John Coltrane , in full John William Coltrane, byname Trane (born September 23, 1926, Hamlet, North Carolina, U.S.—died July 17, 1967, Huntington, New York), American jazz saxophonist, bandleader, and composer, an iconic figure of 20th-century jazz.
Coltrane’s first musical influence was his father, a tailor and part-time musician. John studied clarinet and alto saxophone as a youth and then moved to Philadelphia in 1943 and continued his studies at the Ornstein School of Music and the Granoff Studios. He was drafted into the navy in 1945 and played alto sax with a navy band until 1946; he switched to tenor saxophone in 1947. During the late 1940s and early ’50s, he played in nightclubs and on recordings with such musicians as Eddie (“Cleanhead”) Vinson, Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Bostic, and Johnny Hodges. Coltrane’s first recorded solo can be heard on Gillespie’s “We Love to Boogie” (1951).
Coltrane came to prominence when he joined Miles Davis’s quintet in 1955. His abuse of drugs and alcohol during this period led to unreliability, and Davis fired him in early 1957. He embarked on a six-month stint with Thelonious Monk and began to make recordings under his own name; each undertaking demonstrated a newfound level of technical discipline, as well as increased harmonic and rhythmic sophistication.
During this period Coltrane developed what came to be known as his “sheets of sound” approach to improvisation, as described by poet LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka): “The notes that Trane was playing in the solo became more than just one note following another. The notes came so fast, and with so many overtones and undertones, that they had the effect of a piano player striking chords rapidly but somehow articulating separately each note in the chord, and its vibrating subtones.” Or, as Coltrane himself said, “I start in the middle of a sentence and move both directions at once.” The cascade of notes during his powerful solos showed his infatuation with chord progressions, culminating in the virtuoso performance of
