Coltrane turned the saxophone into a spiritual research tool
John Coltrane (1926–1967) ranks among jazz’s most influential saxophonists and composers. North Carolina–raised, Philadelphia-trained, Navy-seasoned, he moved from sideman brilliance to bandleading quests that stretched harmony, modality, and intensity. Marriage to Alice Coltrane linked two exploratory musical lives.
He was born on 23 September 1926 in his parents' apartment in Hamlet, North Carolina, and grew up in High Point. From December 1938 his father, an aunt and his grandparents died within months of each other, leaving his mother and a cousin to raise him. As a teenager he blew clarinet and alto horn with a local band, then moved to saxophone under the spell of Lester Young and Johnny Hodges.
In June 1943 the family moved to Philadelphia, where he worked in a sugar refinery; that September his mother gave him his first saxophone, an alto, for his seventeenth birthday. He took lessons at the Ornstein School of Music and by 1945 was playing in a cocktail-lounge trio. Seeing Charlie Parker on 5 June 1945 hit him, as he later told DownBeat, right between the eyes.
To dodge the Army draft he enlisted in the Navy on 6 August 1945, the day of the first atomic bombing, and was sent to Pearl Harbor. There he joined the Melody Masters, an all-white swing band, officially listed only as a guest and still pulling kitchen and security duty, yet he ended up helping lead it. His first recordings, an informal session with Navy players, date from 13 July 1946.
Starting in bebop and hard bop, he went on to lead at least fifty sessions, recorded with Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, helped pioneer modal playing and stood at the front of free jazz. His music grew ever more spiritual, above all on A Love Supreme (1965). He has since received a special Pulitzer Prize and been declared a saint by the African Orthodox Church.
Source: John Coltrane
