By Neil Tesser

At the time of this writing, an Internet search of the name "John Coltrane," using just one of the standard search engines, yielded 23,180 "hits."

We live in a wildly digitized world, and that figure offers an appropriate, quantitative sense of the influence Coltrane has had on not only jazz but all of music. Coltrane reaches out to American youngsters who grew up listening to rock, and to Carlos Santana, who profusely credited the saxophonist during his skein of acceptance speeches at the Y2K Grammy Awards; to classical music conductors here and in Europe; to pop singers in India, festival organizers in Japan, and, throughout the world, those who have the most "hands-on" involvement with his art - the saxophonists who have spent entire careers coming to grips with the implications of his innovations. Even discounting the duplicate Internet hits and the merely passing references, the number 23,180 is fairly stupefying - all the more so because at this writing, John Coltrane has been dead almost 35 years.

Coltrane's influence exerts almost as much force as it did in the 60s, when his albums arrived at the rate of two or three a year and his concerts galvanized his fans and fellow musicians. While he lived, his disciples bore the stigma of mere imitation; in the 70s, his lessons became the foundation-stones for a new tradition of jazz saxophone. And now, at the dawn of a new century, Coltrane's cyclonic and impassioned improvisations carry the weight of historical canon. He has become jazz's answer to Beethoven, and his explorations of inner space further the philosophical quest of vital artists from every discipline: the restless drive of Melville, the voluptuous detail of Whitman, the clockwork abstractions of Kandinsky, the searching confrontations of Scorcese.

Many sources have recounted the facts of his life, most recently a comprehensive 1998 biography by Lewis Porter (John Coltrane: His Life And Music), but one specific fact needs reiteration. Coltrane did what he did - created the body of work that continues to attract newcomers and dazzle its old friends - in a lifetime lasting only 40 years. (Considering the similarly short lives of George Gershwin, Charlie Parker, and Jimi Hendrix, I often wonder how American music might have evolved if any one of these artists had lived to even middle age.) In his adult life of two decades, Coltrane managed to move from the bebop he played with Dizzy Gillespie to the "sheets of sound," a result of his relentless harmonic studies, that he unveiled in Miles Davis's mid-50s group; then, in the 60s, he transformed his style from the skyscraper steeplechase of the album Giant Steps, to the prairie openness that characterized his classic quartet, and finally to the dark matter of his last, self-consciously "cosmic" sessions.

Coltrane could traverse this journey in so short a time because musically, he never stood still: "He was always looking for things he could work around with and then incorporate into his overall conception."

The speaker is Zita Carno, who in the summer of 2000 retired after 25 years as keyboardist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. But as a gifted young pianist at the Manhattan School of Music in the late 1950s, she developed an interest in Coltrane's music that led to a scholarly article on his work in the Jazz Review - it included the first transcriptions of his solos - and a fast friendship with the saxophonist himself. Carno wrote the liner notes for the original issue of Coltrane Jazz, and her comments reveal she had a finely tuned understanding of what Coltrane was attempting despite her status as a jazz arriviste - or maybe because of it. It certainly contrasted with those longtime jazz listeners and classical wanderers who had dismissed the saxophonist's complexities as being inimical to good music.

"Sometimes, with somebody like Coltrane, it takes another musician to really get to the essence of it," she explains. "A lot of the critics are not musicians and they really don't have a sense of what the player is getting into, harmonically and structurally.

"Coltrane was heavily into contemporary symphonic music - Stravinsky, Ravel, Schoenberg, Webern - and a lot of the different world music. He was constantly experimenting. He was like what they call in baseball a 'Thomas Edison,' which is a pitcher who's always experimenting with new grips and deliveries." (Carno, it turns out, knows at least as much about baseball as she does about jazz; something of a "Thomas Edison" herself, she admits to being a pretty effective sandlot pitcher in her youth after tinkering with the "slip pitch" she learned from the Yankees' ace Eddie Lopat in the 1940s.) "Trane was like that with the saxophone, always experimenting. When he uncorked the soprano, that really floored me; I said, 'Don't tell me you're hearing things even beyond your range on the tenor!' But he was."

In 1965 the Coltrane Quartet recorded a 15-minute improvisation called "Transition." It became the title track of the album on which it finally appeared in 1970 - three years after the saxophonist's death - and the best one-word description you'll find of a musical odyssey in continual motion. Still, no portion of his career exemplified transition more than the one encompassed by this album.

Giant Steps had marked the apotheosis of the dominant improvisatory practice, based on running a gamut of chord changes (the esteemed critic and historian Martin Williams wrote that mainstream improvisers of the time had begun to sound like "rats in a harmonic maze"); soon would come an idiom based on scales and modes instead of interlocking chords, foreshadowed here by "Village Blues." This approach solidified on My Favorite Things, the album that followed Coltrane Jazz into the record shops by less than two months; it would next incorporate the split-tone multiphonics hinted at on "Harmonique," and then the wailing shrieks of joy and anguish that logically extended from Coltrane's timbral experimentation, and that his contemporary, saxist Albert Ayler, had turned into a street-tough tone poetry. Coltrane Jazz is the portrait of a musician making the signal transition of his artistic life.

Along with the music, Coltrane's fledgling quartet was also in transition, and this album captures that process as well. Seven of the tracks feature a backing trio Coltrane knew well: pianist Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Jimmy Cobb formed the rhythm section of Miles Davis's quintet, which still employed Coltrane at the time of this recording in late 1959. But "Village Blues," recorded 10 months later, showcases the new quartet Coltrane had begun assembling in the early part of 1960. This song documents the onset of Coltrane's two strongest musical relationships, with pianist McCoy Tyner and drummer Elvin Jones; bassist Steve Davis would give way to Reggie Workman before Jimmy Garrison joined at the end of 1961, completing the lineup for one of the most important bands in jazz history.

In between the sessions with Wynton Kelly and the hiring of McCoy Tyner, Coltrane worked with another pianist - Steve Kuhn, a Harvard graduate who was playing in trumpeter Kenny Dorham's group when he heard that Coltrane might be leaving Miles Davis to form his own band. Giant Steps had just come out and, like many young jazz explorers, Kuhn had fallen under the music's spell. He called the saxist, asked if they might meet, and ended up as Coltrane's pianist when the new quartet began an extended engagement at the Jazz Gallery in Greenwich Village. But Kuhn left about a month into the gig, which makes him the transitional pianist in a transitional period; Coltrane expressed no complaints with his playing but wanted a different sound for the band, which he felt Tyner could best provide.

The Jazz Gallery engagement drew critics' kudos and, says Kuhn, had a galvanizing effect on the packed-house audiences eager to salute the hero behind "Giant Steps," "Naima," "Cousin Mary," and other engrossing Coltrane compositions. "The audience reaction was like a revival meeting," Kuhn recalls. "They were literally pulled off their seats, they were going crazy - it was very exciting. Coltrane could see what was happening, but he never talked about it; he was very, very humble. He didn't talk about those things. He was really into the music; between work and practicing, he constantly had the horn in his mouth . . . ."

(In short, Coltrane attacked his music with the same obsession that led him to substance abuse in the 40s - and the same commitment that led him to finally kick both heroin and alcohol in 1957, after various attempts. "He had an addictive personality," thinks Kuhn. "He had gone straight by the time I met him, but he was hooked on these butter-rum Lifesavers. He was constantly popping them; he smelled of them all the time.")

The eight tunes programmed into Coltrane Jazz also depict transition; they include three standards, two blues, and three more Trane compositions that point forward. With its fair-haired, major-key harmonies and sprightly rhythm, Hoagy Carmichael's "Little Old Lady" allows the saxist a clear path on which to dance his harmonic permutations. It also reminds us of how his broad-beamed and hollow-centered tone- so effective in the apocalyptic swirl of his minor-key masterpieces - could sound almost sunny in different settings. The previously mentioned "Village Blues," echoes the famous "Freddie Freeloader" from Miles Davis's modal manifesto Kind Of Blue; it makes an intriguing counterpoint to the more traditional "Some Other Blues," on which Coltrane's solo nonetheless moves touches on present as well as past musical concerns. The remaining standards, "My Shining Hour" and "I'll Wait And Pray," might have stemmed from any of his Prestige recordings of the late 1950s; the first is cogent and forceful, while the second (the album's only ballad), smoky and sensuous, bares an innocence that gave Coltrane's ballad playing its surprisingly sweet punch.

The other Coltrane compositions, heard in retrospect, occupy essential gradations in the continuum leading from Giant Steps to My Favorite Things and beyond. (As saxist and educator Kenny Berger pointed out in the notes to an earlier album in this reissue series, "[F]rom the vantage point of nearly 40 years of intervening history, we know know what Coltrane was going to do next. In the early 60s it was anybody's guess.")

The darkling line called "Fifth House" takes its title from astrology. Coltrane had an ongoing fascination with the planets; he originally used the title "The Red Planet" for the song we now know as "Miles Mode," and used the names of various planets to title a series of saxophone-drum duets recoded a few months before his death. But as Lewis Porter has pointed out, the title also refers to the fact that Coltrane had loosely based the the line on his ongoing experimentation with bebopper Tadd Dameron's tune "Hot House." Dameron himself had used the Cole Porter standard "What Is This Thing Called Love?" as the basis for "Hot House," and the fifth house represents love. Coltrane's transformation of the tune proves as convoluted as the process of naming it. He has simplified Dameron's melody, giving it a mysterious, almost sinister contour; putting new chords to this melody, he ends up with a song in which the underlying structure ("What Is This Thing") becomes virtually unidentifiable; not until Kelly's piano solo, which returns to the chord changes that jazz musicians usually use for the song, does Cole Porter peek through at all.

In its reliance on multiphonics - the dual-note expressions uniquely possible on reed instruments - the melody of "Harmonique" opens a door into the near future, when such sounds would become part and parcel of Coltrane's most excited utterances. Without the multiphonics, "Harmonique" remains a simple, stirring blues in the tradition of "Blues March," a staple of Art Blakey''s Jazz Messsengers' book at the time; and Coltrane's excellent if typical solo pays no attention whatsoever to this timbral technique. It could have faded into memory as a parlor trick, if it hadn't forecast what would soon become one of Coltrane's sonic trademarks.

Without doubt, the album's great contribution to the Coltrane songbook remains "Like Sonny," dedicated to Sonny Rollins and based on one of Rollins's favorite licks - the little trilling turn constituting the opening phrase of the song. Coltrane may have started working on the song as early as the summer of 1957, and so had plenty of time to perfect it. The version heard with the original release of Coltrane Jazz in fact comes from second session at which Coltrane recorded the song. The first version, from March of 1959 (heard here as an alternate take), uses rhythms reminiscent of the West African music that first captivated Coltrane in 1958; the next one, issued first and thus the one most familiar to us, uses a samba-inspired beat and sonorous piano accents to frame the melody. (Coltrane recorded it a third time, for the Roulette label in September of 1960; on this version he abandoned his exotic effects for a light, streamlined approach that sounds like the basis for Charles Lloyd's famous "Forest Flower," written only a few years later.)

Smartly and honestly, Coltrane thus used imitation to celebrate his contemporary Rollins; within a few years Rollins, whose lionization in the mid-50s preceded Coltrane's own, would return the favor and jump into the avant-garde, which the Coltrane Quartet had come to symbolize more than any other band (with the possible exception of Ornette Coleman's). Such transitions proved vital to the leading musicians of jazz in the soon-to-be turbulent 60s. But to John Coltrane, they were as essential as air.

Neil Tesser
author, The PLAYBOY Guide To Jazz (Plume)

Reprinted with permission from Rhino Records. Copyright © Neil Tesser.