‘Chasing Trane’ an ode to sax legend
Some films are also concerts, and if you enjoy music as much as a great documentary, you are going to be thrilled by “Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary.”
A meticulously researched and lovingly made portrait of one of the giants of 20th-century American music, the film, in which the words of John Coltrane, culled from liner notes and interviews, are spoken by Denzel Washington, is a triumph. Using mostly blackand-white still photos, black-and-white archival footage and recent interviews — with Carlos Santana, John Legend, Common, Sonny Rollins, a sax-player from the South named Bill Clinton, Wayne Shorter, an ebullient Cornel West, The Doors drummer John Densmore and Coltrane’s former drummer McCoy Tyner, as well as Coltrane’s children — director and writer John Scheinfeld covers the usual ground for a life story. Coltrane was born in 1926 in Jim Crowera North Carolina, where he lived as a child with an extended family numbering two Methodist preachers.
Decades later, Coltrane would use the speech patterns of Martin Luther King’s eulogy for the four girls murdered by white supremacists to create the civil rights elegy “Alabama.” Coltrane also turned a catchy ditty from “The Sound of Music” — “My Favorite Things” — into an ecstatic, whirling-dervishlike radio hit. Scheinfeld uses the Eastern-influenced sound of Coltrane’s horns brilliantly to shed light upon Coltrane’s story, tracing his career as a saxophonist and composer from early years in a postWorld War II Navy band to Coltrane’s time playing in the Miles Davis band to the composition of Coltrane’s spiritual-romantic masterpiece “A Love Supreme.”
Music legends Rollins and Santana are especially insightful about where the music comes from and where it takes its maker. More complete than the 59-minute 1990 documentary “The World According to John Coltrane,” “Chasing Trane” is now one of my favorite things, too. Bravo.
(“Chasing Trane” contains mature themes.)