What Haunted John Coltrane | The FADER

Here, jazz scholars might theorize, is where history shifted. “When he cleaned up, things began to unfold,” bassist Reggie Workman says of his former bandmate. At the close of ’57, his habit fully shaken, Coltrane says he experienced “a spiritual awakening,” which led him to a “richer, fuller, more productive life” (Coltrane’s words are culled from various interviews and narrated by Denzel Washington throughout the film). From that point forward, he promised to use his music to enliven the lives of others. Back in New York City and free of the demons that for so long nipped at his feet, Coltrane thrived: he informally teamed with Thelonious Monk, a cultural giant and a master architect of jazz improvisation, and re-joined Davis’s band with a renewed sense of self. He began to take more risks, too. “Miles is a strange guy — he doesn’t talk a lot, and he rarely discusses music,” Coltrane said of his mentor and friend. “It’s very hard, in a situation like that, to know what you should do. And maybe it’s because of that, that I started to do what I wanted.”

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At that point, Coltrane started moving with deliberate alchemy. In August of 1959, Davis released Kind of Blue — an era-defining jazz album (perhaps the greatest of all time), and one on which Coltrane was featured as the lead saxophonist. Less than five months later, Coltrane released his fifth album, Giant Steps, the near-perfect collection of songs that many consider his best (he composed every track). In his own words, he was inspired by great minds like Albert Einstein and universal questions about life and love and time and death. On his own, Coltrane’s music became a cosmology: his solos were transcendent and structureless, episodic bursts of light. “I’ve got to keep experimenting. I have a part of what I’m looking for in my grasp, but not all,” he admits midway through the film, ever on the move. Stagnation seemed to be the antithesis of John Coltrane’s creative output, a definitive trait in the artist’s outsized career. The film does well to dwell on this point: though Coltrane did not always know which direction the music would take him or what awaited him in life, he kept moving and creating and heaving forward. “It’s that universal side of music which interests and draws me, and that’s where I want to go.” And so he went.