John Coltrane

The Full Biography

John Coltrane. Saxophonist. The North Carolina seeker who made a tenor into a form of prayer, then died at forty before the search had agreed to stop.

This is his story.

The image most people still carry is sweat, a closed eye, and the four movements of A Love Supreme treated as a civic hymn. A chanted phrase. A saxophone that seems to be reaching past the room. What the still cannot show is John William Coltrane of Hamlet and High Point, a run of family deaths when he was twelve, a Navy bandsman in Hawaii, a chair in Miles Davis’s quintet that he occupied and then left, a habit he put down, and a death in Huntington, New York, that the recordings have never accepted as the end of the work.

He was born on September 23, 1926, in Hamlet, North Carolina, a railroad town, to John R. Coltrane, a tailor who also played music, and Alice Blair. The family soon moved to High Point. Around 1938 and 1939 his father, his grandparents, and an uncle died in a short span. He was twelve. The first pressure was grief with a clarinet in it. He took up the saxophone in his teens, first alto, then the tenor that would become the public instrument. In 1943 the remaining household went north to Philadelphia, where a young player could hear the real music after dark and still have a kitchen in the morning.

In 1945 he entered the Navy. After the war he served as a bandsman in Hawaii with the Melody Masters, a service group that gave him a professional debut before the clubs had his name. Back on the mainland he worked the circuit that made a saxophonist employable: Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, then the orbit of Dizzy Gillespie’s big band and small groups. The door the public still recognizes is 1955, when Miles Davis hired him for a quintet that also held Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones. The sound was already searching. The life was not yet clean.

Heroin and alcohol were in the file. In 1957 Davis fired him. That year is the hinge inside the hinge. Coltrane spent months with Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot in New York, learning how silence and cluster could be the same instruction. With help from his wife, Juanita Naima Grubbs — the Naima of the ballad — he put the heroin down. He spoke of a spiritual awakening. On September 15, 1957, for Blue Note, he recorded Blue Train, a hard-bop session that already sounds like a man in a hurry to get somewhere the form has not named. He rejoined Davis. In 1959 he occupied the room called Kind of Blue. He did not stay. Occupying and leaving is the career in one motion.

Giant Steps, recorded in May 1959 and released in 1960 on Atlantic, is a harmonic assault still used as a test. The chord movement — the “Coltrane changes” — asks a player to think in a new key every few beats. My Favorite Things, recorded in October 1960 and released in 1961, took a Rodgers and Hammerstein waltz, put it on soprano saxophone, and stretched it until a Broadway tune became a modal climate. He had left Davis to lead. The classic quartet assembled around him: McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, Elvin Jones on drums. From about 1962 until 1965 that group was as complete a working band as the music has hired.

On December 9, 1964, at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, the quartet recorded A Love Supreme. Impulse! released it in February 1965. Four parts: Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance, Psalm. He chanted the title phrase into the horn. He wrote of the suite as thanks — for having been made able to put the habit down, for a God he was no longer embarrassed to name. Listeners who do not keep jazz in the house still know those twenty-three minutes. It is a monument. It is also a method: play through the problem until the problem becomes praise.

I want to be a force for real good. I know that there are bad forces, but I want to be the opposite force.John Coltrane

That is the turn, and it is easy to file as a conversion story with a pretty album at the end. The turn is the 1957 refusal — the firing, the Five Spot, the end of the needle — and then the decision to treat every chorus after that as a spiritual and musical problem that could be solved only by playing through it. A lot of sidemen stay in Davis’s weather. Coltrane became a weather of his own. The last two years split rooms. Some listeners still walk out. He did not sand the work to keep them seated.

The Atlantic years are a shop, not a preface. Giant Steps and My Favorite Things sit at the front. Coltrane Jazz and Coltrane’s Sound filled the same stretch. Olé Coltrane (1961) put a Spanish mode under the tenor. Africa/Brass, his first Impulse! date, opened the new house with a large ensemble and Eric Dolphy in the room. The Village Vanguard nights of November 1961 — issued as Live at the Village Vanguard and, years on, as a complete set — are the club as laboratory: “Chasin’ the Trane,” a long blues that treats a downtown room as a chapel without asking the chapel’s permission. Duke Ellington & John Coltrane (1962) is a conversation between a young seeker and an American institution. Ballads (1963) and John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman the same year are the quiet books. He could still play a standard as if it were a letter. He chose, more and more, not to stay there.

Crescent (1964) is the quartet just before the suite: Tyner, Garrison, Jones, a band that already knew how to wait. Impulse! kept the tape running. The John Coltrane Quartet Plays (1965) took “Chim Chim Cheree” and “Nature Boy” and stretched them until Broadway was only a starting key. Transition, recorded in 1965 and issued after he was gone, is the hinge inside the last shop. Meditations (1965) added Pharoah Sanders and a second drummer and asked the listener to sit inside a sound that no longer offered a chorus as a courtesy. Kulu Sé Mama and Om belong to the same season. He had become, in three labels and a decade, the tenor a generation used as a measuring stick and then could not follow.

Home, by the mid-1960s, was a house in Dix Hills, on Long Island, a suburban address for a man whose nights were still downtown and on the road. He practiced as if the horn were a liturgy. Friends describe hours in a room before the gig, scales and patterns that were not warm-ups so much as a second service. Naima had been the first marriage and the ballad. Alice McLeod, whom he married in 1965, became the pianist in the last groups and the keeper of the spiritual household. Ravi, John Jr., and Oran are the children of that house. The body was already keeping a different set of books. The liver, the old drinking, the old habit, the hard touring — those were in the file before anyone used the word cancer in public. Impulse! kept issuing the dates. The road kept asking for another night. He gave those last nights until Huntington Hospital, in July, took the calendar from him.

He married Juanita Naima Grubbs in 1955. The marriage ended as the music grew louder and more itinerant. In 1965 he married Alice McLeod, the pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane, who would carry the spiritual and musical household after he was gone. Their children include Ravi, who became a saxophonist in his own right, and John Jr. and Oran. Friends from the quartet describe a man who was first in the room with a problem and last to put the horn down. The Coltrane in Huntington at the end was a body the search had used hard. Both the monk of the suite and the exhausted traveler are the life.

The later years

After A Love Supreme he did not retire into the hymn. In June 1965 he recorded Ascension, a large-ensemble blast that still divides people who agree on the quartet. Pharoah Sanders often stood beside him. Elvin Jones and then Rashied Ali changed the drum chair’s weather. Alice moved onto the piano bench as Tyner stepped away. The pieces grew longer. The harmony loosened until it was barely a floor. Live at the Village Vanguard Again! (1966) and the Japanese tour of the same year are the last great public nights of a band that no longer resembled the 1962 machine. In February 1967, with Ali only, he recorded the duets issued years after as Interstellar Space. Expression, taped in the spring of 1967, is among the last studio dates. This is not a decline story. It is a search some ticket buyers would not sit through, and a leader who accepted the empty chairs as part of the price.

The liver had been a file for years — the old drinking, the old habit, the hard touring. He kept working into the summer. On July 17, 1967, he died at Huntington Hospital on Long Island of hepatocellular carcinoma. He was forty. Alice and the children were the house in Dix Hills. The funeral was at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Manhattan; the music people came because the music had already become a parish. The Impulse! catalog was already a church without a living pastor. He had not been given an elder’s decade of guest chairs and honorary doctorates. He had been given twelve urgent years as a leader and he used all of them.

What those last two years were is easy to file as chaos. They were a method. He added horns. He subtracted the piano. He let the drum chair become a weather system. He named pieces after planets and after prayer and did not explain the titles on television. A listener who puts on Ballads in 1966 and a listener who puts on Ascension the same week are both hearing the man. He refused to pick one of them as the official self. The Japanese tour of 1966, the Village Vanguard return, the duets with Ali, the spring dates that became Expression — those are a working calendar, not a collapse. He practiced in Dix Hills as if the next night were still a problem to solve. Alice was already on the bench. Sanders was already in the room. The body was already keeping a different set of books. Forty is the file. Dix Hills is the last address. The suite is the civic object. The untrimmed nights are the correction. The recordings did the traveling he could not finish.

After he was gone

Alice Coltrane kept recording, on harp and piano, and kept the spiritual household in California. Ravi grew into the instrument. In San Francisco, Franzo and Marina King had already heard the suite as liturgy; the Saint John Will-I-Am Coltrane African Orthodox Church remains a living congregation, not a museum caption. Every tenor still pays him a tax in search. Davis still arrives in the same sentence, correctly, as the first shop. Monk is the other shop. Forty is the file.

He came out of Hamlet, sat with Dizzy, sat with Miles, sat with Monk, put the habit down, built a quartet, wrote a thanks, played past the rooms that wanted the thanks repeated, and died before the church had finished building itself around him. If you only remember the prayer, you have the still. If you remember High Point, the firing, the leaving, and the last untrimmed nights, you have him.

Portrait: Hugo van Gelderen / Anefo (Dutch National Archives) · CC0 · via Wikimedia Commons

John Coltrane · Full Biography · 50 Plus Hub
https://50plushub.com/nostalgia/stars/john-coltrane/story