Sensitive to the sublime
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.
