A Legacy Supreme

The picture of John Coltrane made by photographer William Claxton in 1960 at New York’s Guggenheim Museum shows the legendary jazz saxophonist intently pondering the meaning of an exhibition of modern art.

What makes the photograph unique is not the surroundings; Coltrane was receptive to artistic expression that reached well beyond the jazz arena.

What is surprising is the lack of a horn. Coltrane’s unending quest for aesthetic epiphany via the intricate keys and pads of a saxophone was one of the great creative pursuits of 20th century music. Seeing him--stoic, concentrated--without that familiar metal appendage is a powerful reminder of the extent to which his voice, his message, his teachings and his journey were heard primarily from the bell of his saxophone.

It also is a reminder of the essential Coltrane enigma: that such an inner-seeking musical quest could manifest itself, externally, in music that pushed the limits of the jazz experience, that often had the quality of living, breathing waves of emotion--rich, primary-colored washes of sound that were passionate, deeply driven efforts to push beyond the boundaries of chordal harmony to a point of free creative expression.

Today’s finest players speak in awe of Coltrane’s relentless pursuit of his vision and of the influence it has had upon their own music.

“To know Trane, you have to understand his madness,” says Branford Marsalis, “because that’s what it was, a kind of madness, like people who always talk about hearing voices. Coltrane was hearing voices too--jazz voices. And he couldn’t control what was coming out of his horn. It just had to be expressed.”

Says saxophonist Joe Lovano, last year’s Down Beat magazine jazz musician of the year: “I’ve probably checked out Coltrane more than any other player. The melodies he played really opened my ears up to try to hear some different intervals; they encouraged me to put my own ideas to that new kind of harmonic approach.”

Thirty years after his death on July 17, 1967, of liver cancer at age 40, Coltrane’s voice continues to be vital to musicians around the world. More than any other single jazz player since alto saxophonist Charlie Parker--with the possible exception of Miles Davis, whose influence has tended to be segmented by his different periods and styles--Coltrane has been the influence of choice in the post-bebop years. His music has affected virtually every tenor saxophonist, as well as innumerable players of other instruments.

Listen to Marsalis or to Joshua Redman--the year’s best-selling mainstream jazz artist--and hear John Coltrane. Listen to Michael Brecker, who won two Grammy Awards earlier this year, and hear John Coltrane. Listen, even, to Kenny G and hear John Coltrane.

And the Coltrane beat goes on in other ways as well.

McCoy Tyner, the pianist in Coltrane’s classic group of the early ‘60s, has become a pivotal influence as a player and composer in his own right, largely by reflecting innovations that emerged in his years with Coltrane.

So too has Elvin Jones, the drummer in that group, become one of the primary inspirations for young percussionists of every persuasion, again by extending and enhancing the style that evolved in his years with Coltrane.

And tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, one of Coltrane’s most dedicated acolytes, has productively proselytized the Coltrane sound by combining it with all manner of contemporary music and world-beat sounds.

What is it about Coltrane’s music--three decades after his death--that makes it continue to have an enormous impact, threading its way with such persistence through so many different styles?

The answers, from the musicians who have been most affected by Coltrane, are as diverse as the music itself.

“The way I see it, Charlie Parker discovered the atom and John Coltrane came along and smashed it,” says saxophonist Charles Lloyd, a player whose own musical pursuit has paralleled Coltrane’s attempt to balance an inner-seeking quest with envelope-stretching improvisation.

Lloyd’s epigrammatic phrase means essentially that Parker, the primary post-World War II jazz saxophone influence before Coltrane, revealed the fundamental elements of the music’s modern forms, and Coltrane broke open those forms to reveal an infinite array of creative possibilities.

Wayne Shorter, who speaks of Coltrane’s “mysterious spontaneity,” recalls his late friend Davis’ fascination with Coltrane’s occasional efforts to play in a completely new fashion, as though he had no creative history.

“He told me how Trane would stumble, purposely, destroying all his expectations, his fingerprints . . . to get away from the things that he knew best--the safe zone,” Shorter recalls. “Miles said Coltrane would stumble and stumble, and then he said, ‘But when he finished stumbling, man, look out! The door opened on a whole new hallway!’ ”

The length and breadth of Coltrane’s influence were enhanced by the fact that his creative breakthroughs were divulged through the opening of doors into so many “new hallways.” His early work with Davis in the late ‘50s (and in his own recordings of the period) featured an approach to improvisation often described as “sheets of sound”--an approach still heard frequently in the playing of performers such as Brecker, Lloyd and David Sanchez.

Colorful though the description may be, it doesn’t accurately describe the remarkable extent of what Coltrane was doing, which had less to do with “sheets” than with rigorous, even brutal extension and amplification of harmony, often via finger-busting, rapid-fire runs and arpeggios. In his own works--the harmonically complex piece “Countdown” is a good example--the process is further complicated by momentary changes in the key centers.

“Coltrane had a lot for me,” Marsalis says, “but I was scared of it for a long time. It was too encompassing.

“Anybody who hears me knows that I was influenced by him, but I’m happy to say I’ve never been accused of being a Coltrane clone. I mean, it took me five years to figure out a way to play ‘Giant Steps’ without playing it the way Trane plays it, just to avoid regurgitating the harmonic sensibility that everybody else does when they play the song.”

In seeming contradiction to his busy up-tempos, Coltrane also was a brilliant ballad player who, on albums such as “The Gentle Side of John Coltrane” (Impulse!), could play the melody of a standard song with the soaring lyricism of a jazz vocalist.

“He loved to sing,” Tyner says. “Every now and then, when we were traveling cross country, he would break out singing something like--if you can believe it--’O Sole Mio.’ And I’d say, ‘Hey, John, you like to sing?’ And he’d just laugh and keep on singing.”

Strange though it may seem, Kenny G’s approach to melody, despite the dramatic difference in tone quality, is manifestly indebted to Coltrane’s approach. And players as disparate as Brecker, Grover Washington Jr. and John Klemmer have found ways to adapt Coltrane techniques to their own highly individual purposes.

“I was pulled in to his music pretty deeply,” Brecker says. “For me, it was a model of the way to approach music as a search for honesty. At first, I tried to sound like him, but it was never something I could really do. Now, he’s still in my playing, because my roots are in Coltrane, but they’re there in what I call a spiritual sense, in that constant reaching for new things that he did. To me, it’s completely timeless. It still sounds current.”

Yet another Coltrane influence flows from the group sound he established with his ‘60s quartet (with Tyner on piano, Jones on drums and usually Jimmy Garrison on bass), a sound that has been imitated by hundreds of jazz groups around the world.

“The thing about that band,” Tyner says, “was that everybody did their job, and everybody was receptive to the other person. And that allowed us to think about the music, as opposed to worrying about what the other person was doing. We were free to see where the music would take us.

“John never told us what to do, at all. He was the kind of person who would let you go ahead and find your way--I think he got that from Miles, who did the same thing with his bands. . . .

“He used to say, ‘I’m playing what’s around me. That’s what I’m playing.’ And I think that’s why the music came out the way it did, because of that environment of complete creative freedom. When you’re part of a creative experience like that, it stays with you for the rest of your life.”

And, finally, in the mid-’60s, when avant-garde jazz was exploding in all directions, not always with much musical credibility, Coltrane co-opted the movement. Producing some of the most powerful playing of his career in Impulse! albums such as “A Love Supreme,” “Meditations”’ and his final recording session, “Expressions,” he brought creative lucidity and spiritual ascension to the process of playing freely.

“I was always drawn to Trane,” Lloyd says, “because he had the spiritual sound and that approach. He was searching for something. The spiritual connection is what got to me.”

Coltrane’s highly individual approach to spirituality--it manifested itself in works such as “Dearly Beloved,” “Ascension,” “Dear Lord” and “The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost”--has been interpreted and viewed in many ways before and since his death, often in an effort to position him in specific religious disciplines.

But Coltrane himself took a far more all-inclusive approach.

“To Trane,” Bill Cole wrote in his biography “John Coltrane” (Da Capo, 1993), “all of life was sacred.”

Coltrane defined his thinking in the liner notes for “A Love Supreme” (1964): “During the year 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music. I feel this has been granted through His grace. ALL PRAISE TO GOD.”

Coltrane, who was born Sept. 23, 1926, in the little town of Hamlet, N.C., came by his spiritual attachments early. His grandfather was widely known as a charismatic preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in High Point, N.C. Music was in the family as well, in his father’s violin and ukulele playing and his mother’s love of opera.

Starting out on clarinet, John shifted to alto sax at age 15, shortly before he moved to Philadelphia to study at the Ornstein School of Music. He was working with rhythm & blues bands at the time he was drafted into the Navy in 1945, and he went on to serve in Hawaii with a Navy band (some recordings of his playing from that period are on “The Last Giant: Anthology,” on Rhino).

A proffered gig with Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson came with the proviso that Coltrane switch to tenor (since Vinson himself was a first-rate alto player). At first reluctant to make the change, Coltrane soon found a far more expansive potential in the larger horn.

In the late ‘40s and early ‘50s, Coltrane worked in every imaginable setting, from the Dizzy Gillespie big band to the small group of Johnny Hodges, from the R&B; band of Earl Bostic to innumerable faceless gigs (including, according to a description advanced by the late pianist Bill Evans, a job with a band called Daisy Mae and the Hepcats).

Coltrane’s breakthrough came in 1955, when he joined the Miles Davis Quintet, a job that lasted for the rest of the decade (except for a brief period with the Thelonious Monk Quartet).

In the creatively energized environment of the Davis group, all the many currents and influences that Coltrane experienced in the previous decade began to come together. Davis gave Coltrane ample opportunity to explore the complex harmonic extensions and rapid-fire rhythmic articulations that characterized this phase of his creative evolution.

He worked hard at it, his work ethic one of the most rigorous in all of jazz.

“I’d go see him at the Five Spot [in New York],” Lloyd recalls, “and at the intermissions he’d be backstage practicing by the beer cases. I’d go back and say, ‘Oh, Trane, you sound so beautiful tonight.’ And he’d say, ‘No, Charles, I just can’t find it tonight.’ Which was strange to me, because as far as I was concerned, in his playing he’d just found the hide-out of every deity that ever came through there.”

In the early ‘60s, Coltrane organized his best-known group--with Tyner, Jones and Garrison--to produce works such as his own harmonically convoluted “Giant Steps” and his soon-to-be-famous reworking of “My Favorite Things” from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “The Sound of Music.”

This stage of his career, from 1964 until his death, is perhaps best characterized by his “A Love Supreme.” It was a period in which he finally broke the bounds of traditional jazz improvisation, moving into unfettered soloing that was strengthened and sustained by a growingly pervasive spiritual foundation.

Given Coltrane’s relatively short time on the scene--a decade and a half, really--one can only marvel at the continuing repercussions triggered by his music. Like Parker, who also had about a decade and a half to make his mark, Coltrane packed a lot of musical life into a short period of time.

“I’m 44 now,” Lovano says, “and it’s really been in the last five years that things have been coming together for me. Well, man, Coltrane was just 40 when he died, and he had played in all kinds of contexts--big bands, walking the bar, rhythm & blues--in addition to making all that music of his own. But it was still a very short time that he had to do as much as he did.”

Lloyd agrees but adds an important proviso:

“Some souls are old souls,” he says, “and Trane had that maturity. Some of us finish our work early, some of us are late bloomers. Coltrane was a great master, and he did his work very early.”