John Coltrane 100: John Coltrane in Detroit, June 1966

John Coltrane Memorial in Hamlet, N.C.
Photographer unknown.

By Stuart Broomer

If I can write anything meaningful about the music of John Coltrane, it may be about the context in which I came to experience his work live, in 1966, after listening intently to his work for four years on record and writing reviews of some of it as well. One’s juvenilia is embarrassing almost by definition, but that’s my particular gateway here to a world in which Coltrane was playing live a few feet in front of me. 13 months later he passed away. I write this hopefully to communicate something of the challenging world in which Coltrane made his music, that ever more intense, more radically free music, as testimony to his courage and vision as a great artist, as large a person as one might be in that world.

The John Coltrane Reference (Routledge, 2008) by Chris DeVito, Yasuhiro Fujioka, Wolf Schmaler and David Wild, edited by Lewis Porter (Routledge, 2008) is a monumental work of scholarship. After the introductions, there’s a Chronology of Coltrane’s life and career that runs to 357 large pages of fine print, followed by a Discography of 404 similarly sized pages in identical print, followed by 49 more pages of appendices, index, etc.

Very near the Chronology’s conclusion, there’s an entry for the John Coltrane Quintet’s appearance at Detroit’s Drome Lounge from June 17-26, 1966. The personnel, then consistent, is identified as Coltrane, tenor and soprano saxophones; Pharoah Sanders, tenor saxophone; Alice Coltrane, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Rasheid Ali, drums, Friday to Sunday, matinees on Sunday. Reviewed in Coda (“John Coltrane Quintet – Drome Bar—Detroit” by Stu Broomer, Aug-Sept., 1966, pp.32 - 33). The review is represented by just a few of its sentences, but I’ll restrict myself to the Reference editor’s choices and their punctuation as well.

“This is probably the most moving working band in America (…) Tenor saxophonist Farrell “Pharoah” Sanders is now the most important soloist in the group. (…) When (Coltrane) first heard Albert Ayler in 1962, Coltrane told him he had heard himself playing like that in a dream once. (…). This band has recorded five times but nothing has been released. Perhaps Bob Thiele is hoping Coltrane will return to his old-time sanity. I for one hope he will not”. (Reprinted by permission of the author. All Rights Reserved).

What I’m trying to get at here about John Coltrane is an essential drive for expression and liberation, for liberation from every constraint to discover what’s real or what’s at least possible. If my memories from 60 years ago mean anything, they’re about the value of revolt and the horror of the norm, the judgmental restriction of cultural norms, in some places becoming more restrictive than anything I might have felt 60 years ago (a festival of liberalism by comparison). As a result, I want the music more intense, more personal, more unpredictable and I’ll stand up for it anywhere. But it is not without ambiguities.

As a teenager in the 1960s, I became obsessed with free jazz. It was a promise of freedom from restraint as well as constraint, an explosion of mixed emotions from great sorrow to ecstasy, in effect, perhaps, a promise too far. My absorption in jazz had begun in childhood with the 1957 TV special The Sound of Jazz and followed with the eventual LP. More television: I saw the Robert Herridge Presents episode with Miles Davis and John Coltrane in 1960 and loved it. My brief initial puzzlement and rapid-onset rapture with free jazz started when I picked up the September 1961 Metronome at the corner variety store. It included an epic essay on the jazz avantgarde by the then LeRoi Jones (I still have the essay somewhere — stapled together — the issue is gone). The writing was abstract, mannered and strange but also enchanting (I had already read a paperback of Kerouac’s Tristessa), its subject an arcane revolution. By the time I had purchased Ornette! and Free Jazz a few months later, Metronome had ceased to exist. I had only Down Beat, a magazine at the time sufficiently reactionary to condemn John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy as anti-jazz in a cover story. A few years later, circa 1965, I started writing for Coda, then Canada’s only jazz magazine.

If there’s a shock in that original account (in bowdlerized form), it’s likely the ranking of Sanders’ performance over Coltrane’s. Without digging for the original, I recall moments from that night when I was listening to the dense, tumultuous music and focussing on the brilliant screaming mayhem of the two saxophones, only to open my eyes and discover that John Coltrane was intently hitting a cowbell with a drumstick and Pharoah Sanders was the only person playing a saxophone. This isn’t a criticism of Coltrane. He was one of the greatest musicians who ever played jazz, but we all know now that he was seriously ill and still carrying a heavy musical load. Other memories: I already had certain knowledge that Jimmy Garrison’s solos, as memorably powerful as they were, depended heavily on the bass’s tuning in fourths, and the complex, droning solos dependent to a significant degree on the use of open strings (I was a bass player at the time). At one point in the evening, Coltrane spoke quietly to him (I was sitting at a piano-shaped stage, my ear within four feet of their mouths) specifying the key for one of his extended introductions. Garrison then looked upset, arguing for another key. I wasn’t surprised by the issue. I was surprised that it was happening about four years into Garrison’s tenure in the band.

Another and crucial surprise goes to the heart of the history of free jazz. My party (myself and three others, young musicians from Toronto, three Caucasian, one Japanese) were, in effect, insiders (however “out” we might feel in the Drome). We arrived early, conveying Rashied to the venue since we were staying in the same place, the Detroit Artists Workshop. Arriving early, we found a strange mix of conviviality and formality. Standing just inside the foyer, Jimmy Garrison was shaking hands with patrons as they entered. Even to a bass player, Garrison’s right hand (the plucking one) came as a shock: it felt like a bundle of sticks.

As popular, as great, as John Coltrane was, there was a fundamental divide in the audience about the shape his music was assuming, that was apparent from the time the music began (a shock perhaps influenced by the very music that Impulse was choosing to release). In essence there were two audiences. In the Drome it happened largely along racial lines, generally slightly older blacks on the one hand, and the white audience, many significantly younger, significantly suspended between hip and hippie. One audience looked disgruntled, offering spare, obligatory applause; the other clapped wildly with exclamatory shouts. Late in the evening, Coltrane broke into the opening phrase of his anthem, “My Favorite Things”, its bright coiling phrases instantly recognizable from the first note. It was amazing. With my back to the rest of the audience, I could actually feel the room lift, so strong was the shift in mood, comparable, for a brief instant, to the sun breaching a cloud cover. Within a couple of minutes, the sonic tumult had taken over again, and one could feel, even more intensely, the mood of the room dropping, to frustration and disappointment, perhaps, and most intensely, I felt, the abandonment, the sense of betrayal.

In total, (expanding on Coltrane's grimly disappointed Black audience) the trip seemed at times to be about race but things would get much darker, or should I say lighter (toxic metaphors lurk in our tongue) -- I had gone there with three other young Toronto musicians with whom I played. I had an association with John Sinclair (then in jail on drug charges -- not sure how current John's name is, but his greatest moment of celebrity came when imprisoned during Woodstock: Abby Hoffman interrupted the beginning of the Who's performance with a comment to the effect that Woodstock didn't mean shit while John Sinclair was in jail; then Pete Townsend hit Hoffman with his guitar for trying to take over the Who's stage). In John’s absence, his partner Leni Sinclair was running the Workshop.

I knew The Detroit Artists Workshop through shared performances between Detroit and Toronto, performances arranged by John Sinclair and the Toronto poet Victor Coleman of the Bohemian Embassy, a Toronto coffee house and performance space. Shared performances had included members of Detroit trumpeter Charles Moore’s MC5 with featured musicians that had included Marion Brown and Andrew Hill (through which I got to play bass with Andrew for a weekend among other playing associations). I had also published a poem and a record review in John's mimeo'd music journal Changes, which I think may have only gone to two (or maybe three) issues.

The Workshop was the epicentre of radical culture in Detroit whether the issue was music, race, drugs, economics or language. Later it was the spawning ground of the MC5, of "Up Against the Wall Motherfucker" fame, who John Sinclair managed. He later was a founder of the White Panther Party, a Black Panther support group. When I met the members of [Ahmed] a few years ago in Guelph, talk turned to Detroit. Some members were thinking about visiting Detroit, and Pat Thomas and I found ourselves reminiscing about John, whose poetry Pat had accompanied during an Amsterdam performance. John's contract, Pat recalled, required a private pot smoking loft.

A few days before our group arrived in Detroit, a young inter-racial couple from the Workshop had been violently attacked on the street by the sons of a former Mississippi sheriff whose property adjoined the Workshop at the rear. While we were staying there, the sheriff had invited the residents of the Workshop to a get together/ barbecue to make peace. None of the Workshop residents (naturally) wanted to go and Leni Sinclair asked our Toronto group (whom they were temporarily housing, four males sufficiently groomed to get across the border without close scrutiny) to go as their representatives. We accepted with a certain reluctance, though things (barbecue, blanched pleasantries) went civilly enough.

An hour later, on the way out of Detroit, we stopped at an ice cream outlet before we hit the border. The sons and their wives and children were there as well. On neutral ground, none of us acknowledged the existence of the other. 

Charles Tyler, Stuart Broomer + Perry Robinson, 1966 
©2014 Bill Copeland

AN AFTERWORD: 60 years on, I frequently listen to John Coltrane recordings, probably more than to any other historical jazz artist. I have the complete runs of the Prestige and Atlantic recordings and most of the Impulses on CD and the recordings with Monk and Miles Davis and isolated one-offs like Blue Train on Blue Note. My usual listening choices run the gamut from the Prestige and Atlantic recordings (especially Olé, the last of them, with Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy and Art Davis added to the working quartet of McCoy Tyner, Reggie Workman and Elvin Jones). My listening range ends with one of my favorites, Meditations, with the “classic” quartet augmented by Rashied Ali and Pharoah Sanders. I hardly ever, if at all, listen to much that came later. Whether that’s because the actual experience of the last quintet live was enough – sufficiently intense -- to satisfy my need for that music, or that the music is so unstable or destabilizing that I don’t feel a need to hear it in its “frozen” form. The sole exception made among recordings of the last stage is Interstellar Space, the recording of four duets with Rashied Ali, recorded in February 1967, though it too is rarely played, singled out perhaps for the relative coherence of the music and the focus of its intensity.

© Stuart Broomer, 2026 

 

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John Coltrane 100: Exploring the Archives

John Coltrane - One Down, One Up: Live At the Half Note (recorded 1965, released 2005), My Favorite Things: Coltrane At Newport (recorded 1963 and 1965, released 2007), Offering: Live At Temple University (recorded 1966, released 2014), A Love Supreme: Live In Seattle (recorded 1965, released 2021), Evenings At the Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy (recorded 1961, released 2023)

 

By Lee Rice Epstein

1965 was remarkably transformative year in Coltrane’s history. Thankfully, through its ongoing archival releases, Impulse Records has continued to fill in the picture of how, as an artist, he continually pushed himself and his band, deeply and passionately giving his all at all times. One Down, One Up takes us right to March 26, 1965, where Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones play an astonishingly high-wire, high-energy “One Down, One Up” that runs nearly 30 minutes. The electricity crackling between players says exactly why Coltrane still matters, why he’s still adored, and why countless players of all kinds continue to study and revere him. The set’s recapitulation on the Newport stage months later (the second half of My Favorite Things: Coltrane At Newport), more clearly shows how the group was thinking about and working through their headiest ideas. That the Newport set was released with a 1963 performance featuring Roy Haynes in the drummer seat gives some additional dimensions to the quartet’s changes over time. Tyner and Jones moved on by the next year, while Garrison held down the Alice Coltrane, Rashied Ali, and Pharoah Sanders group. Reportedly, he didn’t play with them in the fall of

1966, when Coltrane led a phenomenal set at Temple University. Offering has been alternately reviled and lauded, cited by some as a polished but unnecessary bootleg for completists only. But, if one just takes a step back and considers Offering happening the same season as Albert Ayler’s seminal European tour—with the quintet of Ayler, Donald Ayler, Michel Samson, Bill Folwell, and Beaver Harris—and if one wants to get really interested in sympathetic wavelengths, you hear Coltrane singing reportedly for the first time ever during “Leo” on November 11, 1966, while Ayler was recorded doing the same on a performance of Sanders’s “Japan” the previous night, November 10, 1966. That Ayler later screamed during his memorial performance for Coltrane would be too on the nose if someone manufactured it. The two shared both intellectual and spiritual bonds, a beautiful thing we’re scarcely able to know of or understand even partly.

As the saying goes, it would have been enough to get these first three albums, but the 2020s has produced two seemingly impossible sessions: a live recording of “A Love Supreme,” also from 1965, and an unissued session with Eric Dolphy from 1961, featuring “Greensleeves” and “Africa.” What, truly can be said about Coltrane and Dolphy that doesn’t lead to a mountain of what-if or if-only hypotheticals? The hour-plus set is fiery and rich with ideas in motion. If someone told me this was 1963 or ’64, I wouldn’t doubt it. By ’61, both Coltrane and Dolphy were already well out in front of many contemporaries, and the mutual support demonstrated during their brief time together is beautifully realized here. On A Love Supreme (fascinatingly, recorded a couple days after Live In Seattle),Coltrane leads a kind of crossover group, with Tyner, Garrison, and Jones as the core quartet, joined on the tour by Sanders and Donald Garrett on bass, with Carlos Ward jumping in on sax at Coltrane’s invitation. Both Coltrane and Sanders add percussion along with Jones’s drumming, and if Offeringrepresents some kind of approaching end point in Coltrane’s art, the Seattle performance of “A Love Supreme” leads in the same direction, ever forward. 

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John Coltrane 100: The John Coltrane Quartet Plays

John Coltrane – The John Coltrane Quartet Plays (Impulse, 1965)

By Dan Sorrells 

Most of my listening hours are spent on freely improvised music. But when it comes to Coltrane, I love the classic quartet, 1965, right before things broke open (and the group, apart). The John Coltrane Quartet Plays is what I reach for most often. “Chim Chim Cheree” starts like another “My Favorite Things,” but less than a minute in, Coltrane’s already chafing against the melody, and after two he and Jones are fairly bursting out of Tyner’s measured vamp. “Brazilia” and “Nature Boy” enticingly point toward the searching explorations to come, where ideas were turned inside-out in dizzying, kaleidoscopic epics (something further evidenced by various surfaced recordings from the Half Note during the same period, where “Chim” and “Song of Praise” stretch to twice the length). The sense that traditional song forms must still be made to contain Trane’s increasingly frenetic probing lends indelible tension to the music; these songs are like swelling water ballons, but they’re filled with boiling water. For those of us in the future, it’s all the more heightened when you know just how far things will get pushed, even before the close of the year.

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John Coltrane 100: Live at the Village Vanguard

John Coltrane – Live at the Village Vanguard (Impulse, 1997) 

By Kenneth Blanchard

There are certain recordings that stretched my grasp of jazz (and indeed music). Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure comes to mind. Coltrane’s LVV collection is another. Recorded over four nights in 1961 at the Jerusalem of Jazz, only five of the originally recorded numbers were released in the following two years. The 1997 box set is a genuine treasure. The structure of the music remains within standard hop bop spaces, but the moods blossom into an entirely new ecosystem. The inclusion of Eric Dolphy was one of Trane’s most brilliant moves. On Naima, Spiritual, India , his low horns (also sax and bass clarinet) perfectly match Trane’s tenor and soprano sax. Trane’s interest in alternative spiritual and musical traditions is obvious enough. His famous “sheets of sound” slide in and out of every line. I find the articulation of Coltrane’s own personality to be as vivid here as on any of his recordings.

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John Coltrane 100: A Sunday Morning Record

DUKE ELLINGTON & JOHN COLTRANE - s/t (Impulse!, 1963)

By Ferruccio Martinotti

Sunday morning. We weren't even looking through Trane’s records, we already had a clear plan for the centenary. Then we spotted it. Or rather, it was almost as if IT was looking at us. There it was, humble and elusive amidst some truly gigantic "neighbors": “Duke Ellington & John Coltrane”. When a title says it all. How long had it been since it last took a spin on the turntable? A long, long time. So, we not only dusted it off, rescuing it from obscurity and oblivion but also cast it as the star of our own humble contribution to the Coltrane forum’s tribute. A quick preamble. Our favorite Trane is the one who burned all his bridges behind and embarked on the Path of Spiritual Ascension alongside Alice, Pharoah, Garrison, and Ali: for us, THIS is John’s definitive group. Since we are certain that our colleagues will, as usual, handle albums like ‘Interstellar Space”, “Olatunji”, “Live in Japan” et al, with the utmost mastery, we opted for a record you won’t find on "100 all-time best" playlists or among the essential albums by either Duke or Trane, yet one that is nonetheless deeply compelling. First things first: when and how did this encounter (the only one, if we’re not mistaken) between two of the greatest musicians of all time take place? The date: September 26, 1962. The setting: Rudy Van Gelder’s Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, a place so legendary that, like Atlantis, one wonders if it ever truly existed. The mastermind: Bob Thiele, a producer at Impulse! The Maestri arrived at the meeting from different trajectories, not just in terms of age, but artistically as well. Duke, at 63, as the old king of the jungle, having already changed the course of music history in the 1920s and 30s, he wanted to show the "young lions" that the time to end up in the zoo hadn't arrived just yet. And judging by the extraordinary “Money Jungle”, recorded right some weeks earlier along with Max Roach and Charles Mingus, he had every right to feel that way. Trane, meanwhile, aged 35, was in a transitional phase. Leading one of jazz’s most sensational lineups ever (Jones, Garrison, Tyner), he had just released his first album for Impulse! in 1962, a record where modal structures were handled sublimely, yet he had not entirely cut ties with a more “mainstream” approach to his music (though, given the musical context, quotation marks are essential here!). It was as if, mid-journey, he had paused to catch his breath and look back one last time, before lighting the fuse and blowing everything wide open. The two arrived at the studio bringing their respective rhythm sections: Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones for Coltrane; Aaron Bell and Sam Woodyard from Ellington’s orchestra. To glimpse a moment of that historic occasion, we can turn to bassist John Lamb, who was present that day: “There was no music on that whole date. Nobody had a chart. We came in and we were standing there, waiting to see what would have happen. Trane would go and sit on the piano bench with Duke. They didn’t talk but Duke would be singing and Trane would go. Then, after they did that for a few minutes, they got up. Trane would go to his microphone, Duke would start playing and the rhythm section, we had to do for ourselves, you know. That’s it. He didn’t even tell you the key. He could communicate without words and Trane could hear it.” The eight-hour session yielded seven tracks: “In a Sentimental Mood”, “Take The Coltrane” and “Stevie” (two sketches composed right there in the studio), “Angelica” and “The Feeling of Jazz” by Ellington; Billy Strayhorn’s “My Little Brown Book”; and Coltrane’s “Big Nick,” a tribute to tenor saxophonist Big Nick Nicholas. At work here are two living legends who set out not to change history, but simply to experience, with mutual respect and admiration, the intimate joy of music. No overbearing displays, no pointless academic showing-off or gratuitous virtuosity. Pure Magic. Even Elvin Jones puts down the sticks of dynamite and picks up the brushes. It is a "Sunday Morning Record", relaxed, atmospheric, and straightforward, reminding us that in our constant search for the ultimate, mind-blowing thrill (which, by definition, is NEVER the last one), we often lose sight of the wonder of simplicity. This is the perfect album to set that right. Let us leave the final word on this experience to Trane: “I was really honored to have the opportunity of working with Duke. It was a wonderful experience. He has set standards I haven’t caught up with yet. I would have liked to have worked over all those numbers again, but I guess the performances wouldn’t have had the same spontaneity. And they mightn’t have been any better.”

May the Journey be light for you, dear John.  

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John Coltrane 100: Olé & Monk

By Paul Acquaro 

John Coltrane - Olé (Atlantic, 1961) 

In the mid-1990s I had just graduated from undergrad with a degree in Journalism and absolutely no idea what to do next. I spent the following summer living in a shared house with five other people about my age, one of whom was a good friend and musical partner in our band called “Joe Joe the Dog Face Boy.” We were working, we were playing music, all in all, it was fine even if a bit of a confusing time in life.

In the living room of the house, next to my room, was a shelf with a bunch of records on it. The records belonged to my friend, who had just been gifted them by his father. He had placed them on the shelf not knowing what to do with them - I am not sure that he even had a record player at this point, as it was the heyday of CDs afterall. I, however, did have a record player that had been accompanying me all through college and would be my only constant companion for the next twenty years or more, so the records, a rather eclectic mix of music from the 60s and 70s, would end up often on my stereo. This was how I encountered Olé. 

 

Olé, John Coltrane’s last album for the Atlantic label, released in 1961, was recorded with his long-time associates MyCoy Tyner on piano and Elvin Jones on drums, which already likely brings certain harmonic and rhythmic sounds to mind. Joining them was trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, bassists Reggie Workman and Art Davis, and the great Eric Dolphy on flute and alto sax. 

It was the title track that caught my ear. Extending over the whole side A of the album, it’s a modal feast that builds on a vamp derived from a Spanish folk song. Here, it starts with a single churning bass line and Tyner’s pulsating chords balancing on Jones' driving swing. Soon, Coltrane joins on soprano sax with an approach reminiscent of his playing on ‘My Favorite Things.’ Then, Dolphy lends his flute to the mix, paving the way for Hubbard’s solo, from which the track really takes off. It was rhythmically dense music, but not overly dissonant or harsh; however, for ears that could listen to jazz but were more attuned to rock, it was the perfect hook - a little more advanced than what I was used to, but not too steep of a climb. The B-side’s, ‘Dahomey Dance’ and ‘Aisha’ were a bit more rooted in the ‘jazz’ I knew. I enjoyed them, but it was the A-side that pushed me as a listener. 

Critics have called Olé a transitional album. Aside from the label change, Coltrane was also headed towards more experimental realms. For me, Olé and that pile of records also came at a transitional time, and helped reveal new paths and possibilities.

 

Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane (Jazzland, 1961) 

My plan was to next dig into something in that experimental realm. I had my sights on Offering: Live at Temple University, a live album recorded in 1966, shortly before Coltrane passed away, and released posthumously by Resonance Records in 2014. A funny thing happened, however, along the way. As I was pulling up the recording, I passed by Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane and stopped in my tracks. Also released in 1961 on the Jazzland label, this set of evergreen Monk tunes that had been recorded by Coltrane and Monk in '57 and '58 with changing rhythm sections. Two seconds of the opening ‘Ruby, My Dear’ and I knew I’d wanted to spend a little time awith this one again before moving on.

 

As the story goes, Coltrane was addicted to heroin and had just been fired from Miles Davis’ group. He took this break, and cleaned himself up and started to play with Monk. A residency at the Five Spot in NYC in ‘57 is the stuff of legends and a concert recording of the two from 1957 was discovered and released in 2005 by Blue Note, lends credence to the stories. Entitled Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall, it underscores the copacetic musical relationship found on the original release. 

Back to that recording: the tune that stopped me in my tracks, the slow moving ‘Ruby, My Dear’ begins with such a melancholic saxophone playing the yearning melody that it instantly romanticizes any space where it’s played. ‘Tinkle, Tinkle,’ with its playful and up-tempo melody gives Coltrane a chance to unfurl those ‘sheets of sound’ that he’s famous for. Similarly on ‘Nutty’, the sheets return in a generously flowing solo, studded at key points with with reminders of the melody. Drum and bass outlining the tune, Monk waiting to come back in with the melody, before abstracting it into Improvisational flurries. 

 

This album album is a high point in two musical catalogs that are festooned with them. 

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John Coltrane 100: Blue Train & More

By Nuno Catarino 

Like many others, my gateway into the Coltrane universe was the inevitable Blue Train, a 1997 CD reissue, with the cover altered with different tones from the original edition. I was beginning to discover jazz and, beyond the variations on the title track, it was the vertigo of “Moment’s Notice” that must have won me over at that early stage. And, of course, the free sound of the saxophone, and the fascinating process of its discourse construction in real time — fascinating for someone who, until then, knew nothing of any form of improvised music. From there, there were several landmark records, in a process that did not follow chronology: it went through the duet with Johnny Hartman, Live at Village Vanguard , the space journey of Meditations, all the way to the devotional magic of A Love Supreme, reading the booklet while following the music, and the pinnacle of Ascension. Along the way, an unavoidable landmark, Giant Steps (as with Ornette’s records, the title also announced the jazz that was coming) with its timeless title track and the melancholic sweetness of “Naima”. I was discovering the albums in no particular order, finding the records or having them find me in a random way, and then gradually organizing Coltrane’s journey in my head, as if piecing a puzzle together. In that process, my favorite album then remains my favorite to this day: My Favorite Things. Too mainstream, too easy, some might say. On ’Trane’s path, a milestone. Not yet the classic quartet, but almost there: McCoy Tyner on piano, Elvin Jones on drums, Steve Davis on bass (Jimmy Garrison would join shortly afterwards). Coltrane takes up the soprano saxophone and transforms a well-known popular melody into a piece of his own; starting from the original melody, he transforms it through a profound process of unfurling. From this point on, it would become one of his signature tunes, evolving into other, much more advanced and deconstructed versions. But this is the start. The LP setlist also has three songs that touch the soul of anyone who loves the history of jazz: one by Cole Porter, “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye”, and two by the Gershwins: “Summertime” and “But Not for Me”. In the context of Coltrane's quest and discography, My Favorite Things is a turning point. And, in my own listener's journey, it's music that affects me deeply. 

Nuno Catarino is editorial coordinator of jazz.pt since 2022. He contributes to the national newspaper Público, where he has written since 2007. He is the author, with Márcia Lessa, of the book Improvisando (2019).  

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John Coltrane 100: Soul Junction & First Meditations

By Richard Blute 

The Red Garland Quintet Featuring John Coltrane and Donald Byrd - Soul Junction (Prestige, 1960)

Culinary writers frequently refer to comfort food. Soul Junction is my comfort music. I go to this album when I’m not in the mood to be blown away by wild flights of improvised fury or complex compositions or arrangements. This is an “end of an exhausting day” or a “reminder that maybe all will be well” kind of an album.

I love the relaxed, bluesy feel of it. Listen to Garland’s piano on the opening title track. It’s pure bliss. George Joyner’s bass is understated perfection. The piano trio portion of the track goes on so long and is so hypnotic that you’re to be forgiven if you forget there’s a sax and trumpet still to come.

Hey, there’s the saxophone. It feels like Trane was digging Garland’s playing and was dying to join in. Recorded in 1957, Trane hadn’t perfected his style yet. But his genius is right there to hear. He’s fantastic on Dizzy’s classic Birk’s Works. Donald Byrd doesn’t get much mention on this website, but I love a lot of his Blue Note music. He’s the perfect trumpeter for this session. Garland wisely gives the two of them lots of space to play, and they take every advantage of it.

John Coltrane- First Meditations (For Quartet) (Impulse!, 1977)

As far as I’m concerned, A Love Supreme is the greatest jazz album of all time and Coltrane’s classic quartet the greatest group. First Meditations (For Quartet) is a beautiful piece of music and a fascinating document of a band just on the verge of transforming, both in terms of its personnel and its approach to music. (I prefer to say “transforming” to “ending”.)

The first track, Love,clearly recalls A Love Supreme,as if that classic album is the starting point of this new music. Trane is stunning as always and McCoy is the perfect accompanist. The best track, Joy, is relatively calm and peaceful, until it isn’t. It begins as any number of other tracks from this quartet and then Trane sits out. He’s let the remaining trio play some (for this group) fairly straightforward piano trio music. But then he returns with an absolute roar, as if he wants to break constraints the rest of us can’t see. This is one of several places you can see the seams of the band starting to tear. It’s fascinating to hear.

Much of this music was reconsidered on the subsequent album Meditations with Trane’s new group. A comparison of the two albums and the approach of two different groups to the material is fascinating, the second album justifiably being the more renowned of the two. But I find the first to be the one I keep returning to, as if I don’t want to say goodbye to this quartet.

I genuinely love this album, but I had an ulterior motive for writing about it here. It gives me the opportunity to tell the story of the time I met Elvin Jones. He had been doing a drum demonstration and a line formed afterwards for autograph seekers. When I arrived at the front of the line, I barely refrained from doing “We’re not worthy”, but I did tell him how much his music meant to me and said I’d be honored if he’d sign this album. He took the CD booklet from me, looked at it and asked “Did I play on this?”. (I assume that since the album wasn’t released until 10 years after it was recorded, he never saw the album cover.) I showed him his name in the booklet, he laughed and signed it, making this album all the more special to me.

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John Coltrane 100: A Celebration

As you are likely well aware, this week marks the 100th anniversary of John Coltrane's birth and writers and friends of the Free Jazz Blog were asked to contribute their personal thoughts on his music and influence. The parameters for the contributions were loose, only that it should be something personal and if it so happened that an album appeared more than once, that was fine, as what it meant to the writer was surely different. We ended up with our biggest feature ever! For the next two weeks we will be featuring reflections, reviews, and anecdotes about Coltrane and his groundbreaking music. We begin today an introduction from Sammy Stein.

Enjoy!
Paul Acquaro 

John Coltrane. Src: wikipedia

By Sammy Stein

FJC is celebrating John Coltrane’s 100^th year. For anyone unfamiliar with his music, the following offers a brief overview of why Coltrane is ranked amongst the greatest of musicians.

Through his approach, style, delivery, and unmistakable sound, Coltrane powered through the door that Ornette Coleman and others had left ajar, revealing jazz’s powerful, emotive, and transformational heart. Nothing post-Coltrane is untouched by his influence. His was not a deliberate subversion of traditional jazz, but an uncalculated stream of events, personal, spiritual, and historical, that converged in a confluence that formed his music.

Coltrane’s mother bought him a saxophone when he was sixteen, and he was influenced by players including Illinois Jacquet. His grandparents were ordained ministers, his parents met through the church, and Coltrane grew up influenced by religion. He chose a different path – that of music and was not discouraged by family, yet later in his life, it was God who helped him save his music and career.

Without his spiritual reawakening, Coltrane’s career may have faded. Early on, he was supported by musicians who recognised his prodigious talent. However, he became addicted to drugs and would arrive for gigs unshaven and in smelly, wrinkled clothes. He might fall asleep on stage. Miles Davis fired him, and Dizzy Gillespie didn’t follow suit only because of their friendship and his respect for Coltrane’s talent.

At the nadir of his life, Coltrane reached out to God. He described a revelation he had when God spoke to him, and he set about composing exquisite music, praising God and teaching his followers. He said, “My goal is to live the truly religious life and express it through my music. If you can live it, there’s no problem about the music, because it’s part of the whole thing.”

Coltrane’s first wife, Naima, was central to his early spiritual journey. A practicing Muslim, she helped him understand God’s presence in their lives. With her support, he overcame addiction within a year. His second wife, Alice, became his spiritual partner and musical collaborator. A pianist and harpist, she understood Coltrane’s desire to contribute to a greater purpose through music.

Some of Coltrane’s music has an intangible quality. He understood the spiritual and temporal worlds, and his music fused the two, expressing deep spiritual inquiry alongside the mortal complexities of personality. Jazz became a place where the human condition could be expressed with unflinching honesty and transcendent beauty.

Coltrane was playing at a time when conditions were ripe for rebellion and change, and he was profoundly affected by events of his time, especially the civil rights movement, initially siding with Malcolm X before aligning with Martin Luther King Jr’s belief in peaceful but persistent protest. He performed eight benefit concerts to support Martin Luther King Jr’s cause.

His music channeled anger at racism and discrimination, despair at humanity’s darkness, and the beauty of praise and worship. He had faced the demons of addiction and won, and his music reflected beauty, was personal yet spoke to millions.

The murder of four African American girls in the KKK bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 profoundly affected Coltrane. Two months after the event, he took McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones into Rudy Van Gelder's studio and recorded ‘Alabama’, later released on the album Live At Birdland (Impulse 1964).

As discontent rose, Coltrane’s modal technique challenged preconceived ideas about traditional jazz. Under his and other musicians’ tenure, jazz, ever the mirror of society, became more dissonant and unruly.

Coltrane’s music is as relevant today as it was in the 1960s. The messages are clearly and profoundly expressed and cut to the core impulses of humanity. Because of his uncloaked humanity, listening to Coltrane feels as emergent and alive for someone encountering the music today as it did to listeners forty years, or ten years ago.

Coltrane’s near-mythical status was helped by the Blue Note label, which signed Coltrane and other players, seen as risky at the time, and some iconic images, notably photographs by Francis Wolff, a skilled photographer and executive of Blue Note. Of over 33,000 pictures Wolff took (probably more), his images of John Coltrane in moments of intense concentration or creativity seem to capture the musician's essence.

One of Coltrane’s gifts was his ability to perform as a soloist or as part of an ensemble. Pieces like Davis’s’ ‘Milestones’ with ‘Cannonball’ Adderley (alto sax) and Coltrane (tenor sax) responding to Davis’s trumpet with twists and turns within the original mode laid a template for modal playing (try also Coltrane's’ Spiral’ and ‘Naima’ from Giant Steps (Atlantic 1959)). Modal jazz led away from traditional jazz and toward free jazz. Free playing was where Coltrane was headed.

In the 1960s, some journalists described early free jazz as a poison to jazz, and Downbeat critics described Coltrane and Dolphy’s playing as ‘nihilistic exercises’ and ‘anti-jazz.’ Miles Davis found free jazz difficult to embrace initially. However, a few years later Davis, like Coltrane and others, found free jazz liberating. Coltrane, like many free-playing musicians, connected the evolution of the music with a deepening of self-realization and the strengthening and expression of their beliefs. Alongside fellow musicians Yusef Lateef, Sonny Rollins, and others, Coltrane pursued musical mastery and self-realization.

In his suite A Love Supreme (Impulse, 1965), Coltrane expressed his love and awe of God, and the final movement is based on a devotional poem he wrote. He studied different religions and philosophies, including the Indian philosophy of Jiddu Krishnamurti, which he was introduced to by Bill Evans.

Coltrane perhaps expressed his love for God most during his free playing. His tracks ‘Love’ and ‘The Father, And The Son And the Holy Ghost’ on Meditations (Impulse 1965), albums Ascension (Impulse 1966), Om (Impulse, recorded 1965, released 1966), and ‘Peace on Earth’ from Infinity (Impulse, recorded 1966, released 1972), reflect his beliefs.

Coltrane used the ferocity of his playing and complex techniques as a way of worship. He said he created music for God and others and wanted to be the opposing force to evil. Even those unaware of his driving beliefs find something special, untouchable, and unique in his music.

Coltrane, Art Blakey, Yusef Lateef, and other musicians became part of the Ahmadiyya sect of Islam, which forbids the intake of drugs and alcohol. Coltrane said, "My music is the spiritual expression of what I am - my faith, my knowledge, my being. When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hang-ups…I want to speak to their souls.”

Some found Coltrane’s later music, with its contradictions and unresolved transitions, less pure than his earlier recordings, but for many, they remain some of the best work produced by any jazz musician.

Two weeks before his death, Coltrane discussed opening a music venue without alcohol as he realized this had masked his creativity.

After Coltrane died in 1967, aged just forty, Alice kept pushing musical boundaries, and her music took on a profoundly spiritual element. She collaborated with Ornette Coleman, Pharoah Sanders, and many others, and her music traversed from blues-infused melodies to unfathomable sonic journeys, but it was beautiful, and her talent won armies of devotees, so, partly through Alice, Coltrane’s legacy remained. Also through his sons. John Jr, Ravi, and Oranyan. Oranyan started playing jazz with his brothers but has gone into trance and electronic music production. John Jr was a promising bassist but was killed in a car accident when he was 17, and Ravi is a jazz musician. Alice’s grandnephew, Steven Ellison, AKA Flying Lotus, is a record label owner, producer, rapper, and DJ. Many of his recordings feature jazz samples.

Coltrane’s music and persona continue to influence music and musicians. From those who followed directly, including Pharoah Sanders, Lonnie Liston, Sun Ra, Don Cherry, and John McLaughlin, to nearly every jazz musician today.

In 2016,’ Alabama’ was included in John DeJohnette's 2016 album In Movement (ECM), and on this recording, sons of the original artists, including saxophonist Ravi Coltrane (son of Coltrane) and bassist Matthew Garrison (son of bassist Jimmy Garrison), played.

Coltrane’s music has been sampled on recordings by hip hop artists, younger jazz musicians, and many others. FJC is celebrating the fact that Coltrane left his influence, and there are some great pieces following this introduction. It is impossible to adequately record the influence of John Coltrane on the music that followed, but we can try. As a jazz musician recently said to me, ‘Don’t worry, just stick on some ‘Trane.”

Perhaps more than any other jazz musician, John Coltrane showed there is a way to play from the heart without constraints. When you can do that, you allow your true spirit to reveal itself. Like ‘Trane.

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Pendulum (Benoît Delbecq, Jonas Westergaard & Peter Bruun) - Opening Arcs 1-8 (Ilk Music, 2026)

By Eyal Hareuveni

Pendulum is a singular piano trio featuring French pianist Benoît Delbecq with Danish double bass player Jonas Westergaard and drummer Peter Bruun (both Westergaard and Bruun have collaborated before with fellow Danish pianist Søren Kjærgaard). Bruun initiated this trio in 2024 as part of his ambitious research project exploring new approaches to musical time (Multitemporal movement and embodiment through Rhythmic Design at The Danish National Academy of Music).

The Pendulum trio investigates all aspects of this classic format, including the most basic sensibilities of space and time, avoiding rigid structures, allowing instead for balance, elegance and fluidity. It challenges us to listen to its music as resonant arcs or shared fields of presence rather than defined by linear time, and explores new ways to transform free improvisation gravity into groove. Delbeq suggested that the trio will play with the presence of physical pendulums on stage, symbolizing the elasticity of time and giving a sense of pulse. These oscillating bodies guide the subtle, cyclical shifts in the music, which, paradoxically, feels familiar: music that sways and breathes, while finding rhythm in the inevitability of motion.

The trio releases its eight-volume EP series, Arcs, nearly three hours of music, in a monthly release cycle that began in May and will conclude in December 2026. These Arcs offer Pendulum’s idiosyncratic, enigmatic, lyrical universe, in which metric relations, shifting balances, and elastic phrasing are woven together in a kaleidoscopic manner. Each volume swings on its own terms, with no intention to offer a linear narrative, and uses distinct compositional fragments, notated and graphic scores. But the whole project accumulates into an open body of work that allows us to feel how time bends, breathes, and searches for an elusive balance. The Pendulum trio invites listeners to form their own path through the eight volumes and discover different insights and relations in their own time.

Arc No. 1 

Pendulum describes this volume: “Time leans before it moves. Motion unfolds patiently, stretching and rebounding with quiet elasticity. What propels the arc is not force but attentiveness, which allows duration to bend and return without breaking. Each swing carries clarity and restraint, revealing time as something more shaped than measured”.

The trio suggests sparse, deep listening, labyrinthine architectures with patient and subtle, cyclical-rhythmic shifts, best captured in the aptly titled, 17-minute minimalist “Exercice Elastique”, that patiently gravitates into a most delicate, vulnerable, quite irreverent groove.

Arc No. 2

“Afterwards appears before it is recognized. Movement writes itself into space, leaving subtle traces that guide listening rather than direction. Rhythms form paths, both adaptable and responsive, where perception stretches between memory and anticipation. The arc remains fluid, shaped by change rather than arrival”.

Pendulum sketches an almost abstract, empty map, from which it begins to imagine possible contours and paths, and how to find its inner, spatial logic, and its subtle rhythmic shifts, finally realized on “Plasticity”.

Arc No. 3

“Movement turns inward. Each gesture is weighted, deliberate, and reduced to necessity. Time thickens as motion slows, inviting attention to settle inside the smallest shifts. The arc transforms discreetly, as intensity is held beneath restraint. Balance is discovered through presence, not display”.

The 31-minute “Buto” corresponds with the hyper-slow and hyper-controlled motion of the Japanese avant-dance theatre, Butō (舞踏), that resists and fixated conception of time. Pendulum’s fragile balance was realized through an austere, cryptic, and often almost silent presence that keeps triggering our imagination, and not by technical display or mastery.

Arc No. 4

“Wooden time moves with grain and resistance. Motion creaks, sways, and negotiates its own structure. Oscillation becomes tactile, shaped by friction and patience. The arc holds multiple possibilities at once, allowing form and freedom to coexist without resolution. The rings of time are both counted and counting”.

The trio focuses on its essence, the ever-negotiated arcs that blur the distinction between form and freedom, and question our conception of linear time, turning it into a spiritual riddle, a kōan.

Arc No. 5

 “A phase shifts nearly unnoticed. Motion lightens, stepping carefully through softened contours. Layers thin and overlap, revealing phrasing where gestures begin and fade. The arc listens closely to its own balance, finding meaning in nuance rather than emphasis. The push and pull are their own reason for being”.

Pendulum refines its fragile, nuanced equilibrium with melodic threads that patiently, hesitantly flirt with familiar, playful, and resonant piano trio dynamics.

 Arc No. 6 (to be released on October 10)

“Momenta accumulate through return. Motion becomes practiced, framed by shared gravity and memory. Energy circulates without urgency, shaped by repetition and transformation. The past is present and future at once”.

A further, urgent, cyclical rhythmic refinement is offered, faithfully captured in the short pieces “Arc” and “Dance”, shaped by nuanced repetitions and transformations.

Arc No. 7 (to be released on November 9)

“Time folds into itself. Multiple cycles coexist, asymmetrical yet connected. Movement breathes across layered durations, allowing contradiction to remain unresolved. The arc sustains density without weight, continuity without uniformity. Listening is wide enough to hold all the all of it”.

Pendulum’s music plays a touch-and-go game in its own fragmented musical continuum, sustaining density without weight, continuity without uniformity, but with more structural focus.

 Arc No. 8 (to be released on December 9)

“Strange tools reveal their logic through use. Motion disperses, leaving resonance rather than momentum. What remains feels everywhere at once, absorbed into space and attention. The arc settles without closing, as stillness carries the last trace of movement forward. It is the beginning of the end and the end of the beginning”.

The concluding volume is not an end to this fascinating journey but a sort of beginning. The Pendulum trio already inhabited its own elastic conception of time, as the devoted listeners to this journey, and has established its idiosyncratic language. But Pendulum’s music tells us something deeper about life and the inevitable changes we experience throughout life. This trio asks us to adapt our time sensibility to its subtle transformations, fully embrace and be deeply attuned to our own ubiquitous cyclical and oscillating arcs, as we move forward, attempting to maintain an elusive balance.

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