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THIS IS THE STORY of how a postwar 20th-century musician became a saint, but it still leaves the question: Why Coltrane? What makes people dedicate their entire lives to their art? Many other musicians have made music with openly Christian themes and are celebrated for this — Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, Bono, Kanye West, and Justin Bieber, just to name a few—though most (men, anyway) seemed to deliberately make themselves look like Christ in doing so. (For example, West preached the dangers of pornography and premarital sex while releasing his “2019 record.”Jesus is King”) But what has always struck me about Coltrane, and especially “A Love Supreme,” is how warm and judgmental his approach to spirituality is. He seemed to know how good he was on a technical level – he definitely thought it was an achievable goal to make people happy with his music – but he was also not under any grand illusions. Almost every account that exists of him depicts a quiet and somewhat shy family man. He spent most of his free time practicing. He drove a Chrysler station wagon and lived on Long Island. It’s not that his music filters down the mundaneness of being human, but that he has an uncanny ability to transform human flaws into something useful. The difference between Adam Coltrane and the performer Coltrane was an almost alchemical transformation.
It’s no coincidence that more than any other figure in American music history, fans tend to experience his work in ways that others might experience a religious enlightenment. “I thought I was going to die of emotion,” musician Joe McPhee once told critic Ben Ratliff when he told critic Ben Ratliff that he had witnessed a 1965 Coltrane concert at New York’s Village Gate. record producer George AvakianAs described in Davis’ autobiography, Coltrane once said that Coltrane “got taller and larger in size with every note he played,” “seeming to push each chord toward its outer limits, into space.” In our zoom interview, Stephens describes a similar experience:song of praiseA deep clip from the 1965 album “The John Coltrane Quartet Plays” came one day while sweeping the living room. As he said, “John Coltrane spoke to me.”
There are enough stories like this to create an entire subgenre, but my personal favorite and the one that best explains Coltrane’s enduring appeal comes from the poet and playwright. Primer notes by Amiri Baraka A concert for his 1964 album “Live at Birdland” at the historic club just north of Times Square, sessions attended by Baraka, later known as LeRoi Jones. Describing the extreme contrast and mundane setting of Coltrane’s transcendent, deeply emotional music (which is one of the reasons why suicide seems so boring), he writes: “Birdland is a place where no man should wander unarmed.
“After getting on a subway in the bowels of New York,” he continues, “and that subway is filled with many of the things any human being should hope to find in their bowels, and then he walks slowly, upside down, down the stairs to the street. the traffic and failure that shaped this place, and then to the ‘Jazz Corner of the World’, a God-praising temple(?), totally, like Sodom, with just the first few notes from its horn, your ‘critical’ feeling can be completely erased and this experience will make you ditch everything ugly can put it far away.
Baraka admits that there are people who can’t hear what Coltrane calls “the daring human quality,” as if the notes he played were on a wavelength that wasn’t recorded for certain infidels. Like all art forms, even the most beloved music goes in and out of fashion. But Coltrane’s work not only endured, but the further it moved away from its original recording, the more enthusiastic it was and the more it was embraced. The only other thing to compare is, curiously, religion itself. If you let Coltrane hear—if you really hear him—his music, like God or Buddha or Dharma or God, “can make you think of very strange and wonderful things,” as Baraka describes it.
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