Music Books for Grownups: 'Coltrane: The Story of a Sound'
Everything changed for jazz giant John Coltrane when he sobered up and kicked heroin in May 1957. Having been fired by Miles Davis for unprofessional behavior in April, the saxophonist turned his life around and joined Thelonious Monk's quartet that summer. (Blue Note has sold more than 370,000 copies of the thoroughly enchanting "Thelonious Monk Quartet With John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall" since its 2005 release.) Ben Ratliff, jazz critic for The New York Times, offers his own sober assessment of Coltrane's sound, style, and influence in "Coltrane: The Story of a Sound," a two-part tale. Part one is a fairly standard biography concentrating on Coltrane the working musician. Part two, however, focuses first on Coltrane as a musical sponge, soaking up the influences around him. He distilled them into the most influential sonic essence of his generation up to and following his premature death in 1967 at age 40.
Coltrane evolved from a lucid bebopper and cool swinger into a pop experimentalist (with "My Favorite Things") before cutting a thoroughly original path into the spiritual beyond in records such as "A Love Supreme." Coltrane, according to Ratliff, was driven to express the sounds he heard in his head, no matter what the consequences or cost. Fortunately, Coltrane found the band to execute those sounds. He may have been obsessed, not to mention a little depressed, but he left an apparently unalterable signature of fleeting notes on the way jazz is heard and performed today.
I'm getting a kick out of Coltrane, the sideman, as heard on "Interplay," a five-CD box set of under-rehearsed sessions he recorded for Prestige between 1956 and 1958 with the so-called Prestige All-Stars, pianist Mal Waldron and guitarist Kenny Burrell. Coltrane's famous recovery took place between discs three and four, so compare and contrast.