John Coltrane

John Coltrane practiced like a man possessed and played like one too. He came up the hard way, a sideman in the early 1950s with a heroin habit that nearly ended him, until a spiritual awakening in 1957 turned his life around. From that point his music became a kind of search – relentless, questing, reaching past entertainment toward something like prayer.

His progress was almost frightening to watch. He played dense, cascading runs that a critic famously called “sheets of sound,” so many notes so fast they blurred into texture. Then he simplified, embracing modal playing – fewer chords, more open space to explore – most beautifully on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, where he was a key voice. Every couple of years he seemed to reinvent what he was doing.

His classic quartet of the early 1960s – with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and the volcanic drummer Elvin Jones – made some of the most powerful music in jazz, culminating in A Love Supreme, a four-part suite of devotion that stands among the greatest recordings of the century. It’s overwhelming and tender at once.

At the end he pushed into free jazz, music so intense it lost some listeners entirely, still searching when liver cancer killed him at 40. He left behind not just a body of work but a kind of moral example – the artist as seeker, never satisfied, always reaching for more.