Sensitive to the sublime

Coltrane: The Story of a Sound

JOHN COLTRANE’S music is not to everyone’s tastes. A legendary figure of jazz, and the name probably most associated with the saxophone during the 20th century, his influences have infiltrated every corner of an entire genre’s output. Yet there are people who just don’t get what he was about, what he was trying to do, what he was trying either to create or to deconstruct, just as there are people who don’t get Picasso, or Joyce, or Beckett, or Bob Dylan or Jackson Pollock.

Great art not only pushes boundaries but seems to exist beyond them. For a decade prior to his 1967 death from liver cancer at the tragically young age of 40, Coltrane mystified, confounded, frustrated and infuriated audiences with a body of work enormous in scale and diverse nearly beyond comprehension.

His restlessness is part of the intrigue. Through bebop and hard bop, sidelining for Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis (blowing on such masterworks as ‘Milestones’ and ‘Kind of Blue’), developing his “sheets of sound” before branching out to lead his own band in directions that astonished and infuriated in roughly equal measure, Coltrane was all momentum. Thinking in aural and spatial terms and possessing an uncanny instinct for harmony, he plumbed the depths of the avant-garde, settling, finally, for what Ratliff terms “music of meditation and chant”.

From the beginning, Coltrane practiced with an obsessive intensity, “so hard that he made his reeds red with blood”. When he was not playing he was listening, reading, studying, coming to terms with the theory of all that had gone before. Absorbing. And when he had his skills down, he set his sights on bigger things, with a “mystic’s keen sensitivity for the sublime,” on the power of the universe, the many facets of God.

Evidence of his brilliance, which would receive its full due only with hindsight, is abundant. Blue Train, Giant Steps, live highs: eclectic and exceedingly devotional offerings, at times touching on the apocalyptic.

Mr Ratliff’s book is for the hard jazz enthusiast and is heavy with explanations of Coltrane’s technique and approach to technique. The facts of the great man’s life intercede only when necessary. We learn of a heroin addiction kicked just prior to the blossoming of his career, detoxing “the cowboy way, shutting himself up at home and going cold turkey”. We learn that he left his wife, Naima, married Alice, had children. We learn that he got ill and died. But these details play out only as they impinge on his music. Take this as an excursion into artistry and the chances are good that you will love it.

If you are seeking a straightforward biography, look elsewhere.