in jazz history.

After leaving the navy, Coltrane switched to tenor sax and became a journeyman musician, getting occasional jazz gigs, briefly playing in a band led by Miles (which also included Sonny Rollins). Like many tenormen of the time, he was also under the influence of Dexter Gordon and Sonny Stitt (that is, Stitt’s tenor style). For the most part, though, Coltrane was forced to play rhythm-and-blues gigs in order to make a living. Being an essentially shy and introspective man, Coltrane hated the more “show biz” aspects of rhythm and blues, such as “walking the bar,” a nightclub act in which the saxophonist literally walked on top of the bar while supposedly wrapped up in the fervor of his music. One time when Coltrane was forced to walk the bar, a friend, tenor saxophonist Benny Golson, walked into the club. Coltrane was so mortified that he immediately jumped off the bar and left the club, never to return.

Coltrane played for a while in a band led by the rhythm-and-blues saxophonist Earl Bostic and then later with Johnny Hodges, who for a time led his own band while on leave from the Ellington orchestra. Coltrane said that he learned quite a bit from both Bostic and Hodges, and I think their influence is evident. Rhythm-and-blues saxmen like Bostic brought a sweat-drenched intensity to their playing that was echoed in Coltrane’s music in the 1960s. As for Hodges, the altoman’s rich, golden sound carried a message about the possibilities latent in music that surely affected Coltrane’s own conception.

About this time Coltrane, like so many of his jazz contemporaries, became addicted to heroin. His addiction began partly as a means of dealing with physical pain. He suffered from serious dental problems, the pain of which was greatly exacerbated when he played. (Sonny Rollins has suffered similar dental problems throughout his career.) In order to get through a gig, he used both dope and alcohol, and he soon found himself with a dual addiction.

Despite these problems, Coltrane got his first big break about this time (the early 1950s): he joined Dizzy Gillespie’s quintet. On some sides that Gillespie recorded during this period, we can hear Coltrane’s tenor for the first time. (He had recorded as part of the Hodges band but took no solos.) Only with the benefit of hindsight do we hear that familiar Coltrane voice. At this point, however, he could have been one of dozens of tenormen from this era. Undoubtedly he would have evolved much more quickly had drugs and alcohol not cut so deeply into his time and ability to concentrate.

Despite Coltrane’s tenures with Gillespie and Hodges, two of history’s stellar jazzmen, it was Miles who in 1955 would make Coltrane a well-known figure in the jazz scene. After his triumph at Newport, Miles put together a working band. His first choice was Sonny Rollins for the saxophone chair, but Sonny was busy remaking his life in Chicago after kicking his own heroin addiction. Miles’s drummer, Philly Joe Jones, encouraged him to hire Coltrane. Apparently Miles was not particularly enthusiastic about the idea, probably remembering Coltrane’s performance in the early 1950s band, which had also included Rollins. He finally relented, however, and hired Coltrane.

At first Miles’s audiences were unhappy that the man they had assumed would be the saxophonist in the group, Sonny Rollins, had been replaced with this little-known tenorman. Nevertheless, they gradually grew to accept Coltrane, and the group became one of the most popular in jazz—despite being dubbed the “booze and dope band” since every member of the group, except for Miles, was addicted, or dual-addicted like Coltrane. Coltrane became a spectacle in the band—not, unfortunately, because of his stellar playing. He would nod off on the bandstand, his nose running. He would often show up late and constantly pressured Miles for cash to feed his habit. His playing evolved, but only to a small degree. He sounds authoritative on the blues during this period, but on some of the tunes he seems to be have trouble working within the harmonic framework. On a tune like “Diane,” performed in the marathon recording session for Prestige, he seems to falter, inventing lyrical ideas but having trouble putting them into a coherent musical statement.

After Miles broke up the band (mainly because of the erratic behavior of Coltrane and the other members of the group), Coltrane seemed lost. To those who saw him during this period, it appeared that the question was not whether but how soon he would die; there was little doubt that he was doomed. He dressed like a hobo and spent most of his energy maintaining his dual addictions. One of the most humiliating incidents occurred during a Thelonious Monk recording session. Coltrane had nodded off and was so out of it that Monk had to call his name loudly, “Coltrane! Coltrane!” at the point where Trane was supposed to solo. Many musicians respected Coltrane’s obvious talent, but at this juncture he seemed utterly hopeless, another jazz tragedy.

Then something remarkable happened. Coltrane went home to Philadelphia and—like Miles himself at an earlier point—made the decision to clean himself up, and to do it on his own. At his mother’s house he lay down in a bedroom and instructed his wife, Naima, to bring him only water while he went through the agony of kicking both heroin and alcohol. It was during this horrendous withdrawal that he experienced the spiritual epiphany that changed his life. In the middle of this ordeal, he felt touched by God. He made a bargain with God: if God would get him through the pain of withdrawal, he would devote his life and work to a spiritual quest. And that is exactly what he did. There is one thing about Coltrane’s ordeal that I find particularly interesting: although Coltrane had successfully kicked both alcohol and heroin, he also wanted to stop smoking tobacco. It was almost as if he wanted to be wholly purified; but smoking proved to be the one habit he was never able to kick.

Shortly after returning to the jazz scene, Coltrane was hired to play in Thelonious Monk’s quartet. Monk was slated to play a lengthy gig at the now defunct Five Spot Cafe in New York’s East Village. Unlike most clubs, the Five Spot permitted musicians to play for several weeks or even months at a time. It was during this gig that Coltrane began to make rapid strides in his evolution as a player. Monk encouraged him to take long solos, and Coltrane enthusiastically embraced Monk’s suggestion. Night after night Coltrane played long, serpentine solos, developing one of the most original voices in all of jazz. He said that performing with Monk was very tricky, feeling at times as if he were “stepping into an empty elevator shaft.” But the listeners who heard the group live were enthralled. The premier bop trombonist J. J. Johnson said that listening to the group was the “most electrifying sound [he had] heard since Bird and Diz.”

During this stand with Monk at the Five Spot, Coltrane developed a style that Ira Gitler has very aptly described as “sheets of sound.” This is a technique in which Coltrane plays long series of arpeggiated chords, almost as if he were determined to find every possible chord permutation within a single solo. It creates a spectacular effect, like fireworks for the ear. Melody is sometimes virtually ignored; the pure sound of those roiling arpeggios is the substance of these solos.

There is a photograph of Coltrane from the late 1940s or early 1950s in which he is seen at a club watching Charlie Parker play. Looking at his face, one can see that he is thoroughly fascinated with Bird’s playing, so entranced that the cigarette he is holding has burned almost to the filter. It is either burning his finger or close to it, but he is in a kind of trance. Experiencing the transformative power of Parker’s playing, Coltrane might have experienced an early premonition that this music could elevate and save his soul.

After the spiritual awakening that occurred while going through withdrawal, Coltrane felt even stronger about the healing and saving grace of music. At first his path seems rooted in harmony and the world of chords. At the core of bebop is the challenge of creating fresh melodic ideas through complex and difficult chord progressions. As noted previously, the European classical tradition was seen by the boppers as a kind of “church,” and Western harmony was a kind of catechism, one that laid down the ultimate laws of music, which were ironclad. The challenge for a jazz musician is to create idiosyncratic music and fresh melodic ideas within the boundaries of Western theory.

Bop offered the musicians more harmonic latitude but, to some extent, also deprived them, because the harmonic structures required for bebop were far more complex. Charlie Parker once said that he could play “anything” with chords. Perhaps he already knew that some musicians were beginning to balk at the constraints of Western harmony, even back in the bop era. We shall see that there was at least one musician who was looking for such alternatives even in the 1940s. (It should also be pointed out that Lennie Tristano experimented with “free jazz”—improvisation not based on any kind of structure or even a specific meter—in the late 1940s, but it was a one-time experiment.)

One must wonder whether Coltrane was basically “practicing on the bandstand,” something he would also be accused of later, at the height of his “sheets of sound” period. In its own way, Coltrane’s music at this point is totally abstract since there is very little melodic flow; it is harmony for its own sake. Yet he played with ferocious intensity, and perhaps it is this intensity that keeps his performances from sounding like nothing more than a saxophonist practicing his music. A more accurate description—albeit one tinged with an element of mysticism— might be that of a saxophonist fervidly seeking his salvation in chords, as if, should he be able to play every possible harmonic permutation, he might find the mind of God.

This was the first, but certainly not the last, time that Coltrane would be accused of self-indulgence. Clearly, he seems to have had an agenda other than simply communicating with his audience. He seems to be thoroughly obsessed with chords during this period, like a scientist whose entire focus is on atoms and who perceives all matter only in terms of its molecular building blocks. There are stories about Coltrane sitting at the piano between sets and playing chords night after night, and then going home and practicing until he fell asleep with the horn in his mouth. It is almost as if Coltrane had taken the burden upon himself for bringing the harmonic advances of bebop to their logical conclusion.

The question of whether Coltrane is self-indulgent—in the music of this period or, even more so, in his later work—gets to the heart of the nature of jazz improvisation. Coltrane used to describe his musical quest as “cleaning the mirror,” looking deeper and deeper inside himself in order to discover, finally, both his true self and that of God. But is that what jazz, or any art form, is for? Is it a means for an artist to exorcise his demons, a kind of therapy or method of self-investigation? Or is it intended to be a form of communication between artist and audience?

Later in Coltrane’s career, especially in the final two or three years, these questions became even more relevant. By that time Coltrane seems to have lost interest in any structure at all for his music, and his playing seems based completely on striving for apocalyptic catharsis. There is no easy explanation for listeners’ responsiveness to this wild show, for Coltrane was immensely popular. Could a music so arcane, so seemingly self-referential, be truly popular—with other jazzmen as well as with fans? Obviously many listeners in both groups found great value and beauty in his music. I certainly was one of his avid admirers. Perhaps a key to the puzzle has something to do with the vision of a man nakedly baring his soul, and the inherent risk of that act. Maybe his music was a catharsis for us, too. But is that necessarily good art?

To make things even more complicated, Coltrane in the recording studio was different from the man in public. The saxophonist was notorious for playing take after take while recording, attempting to achieve perfection. This is exactly the opposite of Miles Davis’s approach.

Coltrane had the ability to take the ideas he had been exploring in live performances and truncate them for his solos in the recording studio. Perhaps one reason he maintained his popularity is that his best recorded solos have far more formal logic than his long-winded live solos (although his studio work, needless to say, lacks the overwhelmingly visceral effect of the live performances). Unlike a musician such as Sonny Rollins, who does not enjoy recording in the studio and does not usually play nearly as brilliantly there as he does in his personal appearances, Coltrane thrived in the studio. He used recording sessions to tighten musical concepts he had been exploring and to put them into a logical formal context.

In late 1957 Monk disbanded his quartet, and by 1958 Coltrane was back with Miles. Like many jazz musicians, Miles had been spending time at the Five Spot and was greatly impressed with Coltrane, especially since the saxophonist was clean. By the time he rejoined Miles, Coltrane had absorbed the influences of the jazzmen who had most affected him. Now he had gone far beyond them, creating a sound and style unlike that of anyone else in jazz.

After Coltrane joined Miles’s sextet (with Cannonball Adderley playing alto sax), he was surprised to discover that Miles’s own musical thinking had evolved in a rather unexpected way: “On returning to Miles’s group, I found Miles at another stage in his musical development. There was one time in his past when he was devoted to multichorded structures. He was interested in chords for their own sake. It now seemed as if he was moving in the opposite direction, using fewer and fewer chord changes in a song. He used tunes with free-flowing lines and chordal direction. This approach allowed the soloist the choice of playing chordally or melodically.”1

This new direction must have been somewhat bewildering to Coltrane. After all, it was Miles who first set Coltrane off in his obsession with harmony, and Coltrane felt deeply committed to continuing in that same direction.

Coltrane’s evolution continued at an amazing rate. He seemed to be attempting to make up for all the time he had lost during the dark days of his addictions. He became even more of a workaholic, spending time doing little else but practicing and working out chords on the piano and playing gigs. In contrast to his naturally reserved personality, his playing became increasingly explosive and electrifying. His solos grew longer and longer. At one point Miles asked another musician to find out why Coltrane played such long solos. Coltrane replied, “I don’t know how to stop.” Miles told the musician, “Tell him to take the horn out of his mouth.”

The first recordings of the original Davis sextet include Coltrane and Adderley as well as the original quintet rhythm section of Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones (Garland does not play on every track; Miles is the piano accompanist on some tunes). By this time all the elements of Coltrane’s style were in place: that diamond-hard tone, as recognizable a sound in jazz as that of Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, or Louis Armstrong; the surging rhythmic thrust and harmonic complexities; the non-Western lyricism and the tidal waves of emotion. This sextet recorded “Milestones” (or “Miles,” as it was eventually retitled), the title track on the only album performed by the group and Miles’s first recorded modal tune. Only the three horns solo on this piece. Miles and Cannonball seem to thrive on the melodic freedom they have been given, but Coltrane sounds uncomfortable, as if he were blindly feeling his way. To most listeners, his hesitancy would seem to bode ill for his ability to play modal pieces in the future; of course, that turned out to be anything but the truth.

Several months after the Milestones session, Coltrane made his only recording with George Russell, the big band album New York, New York. Trane had continued to record in a wide variety of contexts, although by this time he was regularly recording under his own leadership. He plays on only one track, Russell’s reimagining of the Rodgers and Hart standard “Manhattan.” The big band was a stellar one, including Phil Woods, Milt Hinton, and Coltrane’s bandmate in the Miles sextet, Bill Evans. As Russell recalls, after Coltrane came to the session, he took Russell’s score for the tune and sat in a corner studying it. This caused Russell and the other musicians some consternation, since the musicians were being paid for their time, and they were all among the most illustrious, and expensive, musicians on the New York scene. Nobody was especially happy that Coltrane had chosen to delay the session. Some of the musicians at first thought he had trouble actually reading the score. But that was not the case. Rather, he was working on Russell’s chord progression, reharmonizing them in accordance with the harmonic advances he had been working on.

Shortly after the session, Coltrane visited Russell at his apartment in Greenwich Village. The two discussed Coltrane’s solo on “Manhattan,” and Russell told the saxophonist, “You know, John, you really do not have to go through all that in order to play the chords you want to use, because the Lydian scale includes them all. You don’t have to think about reharmonizing the tune. You have the freedom to play whatever you want.” Of course, we can never know exactly what effect this conversation had on Coltrane or his development as an improviser, but when he performs on Kind of Blue a few months later we hear, for the first time, the great modal player who would dominate the 1960s jazz scene. He was not, however, simply throwing away the harmonic effects he had been exploring since 1957. He had discovered that he could stack chords on the scales or simply play straightforward melody. No longer having to think his way through the harmonic jungle of post-bop, he was able to access his deepest emotions and develop into one of the most passionate and profoundly spiritual musicians ever to walk this planet.

For Coltrane, Kind of Blue was not the only important record date in 1959. Later that year he recorded Giant Steps for Atlantic. As the Italian musician-writer Enrich Merlin has pointed out, Coltrane was clearly at war within himself when he recorded Giant Steps. The title tune seems to be the final outcome of his intense obsession with chords. Even now the tune is used to put jazz musicians on their mettle; the chord structure is like the definitive harmonic test. Yet on some of the other tunes, like his classic ballad “Naima,” Coltrane seems to be under the influence of Miles in using streamlined harmonies (although, interestingly enough, the tenorman does not really improvise on this version of the tune).

A few months after the Kind of Blue sessions, Coltrane recorded Giant Steps. Following the performance of Giant Steps, though, Coltrane became devoted, for the most part, to modal playing and composing. We ask the same question about Coltrane as we did for Miles: what was going on here? I think it is simple—at the time of Kind of Blue, Coltrane felt that he had not yet brought his obsession with conventional harmony to its ultimate point. With the tune “Giant Steps” he did so, and now the bebop era had finally come to its close.

We can only imagine the battle that must have been taking place within Coltrane’s mind. Had his obsession with chords met a dead end, or did he decide that it was, finally, fruitless? One can only speculate; perhaps Coltrane felt he had taken the mantle from Charlie Parker and had completed the great saxophonist’s work. Certainly he had taken the harmonic challenges of bop as far as they would go. Now it was time to move on to a whole new world of freedom.

It is important to note that after Coltrane went out on his own as a leader, his name was associated with the Black Power movement—though we have no evidence that he actually participated in it or had any political concerns at all. Certainly a number of the young free-jazz musicians he played with in the 1960s identified themselves with the more militant wing of the civil rights movement. The tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp is one example, and many of those young musicians consciously wanted to liberate jazz as completely as possible from its ties to the European musical tradition. Of course, the key aspect of that tradition in jazz expression (other than the instruments themselves) is its harmonic theory.

For Coltrane, the issue was whether to give up on all the harmonic devices he had been working with and simply become a completely melodic, horizontal player. Perhaps that is why he sounds so hesitant on Miles’s first modal piece, “Milestones.” Coltrane would discover, however, that he did not have to discard all he had achieved. This critical discovery set him on the course he would begin to explore the following year, when he left Miles and went out as a leader of his own group—and that critical discovery would come with the recording of Kind of Blue.