John Coltrane

John William Coltrane was born on 23 September 1926 in Hamlet, North Carolina, and spent his childhood in High Point in the same state. His father, John R. Coltrane, worked as a tailor and played several instruments as an amateur; his mother, Alice Blair Coltrane, sang and played piano. Both of his grandfathers were Methodist ministers, and church music formed a central part of family life. After the deaths of his father and maternal grandparents around 1939, the household faced economic hardship. Coltrane began on alto horn and clarinet in school and community bands before taking up the alto saxophone. In 1943 he moved to Philadelphia, studying at the Ornstein School of Music and the Granoff School of Music while supporting himself with other work. He served in the United States Navy from 1945 to 1946 and played in a Navy band in Hawaii. After his discharge he returned to Philadelphia as a working musician and, in the late 1940s, switched to tenor saxophone, the instrument with which he became identified.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s Coltrane performed with bandleaders including Eddie Vinson, Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Bostic, and Johnny Hodges. In 1955 Miles Davis brought him into the quintet that became one of the defining small groups of the decade. Heroin addiction and unreliability led Davis to dismiss him in 1957. That same year Coltrane later said he experienced a spiritual awakening; he overcame his addictions and spent a formative period with Thelonious Monk, whose music deepened Coltrane’s harmonic and rhythmic approach. He rejoined Davis in 1958 and took part in recordings that included Kind of Blue (1959). In 1960 he left Davis to lead his own groups, recorded Giant Steps, and assembled the quartet of pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones that would be his principal vehicle through the mid-1960s.

Between 1960 and 1965 that quartet produced a body of work that reshaped modern jazz, including the modal and waltz-based My Favorite Things (1960) and the four-movement suite A Love Supreme, recorded in December 1964 and presented by Coltrane as an offering of gratitude to God. He pursued denser harmony, longer improvisations, and, increasingly, freer forms. In 1965–66 personnel and style shifted toward the avant-garde; Pharoah Sanders and others joined the group, and pianist Alice Coltrane (née McLeod) became a regular collaborator. Coltrane had married Juanita Naima Grubbs in 1955; they later divorced. He married Alice in 1965. They had three sons, John Jr., Ravi, and Oran; he also had a stepdaughter, Antonia (known as Michelle), from his first marriage. His religious interests in these years ranged across Christianity and other traditions and were inseparable from his late music.

Coltrane died of liver cancer on 17 July 1967 at Huntington Hospital in Huntington, New York, at the age of forty. He was buried at Pinelawn Memorial Park in Farmingdale, New York. His recordings continued to influence jazz, popular music, and spiritually inflected improvisation after his death. In 1982 a San Francisco congregation of the African Orthodox Church, whose founders traced a religious experience to a Coltrane concert in 1965 and who used his music in liturgy, canonized him as Saint John William Coltrane, with a feast observed on 17 July. He is generally regarded as one of the central saxophonists and composers in jazz, notable for technical command, spiritual intensity, and a recorded legacy that runs from hard bop through modal jazz to free jazz.