Modern Jazz

One of modern jazz's most innovative musicians, tenor saxophonist John Williams Coltrane, commonly called Trane, died a couple of months before he reached the age of 41; yet his influence remains as profound after his death as in his lifetime. His greatness comes from his search for new modes of expression as well as his masterful musicianship. Starting in the bebop style of the 1940s, he reshaped modern jazz as a leader in the avant-garde with his later free form style, and modal improvisation.

"John Coltrane's life was based on a series of discoveries, most of them a result of both hard work and the deepest introspection�(he) was no prodigy and not until he was well into his 20s did he comes to realize how truly extraordinary he was�The surface of his life offers little clues as to the brilliant fate toward which, at times haltingly, he strode" (Nisenson 3).

Born September 23, 1926 in Hamlet, North Carolina, his family moved to High Point, North Carolina with his maternal grandfather when Coltrane was a few months old, and his musical roots are there. As a small child he was exposed to the music of the southern African-American church where both his grandfathers had been ministers. This exposure gave him a strong sense of both music and religion. His parents also loved music; his mother played piano and sang in the church choir, while his father, `n amateur musichan, played violin and ukulele. Coltrane's first instrument was a clarinet, which he received at the age

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g his drug habit, he moved back to New York in 1957 with his wife of two years, Juanita - also called by her Moslem name, Naima - and stepdaughter, and joined Thelonious Monk, playing the historic Five Spot gigs. It was during this time that Coltrane developed his famous "sheets of sound" style, a term coined by Downbeat Magazine jazz critic Ira Gitler in a review of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. Gitler wrote, as Coltrane "learned harmonically from Davis and Monk, and developed his mechanical skills, a new more confident Coltrane emerged. He has used long lines and multinoted figures within these lines, but in 1958 he started playing sections that might be termed �sheets of sound'" (Gitler, "�Trane on the Track" 16-17). The technique involves playing several chords instead of just one, a long series of rapid notes examining a chord or scale with little melodic or rhythmic development. Coltrane claimed to have been taught by Monk to play chords on the sax by using fake fingerings and adjusting his lips (Sax Appeal). Once Coltrane perfected this sweeping sound he achieved with the three-on-one chord approach of "sheets of sound," he loved on to new dxpressions. He was perpetually evolving and developing new ideas, search for new m

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