Coltrane's 80th

John William Coltrane was born on September 23, 1926. He is regarded as one of the most innovative and intense jazz musicians of the past century. He died on July 17, 1967.

I wrote about my personal connection with Coltrane's music three years ago, on what would have been his 77th birthday. I won't repeat all of that now. I will simply say that the elevation or evolution of my consciousness progressed as I collected and absorbed the music of the classic Coltrane quartet on through to what was dubbed the avant-garde (or "anti-jazz" by some).

[See "The Coltrane sound on video" for performance footage.]

I see that there have been any number of celebratory concerts or broadcasts to commemorate what would have been Coltrane's 80th birthday, most notable among them being a performance by his wife Alice and son Ravi at the University of Michigan. I also just found out that a statue of Coltrane was recently put on display in his native North Carolina.

Nat Hentoff, in the liner notes for the album Expression, wrote: "This was a man who had discovered what he was on Earth to do. And because he had so clear and urgent a sense of the reason for his being, he was able to focus all his energies on that reason, by contrast with the scattered use most of the rest of us make of our capacities."

In Coltrane's own words, from the liner notes for Meditations: "There is never any end. There are always new sounds to imagine, new feelings to get at. And always, there is the need to keep purifying these feelings ad sounds so that we can really see what we've discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more and more clearly what we are. In that way, we can give those who listen to the essence the best of what we are. But to do that, at each stage, we have to keep on cleaning the mirror."