Isabel Wilkerson Instagram – John William Coltrane, considered one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time, was born on this day, Sept. 23, 1926, in Hamlet, N.C., to John and Alice Coltrane, a musically inclined tailor and domestic, who, while unable to pursue their own talents in the Jim Crow South, shared their love of music with their only child at an early age.
His father played violin, his mother the piano. Young Coltrane got his first instrument, a clarinet, at age 12, and soon became obsessed with it, playing for hours at a time. But just as he was beginning to explore his musical gifts, tragedy struck at age 13 when his beloved father, his grandparents and an uncle all died in short order in the late 1930’s, leaving him and his mother to manage alone.
Struggling to make it, his mother went north to Philadelphia during the Great Migration, leaving Coltrane with family friends while she worked as a domestic until she could send for him. He followed her north after finishing high school at 16.
Upon his arrival in Philadelphia, his mother gave him a used alto saxophone she had managed to save up for. He began playing the saxophone at the family dining room table at all hours of the day. “We just learned to walk around him,” his cousin Mary told a documentary filmmaker.
He studied tenor and soprano saxophone and played with Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk before forming his own quartet in the late 1950’s. Among his many signature songs were “Blue Train,” “A Love Supreme,” and his beloved interpretation of “My Favorite Things,” which he could play for a full 45 minutes live. He died of liver cancer in 1967 at age 40.
My voice-overs on these photos are from a 2023 BBC radio interview of me about my favorite classical music and its influence on my writing. Coltrane was among the first to come to mind for me.
It may not be possible to measure Coltrane’s influence on jazz and American culture. In a short, 12-year career, he revolutionized jazz as we know it. He was canonized by the African Orthodox Church as Saint John William Coltrane. But he once simply said, “I humbly asked to be given the means and the privilege to make others happy through music.” And he did. | Posted on 23/Sep/2024 23:57:49
