The Everlasting Sound of John Coltrane
Born in 1926 in North Carolina, Coltrane's early life was shaped by both deep loss and deep faith. His preacher father, minister grandfather, and several other close family members passed away within a short span when he was just 12 years old, leaving his mother to raise him alone. The qualities of religion, spirituality, as well as grief and inexorable change came to permeate his sound and compositions later in life.
As a teenager, Coltrane picked up the clarinet before discovering saxophone in high school. After enlisting in the Navy and being honorably discharged in 1946, he immersed himself in Philadelphia's vibrant jazz scene, working his way up to bandleader. He played in clubs where he learned from greats like Dizzy Gillespie.
A call from jazz and trumpet doyen Miles Davis brought him to the next level. By the mid-1950s, after years of playing in big bands and smaller R&B groups, Coltrane had built a reputation as a solid, hardworking tenor saxophonist. In 1955, he was playing in organist Jimmy Smith's band when Davis called him and invited him to audition for what would become Davis' legendary First Great Quintet.
Davis was already big shot in the scene, but he had been out of the game for a short time due to a drug addiction. Coltrane later admitted he didn't know why Davis had chosen him, but his fiery, harmonically adventurous playing would soon become an essential counterpart to Davis' cool, lyrical approach.
Over the next four years, Coltrane was on some of the most important recordings in jazz history with Davis, including "Round About Midnight" and "Milestones," the latter of which was one of the precedent-setters for what became known as "modal jazz," a style that depends on musical modes rather than traditional Western major and minor keys. His improvisations grew bolder, and he developed the rapid, cascading "sheets of sound" technique, a term originated by jazz historian and journalist Ira Gitler. This technique would become his signature.
Coltrane at this time was also struggling with heroin addiction, which led to his dismissal from Davis's band in 1957. Determined to change, he got clean and threw himself into his music with renewed focus.
That summer, he joined Thelonious Monk's quartet for a six-month residency at New York's Five Spot Café. Monk's unorthodox harmonies and unpredictable rhythms challenged Coltrane to think differently about phrasing and musical structure. He later described this as a time of massive development for him, saying, "I learned from him [Monk] in every way — through the senses, theoretically, technically."
This period not only solidified Coltrane's place among jazz's elite but also prepared him to launch his own career as a bandleader. By the time he rejoined Davis in 1958 — contributing to the groundbreaking album "Kind of Blue" — he had fully embraced modal jazz and was ready to carve out his own musical path.
His own albums were groundbreaking. There are few artists whose sound is instantly recognizable, and Coltrane is one of them. From the intricate, harmonically rich first album "Giant Steps" to the deeply meditative "A Love Supreme," his most famous and Grammy-nominated work, Coltrane's music wasn't just about technical mastery (although his mastery was apparent). His tone — brooding, intense, searching — cuts straight to the core.
Coltrane saw music as a way to communicate with the divine, heal, and uplift. "I want to be the force which is truly for good," he once said. His saxophone voice — at times searching and urgent, at others meditative and transcendent — helped evolve jazz. His approach to his instrument and its sound was revolutionary, but his reach extended far beyond jazz. He embraced the blues, bebop, modal jazz, and the avant-garde. Rock icons like Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, and even hip-hop artists cite him as a foundational inspiration.
Coltrane, like Mozart, was taken from us at a young age, leaving us wondering what else he still had to give. As he once said, "There are always new sounds to imagine."
Maya Shwayder is the BSO's Senior Contributing Editor and Copywriter.
