The restless spirit of jazz
It is hard to believe that John Coltrane is dead. From the first times he stepped forth with the Miles Davis group and began to blow his long, strong and shattering solos, he was one of the most forceful players in jazz.
John Coltrane was one of the few jazz musicians who bridged the distance between the traditionalist who worked in the standard vocabulary of Western European and American music and the young revolutionists determined to create a new musical language.
Musically he was a restless spirit always seeking and always probing for new dimensions to his art. He was open minded and unprejudiced and quick to give a hand to the younger musicians coming up behind him, just as he was always quick to acknowledge his inheritance from Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, with each of whom he worked, as well as the other great players from whom he drew his inspiration.
If jazz is the epitome of self-expression, Coltrane in turn epitomized it. He played free and he believed — and said — that honesty was the criterion. He was controversial from the beginning. Originally his “sheets of sound” — the phrase was Ira Gitler’s, used in describing Coltrane’s incredible technical virtuosity — inhibited some listeners who just could not accept that much sound.
His later experiments into free form — he always insisted that he couldn’t be academic and that music should be dedicated to the goodness in people — were equally controversial and even resulted in the dispersal of his original group.
But no matter how difficult John Coltrane’s music became at any point, if you knew anything about him at all you knew that he was always sincere and he was always thoughtful and that if he did something he had a reason for doing it.
John Coltrane’s music was no accidental process and that is one of the reasons why it will live.
He gave it all of himself, all of his mind and his soul and his body and if you go back over the years of his own albums and his performances with Monk and Miles and others, all you can possibly do is to marvel at the incredible amount of creativity he packed into his relatively brief career.
Jazz is going to miss John Coltrane desperately. Loss of minds like that can never be made up. He was never for one instant satisfied with doing the same thing again; he worked at searching for what he called new ground over and over. He thought about music constantly.
Strength, quiet and calm. Those were words to describe John Coltrane off stage. Add to it a deeply religious feeling (his major opus was called “A Love Supreme” and was “a humble offering to Him”) and profound springs of creativity and you have a major artist.
The music that Coltrane made ranged from the simple, pure lyricism of “Lush Life” through the stomping blues of “C.T.A.” and the moving “All Blues” and dozens of others of the swirling tumultuous hurricane of force in some of his more recent recording. But it all communicated on a deep and direct emotional level. Coltrane, once your ears were opened to him, hit you like a blast from a hot air furnace.
The terrible thing is he died so young . ... Coltrane dead at 41 (sic) and Lenny Bruce dead at 40. Charlie Parker at 35, Billie Holiday at 44 and Dylan Thomas at 39. Our world exacts a terrible price from its artists.
This column originally appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle on Aug. 6, 1967.