The Story
John Coltrane's late-1950s playing was known for 'sheets of sound' — dense, rapid cascades of notes that critic Ira Gitler coined the term for, a style that carried him through hard bop before he moved toward modal jazz. He appeared as a sideman on Miles Davis's Kind of Blue (1959), the modal-jazz landmark that shaped his own subsequent work, including 1961's My Favorite Things.
From 1961 on, Coltrane recorded almost exclusively for Impulse! Records, where wide creative latitude let him move from hard bop into free jazz. A Love Supreme (1965), a four-part suite framed as a personal spiritual statement, was recorded in a single session on December 9, 1964, with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones.
The Recording Academy honored Coltrane with a posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992. A Love Supreme was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999 alongside his 1957 album Blue Train, and into the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry in 2015; its handwritten manuscript is held at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
John Coltrane died July 17, 1967.
