Jazz Articles about John Coltrane

John Coltrane: His Life and Music

by Gene Lees
February 24, 2004

John Coltrane: His Life and Music Lewis Porter Univ of Michigan Press ISBN: 0472101617 Thirty-one years after John Coltrane died, just short of forty-one years old, he remains an enigma, not to only to me but to the various persons who have attempted to capture his character in books. There are, with the publication of Lewis Porter's John Coltrane: His Life and Music, eight books in English about the man. None of them, including ...

John Coltrane: Blue Train

by Mark Schlack
January 21, 2004

Imagine that New York’s 52nd Street jazz scene never died and John Coltrane lived his life out there, playing an endless series of jam sessions. What if he had never passed through the portal of Miles’ and McCoy’s modal playing, down the rivers of Africa and the Middle East, propelled by the Black experience of the 1960s?

Blue Train gives a taste of what that might have been like, as well as a taste of what was ...

John Coltrane: Ole

by John Ballon
November 23, 2003

John Coltrane never stopped wondering what he wanted from music, and never stopped pushing the boundaries. Trane genuinely strove to be saintly in his devotion to the divine, creating a body of deeply spiritual music that has come to be regarded as holy by his many devotees. His musical legacy was officially consecrated in 1971, when the Church of Saint John Will-I-Am Coltrane was founded in San Francisco. A gentle and enigmatic man of many voices, Trane was an often ...

John Coltrane: The Penny Whistle Tapes

by Derek Taylor
April 1, 2003

The late 1950s were a tremulous time for John Coltrane. In the stark wake of withering heroin addiction, he finally stood stalwartly clean and sober. The future lay wide open and uncertain, replete with possibilities. An all consuming musical quest was about to begin.After hooking up with Monk for an extended engagement at New York's Five Spot, his harmonic language would expand at a near exponential pace. He would also soon augment his signature tenor sound with the ...

A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album

by Joel Roberts
February 11, 2003

A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album Ashley Kahn (foreword by Elvin Jones) ISBN: 978-0142003527 Viking/Penguin 2002 Few recordings in jazz have the mystique of A Love Supreme. Nearly 40 years after its release it's still revered by jazz fans as a work of rare artistry, intensity and originality. But perhaps because of its powerful spiritual overtones and the unfortunate idolization, by some, of Coltrane as an ...

A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album

by Brent Wheeler
January 11, 2003

A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album Ashley Kahn (foreword by Elvin Jones) ISBN: 978-0142003527 Viking/Penguin 2002 The accepted authority on Trane and the authoritative analysis is Professor Lewis Porter's John Coltrane: His Life and Music, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1998. His is a splendid and immaculate celebration but one leaning toward strict musical analysis and written within an academic tradition. Mr Kahn brings a different ...

John Coltrane: Lush Life

by David Rickert
November 6, 2002

Coltrane’s records for Atlantic and Impulse are such towering landmarks that now his work for Prestige is all but ignored. However, there are many excellent albums in the Prestige catalog, and Lush Life, recently reissued in 20-bit, is as good a place as any to start exploring the early days of Trane. The brooding cover doesn’t quite do the music justice, for this is a fairly up-tempo, spirited affair capturing a gifted improviser who was just beginning to stretch out ...