Jazz Articles about John Coltrane

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Circling Om: An Exploration of John Coltrane's Later Works

by Simon Weil
August 6, 2004

Prologue Elvin Jones left John Coltrane's group in January 1966. A couple of months afterwards he declared: “At times I couldn't hear what I was doing--matter of fact, I couldn't hear what anybody was doing. All I could hear was a lot of noise."1 But, shortly after Coltrane's death in July 1967, Jones defended the saxophonist's late music: “Well, of course it's far out, because this is a tremendous mind that's involved, you know. You wouldn't expect ...

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John Coltrane: The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording

by Colin Fleming
July 12, 2004

Composed almost entirely of violently shifting textures and a commitment to dissonance that all but blasphemes melody and musical forms, this document of John Coltrane's last recorded concert from April '67 is decidedly horrific, threatening, and appropriately staggering. Having forsaken his famous “sheets of sound" for a new, overly propulsive medium in the mid-sixties, Coltrane's last phase was nearly anti-jazz or, if one wants, almost anti-music. Yet on this recording it is Pharoah Sanders who truly has his ...

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John Coltrane: Jazz Revolutionary

by Bob Jacobson
March 4, 2004

Jazz Revolutionary Rachel Stiffler Barron Morgan Reynolds ISBN 1883846579

Barron has packed an amazing amount of information into this small, 112 page book for “young adults" (middle and high schoolers), part of Morgan Reynolds' Masters of Music series. One of the author's chief virtues is that she does not talk down to her readers. She does a great job of explaining jazz, bop, modes and “sheets of sound" on just the right level. She ...

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John Coltrane: His Life and Music

by Victor L. Schermer
February 24, 2004

John Coltrane: His Life and Music Lewis Porter Univ of Michigan Press ISBN: 0472101617

This is a great big bear hug of a biography of one of the greatest jazz legends and jazz masters of all time. As with all great and legendary individuals, much has been written about John Coltrane, and it is often difficult to separate the apocryphal from the true. As time passes, myths grow up around the realities- and the ...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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 ...