John Coltrane's Love Is Still Supreme at Age 60

Similar to the attitude expressed above, on a National Public Radio “Jazz Profiles” show highlighting his life, the late great saxophonist Johnny Griffin once defined the music commonly known as jazz as “having a good time in spite of.”

Coltrane’s own account, the period most associated with his first great defining style finds him trying to develop and master complex harmonies and chord structures.42 His aim, of course, was to expand the limits of the existing styles—swing, R&B, blues, and early bebop—in which he was formed and out of which he played. Coltrane’s second great

Scott Saul writes that “when Coltrane … reduced ‘Tunisa’ to its basics, he did so not to claim a higher originality but to reveal an even more direct and powerful drama of energy within the original piece, a charismatic drama that had been hidden by the earlier scaffold of sophistication…. Coltrane dug into ‘Tunisa’ to rewrite a song of spiritual d

He was part of the 1930s and 1940s migration of southern black working-class people who moved from agricultural areas of the South to urban cities in the North. For many writers, it is this circumstance that helps to account for Coltrane’s freedom quest, his contribution to an “epistemology of black freedom.”4

Coltrane understood the ways black folks had been stereotyped, ridiculed, and demonized in the United States. He also acknowledged the incredible rich tradition of Black American music and the contribution its artists had made to their own country and to the world. Speaking of Coltrane’s artistic impact, Max Roach said, I heard many things in what

More than that, many critics were unable to consider that maybe they were not ready to appreciate what was being offered, that they might need more development and less opinion. In reality, too many of the jazz critics of the time had bought into the false belief that they knew what “real jazz” was, and they relished the power they wielded—a type o