John Coltrane The Experimental Musician Essay Research

John Coltrane The Experimental Musician Essay, Research Paper

Jazz, taking its roots in African American folk music, has

evolved, metamorphosed, and transposed itself over the last century to

become a truly American art form. More than any other type of music,

it places special emphasis on innovative individual interpretation.

Instead of relying on a written score, the musician improvises. For

each specific period or style through which jazz has gone through over

the past seventy years, there is almost always a single person who can

be credited with the evolution of that sound. From Thelonius Monk,

and his bebop, to Miles Davis. cool jazz, from Dizzy Gillespie.s big

band to John Coltrane.s free jazz; America.s music has been developed,

and refined countless times through individual experimentation and

innovation. One of the most influential musicians in the development

of modern jazz is John Coltrane. In this paper, I examine the way in

which Coltrane.s musical innovations were related to the music of the

jazz greats of his era and to the tribulations and tragedies of his

life.

John William Coltrane was born in Hamlet, North Carolina, on

September 23, 1926. Two months later, his family moved to High Point,

North Carolina, where he lived in a fairly well-to-do part of town.

He grew up in a typical southern black family, deeply religious, and

steeped in tradition. Both of his parents were musicians, his father

played the violin and ukulele, and his mother was a member of the

church choir. For several years, young Coltrane played the clarinet,

however with mild interest. It was only after he heard the great alto

saxophonist Johnny Hodges playing with the Duke Ellington band on the

radio, that he became passionate about music. He dropped the clarinet

and took up the alto saxophone, soon becoming very accomplished.

When Coltrane was thirteen, he experienced several tragedies that

would leave a lasting impression on him and would have a great impact

on the music of his later years. Within a year, his father, his

uncle, and his minister all died. He lost every important male

influence in his life. After graduating from high school in High

Point, he moved to Philadelphia in 1943, where he lived in a small

one-room apartment and worked as a laborer in a sugar-refinery. For a

year, Coltrane attended Ornstein School of Music. Then in 1945, he

was drafted into the Navy and sent to Hawaii where he was assigned to

play clarinet in a band called the Melody Makers.

Upon his return from Hawaii a year later, Coltrane launched his

music career. .With all those years of constant practice in High

Point behind him, possessing a powerful inner strength from being

raised in a deeply religious family, and with a foundation in musical

theory and an innate curiosity about life, Coltrane was well prepared

to seriously enter a battle..

In the late nineteen forties, Coltrane began playing with several

different R&B groups in small bars and clubs around Philadelphia. It

became a tradition in many of the clubs at this time for musicians to

.walk the bar. (i.e. to walk on top of the bar while playing one.s

instrument). Coltrane was ashamed of having to go through this

.display. every night. .To any serious musician, it was an incredibly

humiliating experience – to someone like Coltrane, who was developing

a type of religious fervor for his music, it was devastating.. In

addition to the negative self-image this experience engendered,

critics criticized his music as being too bizarre. Coltrane became

very depressed, and searching for a way out, he turned to heroin.

Heroin was a very popular drug among black musicians in the forties.

It was a uniting force that, initially, brought them together, but in

the end caused lives and careers to disintegrate.

In 1949, Dizzy Gillespie invited Coltrane to play in his big

band. Gillespie had been a very influential and important figure in

the bebop movement. Bebop was a style of jazz, popular during the

late thirties and forties. It incorporated faster tempos, and more

complex phrases than the jazz of earlier years. For the first time in

many years, Coltrane felt some sense of stability in his life.

However, after a two-year stint with Gillespie, Coltrane was asked to

leave because of his unreliability due to his heroin addiction.

Again, Coltrane was reduced to .walking the bar., and playing in seedy

clubs. Depressed and dejected, his addiction grew.

It was during this time that Coltrane became very interested in

eastern philosophies. .When he was not studying or playing he spent

most of his time reading and attempting to satisfy his growing

philosophical curiosity about life. It was an inborn curiosity to a

certain extent, but one that had also developed from events from his

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