The Ballad of St. Coltrane

Commonplace Newsletter #54

John Coltrane is the only Jazz musician to have inspired the formation of a Church in his honour. It’s worth asking why he inspired such devotion.

They say the devil has the best tunes. This phrase has always bothered me, always rubbed me the wrong way. Because as well as being demonstrably untrue- Al Green, Johnny Cash and even The King himself instantly spring to mind as counterpoints- it has troubling mimetic implications. If the devil has the best tunes then all kinds of wickedness becomes permissible for our rock stars. They are necessary even. All of the cliched and stories of whiskey-swilling and drug-snorting and philandering become a part of the Faustian deal of genius and fame. All is permissible if great art is the byproduct.

Well I’m not nineteen anymore. I don’t buy it.

Of course fame must be awful, of course the endless road must be lonely and often boring, of course the burden of genius must be alienating (I can only speculate on this one) and of course musicians are as flawed and as complicated and as human as everyone else. But the fact remains that everyone is a role model for someone, as much as we may collectively shrink from the grave responsibilities of that role.

Which is where John Coltrane comes in. Because he didn’t shrink from that burden. As much as there is that is exemplary about the man artistically- his devotion to his craft, the commitment and seriousness with which he treated his vision, the excellent and innovative music which he consistently created- there is just as much that is exemplary in the man himself. A great artist is a rare thing. A great artist who is also a great human being is a rarer thing still. Such lives reward contemplation.

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Habit and Practice

‘I think a lot of horn players try to be like what they think Miles Davis is or what they think Bird was, and like that, when they should try to get closer to the thing that John Coltrane actually taught, which were the qualities of endurance, of strength- a positive stoicness.’

~ Archie Shepp, as quoted in Wilmer’s As Serious As Your Life: Black Music and the Free Jazz Revolution 1957-77

Unlike many of his more wayward and dissolute forebears and contemporaries- Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Lester Young- John Coltrane was not gifted with seemingly prodigious early talent. As a teenager the saxophonist was considered to be an okay player, good but not great. But according to biographer Lewis Porter ‘the loss of his father at the beginning of his teenager years was critical… in a sense music became his substitute father.’

The young Coltrane practiced ceaselessly. From playing in a community band during high school to a brief post-school stint in the Navy where he joined his base’s resident swing band, Coltrane became known for his dedication to his instrument. Making a go of being a professional musician in his hometown of Philadelphia post-discharge, Coltrane became increasingly fanatical about his craft. Stories spread of him falling asleep with his horn in his mouth or spending hours and hours practicing a single note.

But with the headlong leap into the world of jazz came the jazz lifestyle; nocturnal living and rivers of alcohol and then heroin- first snorted casually and then inevitably injected as soon as the withdrawals from the last dose loomed.

The drugs eased the pressures of constant travel and touring and dulled Coltrane’s toothaches. And they did not diminish his appetite to hone his craft. Upon joining Miles Davis band the pair- though polar opposites in temperament and playing style- bonded over music theory and their shared quest for artistic perfection. Ever the realist and with memories of nursing his own previous habit, Davis adopted a fairly tolerant attitude to his bandmates drug use. ‘I tell them if they work for me to regulate their habit,’ Miles once said in interview. ‘You can’t talk a man out of a habit until he really wants to stop.’

Miles, having previously quit heroin cold turkey on his fathers farm near East St Louis, grew increasingly impatient with Coltrane’s escalating drug use, but knew from experience that a man had to reach rock bottom before he could hope to get clean. The moment soon arrived.

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Freedom

In May 1957, Coltrane made a life-changing and life-affirming decision. He quit the drink and the drugs. Cold turkey. In an instant. From the liner notes of his subsequent masterpiece and magnum opus A Love Supreme he explains:

‘During the year 1957, I experienced by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and the privilege to make others happy thought music.’

Free from the yoke of his addiction, Coltrane flourished and his music grew in both intensity and complexity to become what the critic Ira Gitler famously referred to as ‘sheets of sounds’, those cascades of music that added the counterpoint of heat to Davis’ cool tone on his landmark Milestones and Kind of Blue records.

But a different freedom beckoned. After debuting as a bandleader of original compositions on Giant Steps for Atlantic Records, Coltrane formed his first quartet in 1960. Now as well as being free from heroin and alcohol, he was also free from the shadow of Davis and the limitations of being a sideman to such a singular, mercurial and domineering bandleader. Coltrane with his long, searching and demanding improvisations, had for some time been fit to play in no band but one where he could be the leader. And so he grasped the opportunity with both hands.

As he told Down Beat Magazine at the time: ‘I feel that we have every reason to face the future optimistically.’ He was not wrong.

A few personnel changes later and Coltrane arrived at his classic quartet configuration with his saxophone virtuosity being backed by Elvin Jones on drums, McCoy Tyner on piano and Jimmy Garrison on bass. Great albums followed, and accolades and increasing sales and Impulse! -the newly formed label the quartet were signed to- quickly became known as The House That Trane Built.

This success was the culmination of a spiritual vision for the music that was (re)born in Coltrane after the fog of drugs had been lifted:

‘Just recently,’ Coltrane explained in an interview from this period, ‘Just recently I’ve tried to become even more aware of the other side- the life side of music. I feel, I’m just beginning again… [music] is a reflection of the universe, like having life in miniature. You just take a situation in your life or an emotion you know and you out it into music.’

The band were as focused, driven, professional and serious as any group of musicians have ever been. They arrived to the venue on time, locked in, ready to go. The quartet worked forty-five weeks a year, six nights a week, three sets a night, sometimes four on the weekend. The blade was kept razor sharp.

Visions come to prepared spirits, as the organic chemist August Kekune once said. And the Coltrane of this period was prepared like no other.

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A Love Supreme

Coltrane needed some time off. 1964 had been a year or ceaseless work, even by his standards. His first son was born in August. He and his wife Alice- herself a brilliant musician- had recently brought their first home in a quiet part of Long Island. The pieces were all lined up, he would have the chance to spend a few weeks away from the road, from the studio, from his saxophone and to simply relax and enjoy family life.

But rest does not come easy to the obsessive, even when circumstances permit. As Alice tells it:

‘There was an unoccupied area up there [in the top floor of the house] where we hardly ever went, sometimes a family member would visit and would stay there. John would go up there, take little portions of food every now and then, spending his time pondering over the music he heard within himself.’

After five days of such seclusion with pen, paper, saxophone and his thoughts, Coltrane reappeared, serene. Alice continues:

It was like Moses coming down from the mountain, it was so beautiful. He walked down and there was that joy, that peace in his face, tranquility. So I said, ‘Tell me everything, we didn’t see you really for four or five days…’ He said, ‘This is the first time that I have received all of the music for what I want to record, in a suite. This is the first time I have everything, everything ready.’

This suite was recorded as A Love Supreme, Coltrane’s finest record and one of the finest records in jazz history. Heartfelt, somber, joyous, searching, pleading, exuberant, hypnotic and energetic all at once. The kind of record that grows with each listen. The kind of record that turns you into a pretentious-sounding, superlative-tossing pseud if even you find yourself in the situation of trying to describe it in writing.

The drummer on that record, the phenomenal Elvin Jones, might have summed it up best:

If you want to know who John Coltrane was, you have to know A Love Supreme. It is like the culmination of one man’s life, the whole story of his entire life. When a person wants to become an American citizen, he or she has to say the pledge of allegiance in front of God. A Love Supreme is John’s pledge of allegiance.

It was a culmination, an encapsulation. A complete artistic statement. That elusive thing that everyone with a spark of creativity longs to create: a true masterpiece.

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Ascension

Though he never quite hit the same majestic heights of A Love Supreme- an impossible task- Coltrane kept touring, recording, searching, experimenting, growing. The classic quartet disbanded after a run of four storied years and younger and more avant garde acolytes such as Archie Shepp and Pharaoh Sanders were drafted in.

The music became free and looser, much to the annoyance of many of the music critic establishment and a good chunk of Coltrane’s own fanbase. But segments of the newly emerging hippie generation loved the spiritual ambition and yearning of this ‘New Thing’, this ‘Free Jazz’, with its daring experimentation, with its meditative and psychedelic breaking away from conventional notions of time signatures, composition length, and rhythmic uniformity.

But it wasn’t to last. In 1967, only three years after A Love Supreme, Coltrane died at the age of forty. Some speculate that the liver cancer that killed him was the result of those prior dark years of needles and bottles, that the cancer was the sad conclusion of a cirrhosis or hepatitis that lingered and festered from those days.

What music this death deprived us of is hard to fathom. Imagine what music the figure of a Wise Old Man Coltrane could have given us if he were still alive and playing like his contemporaries Wayne Shorter and Sonny Rollins.

But it wasn’t to be. Yet, this isn’t a sad story. It isn’t one of regret. A year before his death Coltrane stated that ‘[He] want[ed] to be a force for real good.’ He achieved that. He inspired a whole generation of jazz musicians to not only be daring players who challenge themselves and their audiences, he also inspired them to be better people- generous, community-minded, humble, honest.

He was an exemplar, someone worthy of emulation. A model of how to approach your art in a world where most- regardless of their talent- shun that responsibility.

In researching this piece I have not found anyone who ever said a bad word about Coltrane. He was a good man. Even the bout of alcoholism and drug addiction didn’t seem to mar his fundamental decency, mild-mannered kindness and desire to learn and teach about music. And against what scandalous biographical convention would have you believe, Coltrane only got better when he became sober. He gained an edge, rather than lost one, when he put the substances behind him. And when he reconnected with his spirituality (‘I believe in all religions’ he said a year before his untimely death) he became an ever more ferocious and daring innovator rather than artistically regressing to bland and inoffensive musical pieties.

Now I’m not saying the man was a saint. But when I contemplate Coltrane’s life and his example, and when I put A Love Supreme on the turntable, I can certainly see how someone might well be tempted to come to that conclusion.

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