Whether legendary jazz saxophonist John Coltrane was inverting bebop chord structures or inducing meditational depth with his complex melodies, he seemed to shift gears and gain new expertise with every passing year in the 1960s.
In the 50s, Coltrane played in Miles Davis’ ‘First Great Quintet’, and experienced a spiritual epiphany after kicking heroin in 1957 that inspired everything he played thereafter. The same year his first real solo album was released, Blue Train, before he played on Davis’ seminal Kind of Blue and released his second major solo work, Giant Steps. At this stage Coltrane was at the forefront of the innovative changes in jazz, moving from the usual hard-bop style to the modal form that Kind of Blue introduced. Coltrane took modal jazz and ran with it through the 60s - from My Favourite Things (1961) and Live at the Village Vanguard (1962), to Duke Ellington and John Coltrane (1962) and John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman (1963), Coltrane produced innovative and complex jazz that divided the critics of the time, but is now accepted as era defining. In 1965, Coltrane and his quartet released his most famous record, the deeply spiritual A Love Supreme, which has since been regularly acknowledged as one of the greatest jazz albums ever.
After A Love Supreme, Coltrane became more interested in free jazz, as shown on the classic Ascension. After adding Pharoah Sanders to his band, Coltrane began to take hallucinogenic drugs and his music became more spaced-out, alienating some listeners. In 1967 Coltrane was diagnosed with liver cancer, and he died shortly afterwards at the age of 40, leaving a hugely influential legacy of jazz. His spirituality was influential too - in 1971 a San Francisco church began worshipping Coltrane as a saint.
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