52 Facts About John Coltrane

John William Coltrane was an American jazz saxophonist, bandleader and composer.

John Coltrane is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th-century music.

John Coltrane led at least fifty recording sessions and appeared on many albums by other musicians, including trumpeter Miles Davis and pianist Thelonious Monk.

Decades after his death, John Coltrane remains influential, and he has received numerous posthumous awards, including a special Pulitzer Prize, and was canonized by the African Orthodox Church.

John Coltrane was born in his parents' apartment at 200 Hamlet Avenue in Hamlet, North Carolina, on September 23,1926.

John Coltrane's father was John R Coltrane and his mother was Alice Blair.

John Coltrane grew up in High Point, North Carolina, and attended William Penn High School.

From 1944 to 1945, John Coltrane took saxophone lessons at the Ornstein School of Music with Mike Guerra.

John Coltrane was trained as an apprentice seaman at Sampson Naval Training Station in upstate New York before he was shipped to Pearl Harbor, where he was stationed at Manana Barracks, the largest posting of African American servicemen in the world.

John Coltrane continued to perform other duties when not playing with the band, including kitchen and security details.

John Coltrane played alto saxophone on a selection of jazz standards and bebop tunes.

John Coltrane was officially discharged from the Navy on August 8,1946.

John Coltrane would continue to be under Sandole's tutelage from 1946 into the early 1950s.

Heath recalls an incident in a hotel in San Francisco when after a complaint was issued, John Coltrane took the horn out of his mouth and practiced fingering for a full hour.

Charlie Parker, who John Coltrane had first heard perform before his time in the Navy, became an idol, and he and John Coltrane would play together occasionally in the late 1940s.

John Coltrane was a member of groups led by Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Bostic, and Johnny Hodges in the early to mid-1950s.

In 1955, John Coltrane was freelancing in Philadelphia while studying with Sandole when he received a call from trumpeter Miles Davis.

John Coltrane was with this edition of the Davis band from October 1955 to April 1957.

John Coltrane recorded many sessions for Prestige under his own name at this time, but Monk refused to record for his old label.

John Coltrane's playing was compressed, with rapid runs cascading in very many notes per minute.

John Coltrane stayed with Davis until April 1960, working with alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley; pianists Red Garland, Bill Evans, and Wynton Kelly; bassist Paul Chambers; and drummers Philly Joe Jones and Jimmy Cobb.

John Coltrane formed his first quartet for live performances in 1960 for an appearance at the Jazz Gallery in New York City.

In 1961, John Coltrane began pairing Workman with a second bassist, usually Art Davis or Donald Garrett.

We were doing some things rhythmically, and John Coltrane became excited about the sound.

John Coltrane admitted some of his early solos were based mostly on technical ideas.

John Coltrane was moving toward a more harmonically static style that allowed him to expand his improvisations rhythmically, melodically, and motivically.

John Coltrane recorded an album of ballads and participated in album collaborations with Duke Ellington and singer Johnny Hartman, a baritone who specialized in ballads.

The fourth movement of A Love Supreme, "Psalm", is, in fact, a musical setting for an original poem to God written by John Coltrane, and printed in the album's liner notes.

John Coltrane plays almost exactly one note for each syllable of the poem, and bases his phrasing on the words.

John Coltrane was especially influenced by the dissonance of Ayler's trio with bassist Gary Peacock, who had worked with Paul Bley, and drummer Sunny Murray, whose playing was honed with Cecil Taylor as leader.

The group's evolution can be traced through the albums The John Coltrane Quartet Plays, Living Space, Transition, New Thing at Newport, Sun Ship, and First Meditations.

John Coltrane never rested on his laurels, he was always looking for what's next.

John Coltrane continued to tour with the second quartet up until two months before his death; his penultimate live performance and final recorded one, a radio broadcast for the Olatunji Center of African Culture in New York City, was eventually released as an album in 2001.

John Coltrane died of liver cancer at the age of 40 on July 17,1967, at Huntington Hospital on Long Island.

John Coltrane's funeral was held four days later at St Peter's Lutheran Church in New York City.

John Coltrane is buried at Pinelawn Cemetery in Farmingdale, New York.

Biographer Lewis Porter speculated that the cause of John Coltrane's illness was hepatitis, although he attributed the disease to John Coltrane's heroin use at a previous period in his life.

Unless he developed a primary focus elsewhere in later life and that spread to his liver, the seeds of John Coltrane's cancer were sown in his days of addiction.

In 1947, when he joined King Kolax's band, John Coltrane switched to tenor saxophone, the instrument he became known for playing.

John Coltrane can be heard playing it on live albums recorded in Japan, such as Second Night in Tokyo, and is pictured using it on the cover of the compilation Live in Japan.

John Coltrane can be heard playing the Yamaha alto on the album Stellar Regions.

John Coltrane was influenced by religion and spirituality beginning in childhood.

John Coltrane met Naima at the home of bassist Steve Davis in Philadelphia.

John Coltrane just told me there were things he had to do, and he left only with his clothes and his horns.

John Coltrane stayed in a hotel sometimes, other times with his mother in Philadelphia.

Naima John Coltrane died of a heart attack in October 1996.

In 1957, John Coltrane had a religious experience that may have helped him overcome the heroin addiction and alcoholism he had struggled with since 1948.

In October 1965, John Coltrane recorded Om, referring to the sacred syllable in Hinduism, which symbolizes the infinite or the entire universe.

John Coltrane described Om as the "first syllable, the primal word, the word of power".

John Coltrane believed in not only a universal musical structure that transcended ethnic distinctions, but being able to harness the mystical language of music itself.

In both implicit and explicit ways, John Coltrane functioned as a religious figure.

In 1965, John Coltrane was inducted into the Down Beat Jazz Hall of Fame.