I promised in the shout out review of Ben Ratliff‘s Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, that I had further thoughts about John Coltrane to share. This, what you are reading, is the kickoff post to that: a full listening project working through John Coltrane‘s final years of recorded life, one session at a time.
A lot happened to John Coltrane between December 9, 1964, the day he, along with his legendary quartet consisting of Elvin Jones (drums), Jimmy Garrison (bass) and McCoy Tyner (piano), recorded what was to become the iconic album A Love Supreme, and April 23, 1967, his last recorded performance, three months before his death from liver cancer on July 17, 1967.
During these final years, John Coltrane reached the pinnacle of jazz fame yet kept pushing to find new levels of sonic and spiritual expression. Despite the great success, Coltrane’s vision expanded and as a result his great quartet slowly disintegrated.
He and collaborator/wife Alice Coltrane welcomed children into their family, began recording together and began experimenting with LSD, releasing some of the most challenging jazz ever set to tape. Quietly lurking throughout was a nagging stomach issue that wasn’t properly diagnosed until it was too late.
Why John Coltrane’s Final Years?
How exactly does an artist, particularly one so emotionally charged, process all of this life while continuing to pour everything into their work? How do these life events affect their compositions, their improvisational techniques, their relationships, their inner feelings and outer expressions of them? Fortunately, John Coltrane left a legacy of recordings to help us track his zephyr through these 865 days.
There have been thousands of books written about John Coltrane, all of them incredibly researched by true scholars. This project is not one of those, but instead a compendium of observations and (hopefully) lessons learned by studying how one of the true greats filtered life’s greatest experiences into their artwork. I am not a historian, a Coltrane completist, a laureate of jazz literature, or a saxophonist. I am a working musician, artist, creator, improvisor, vinyl aficionado and occasional writer. These are my thoughts and curiosities, not a distillation of facts.
The Ground Rules
Everything we’re going to listen to comes from my own collection, mostly vinyl, some CDs, resorting to streaming only when a title is genuinely unobtainable on wax. For the vinyl nerds, I will note vinyl pressing details and the system used to audition these records on each post. The following catalog of posts are sequenced by recording session date, not album release date, so you can hear these final years unfold in the order they actually happened. In most cases, an entire album was recorded on one or perhaps two successive dates. In some instances, Kulu Sé Mama for example, the album was recorded over multiple dates, many months apart.
Some of these albums weren’t released in Coltrane’s lifetime. Om wasn’t released until 1968. Infinity, 1972, with overdubs Alice added after his death. Stellar Regions was released in 1996. All of these albums and their individual performances have been sequenced according to their recording or performance date. Listening by session date instead of release date means those pieces get heard in the order Coltrane actually played them, not the order a record label decided to ship them or stash them away in a vault.
This sounds like a small distinction until you actually try sequencing each performance into a group of chapters. The album is an artifact. The session is the event.
The Sessions: John Coltrane’s Final Years, 1964 to 1967
Twenty two listening dates, in order:
- Dec 9 & 10, 1964: A Love Supreme
- June 10, 1965: Transition, plus Kulu Sé Mama (“Welcome”)
- June 16, 1965: Kulu Sé Mama (“Vigil”)
- June 28, 1965: Ascension
- July 2, 1965: New Thing at Newport (with Archie Shepp)
- July 26, 1965: A Love Supreme, Live in Antibes
- Aug 26, 1965: Sun Ship
- Sept 2, 1965: First Meditations
- Sept 30, 1965: Live in Seattle (featuring Pharaoh Sanders)
- Oct 1, 1965: Om
- Oct 2, 1965: A Love Supreme, Live in Seattle
- Oct 14, 1965: Selflessness, plus Kulu Sé Mama (title track)
- Nov 23, 1965: Meditations
- Feb 2, 1966: Infinity
- May 28, 1966: Live at the Village Vanguard Again!
- July 22, 1966: Concert in Japan
- Nov 11, 1966: Offering, Live at Temple University
- Feb 15, 1967: Expression (session one), plus Stellar Regions
- Feb 22, 1967: Interstellar Space
- Feb 27, 1967: Expression (session two)
- Mar 7, 1967: Expression (session three)
- Apr 23, 1967: The Olatunji Concert, his last recorded performance
Look closely and the order reveals something a normal discography hides. Expression and Interstellar Space were not made one after the other, they were made in the middle of each other, three sessions of one album with an entirely different one recorded in the gap between the first and second. Kulu Sé Mama never plays whole in this sequence at all, its pieces are spread across three separate events, months apart. That’s what happens when you follow the calendar instead of the catalog.
What I’m Actually Listening For
This isn’t a ranking listicle. Nor is it a victory lap through a legendary discography. I want to hear what actually moved, session to session, as his health, his marriage, his chemistry, and his band all shifted under him in real time. Two years is not a long runway for that much change. How has your life changed in the last 865 days?
I’ve attempted and tackled a lot of creative work in my life including some pretty hefty writing projects. This one scares me. A lot. This is a lot of music to listen to, catalog, remember, make sense of and understand within the context of itself and another human’s life experiences. My biggest hope is that John Coltrane, through his recorded output, imparts some degree of wisdom, grace and understanding to me (and maybe you, if you follow along) to help us traverse our life’s ultimate gifts and challenges.
The next post, “The Ascension Years: John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme – Dec 9 & 10, 1964,” is already underway. Listening and note taking is complete and the rough outlines of the post are on the verge of being drafted. A Love Supreme is a record I’ve lived with for all of my adult life, finding a fresh way into music so familiar is its own kind of risk. What can I add to the Coltrane discussion that hasn’t already been said? I don’t really know.
The journey starts now, following John Coltrane through his final years, from December 1964 all the way to his last recorded concert, in order.
Spacefuzz is the recording project of Charles Morogiello, a composer, artist and guitarist based in Phoenix, AZ. He has studied, performed or recorded with Mel Powell, Morton Subotnick, Terry Riley, Wadada Leo Smith, Lou Harrison, Don Preston (The Mothers of Invention/Frank Zappa), Billy Martin (Medeski Martin & Wood), Mark Karan (The Dead, The Other Ones) and many more. His latest album, Crush Depth: A Dub-Sonic Submarine Symphony in Four Sides, is out now on vinyl and digital via Bandcamp. Explore the Spacefuzz discography or read more about the project. Stream on Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, and Qobuz.