John Coltrane: His Life and Music
Written by Lewis Porter
Published in 1998 by University of Michigan Press
ISBN 0–472–10161–7, hardcover, 409 pages, out of print.
ISBN 978–0472086436, paperback, 448 pages, $24.95.
Index, Chronology, Bibliography, 16 pages of B&W photos.
Extensive use of sheet music throughout the biography.
I have read dozens of biographies of jazz musicians and this is the most impressive I’ve seen. I would rate John Coltrane: His Life and Music, by Dr. Lewis Porter, as one of the great biographies of anyone ever written.
Dr. Porter had the benefit of four major biographies of musician, composer and band leader, John Coltrane (1926–1967) published ahead of this book. He corrects all of them.
Dr. Porter hunts down every gig Coltrane made and puts them all in one long timeline. He interviews all his surviving teachers and finds the practice books he worked with. He traces the origins of many of Coltrane’s compositions back to world folk records. He even corrects Coltrane’s recollections about his own life.
When he wrote this book, Dr. Porter was a professor of music at Rutgers University, where he directed the master’s program in Jazz History and Research. He started writing about John Coltrane in 1980. From 1989–94, he worked with Yashuhiro Fujioka in completing the mammoth John Coltrane: A Discography and Musical Biography, reviewed elsewhere in this series.
Dr. Porter began work on this book in 1994 and completed it in 1998. He is widely credited with recognizing the significance of John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps changes,” and shows how the pattern is used in Coltrane’s work and the works of many others. “There’s no way to be a jazz musician since Coltrane without knowing his music,” Dr. Porter writes.
John Coltrane: His Life and Music greatly benefits from the fact that Dr. Porter is himself a musician and skillfully uses sheet music to explain the algorithms Coltrane invented. It almost seems unprofessional the way Dr. Porter reveals Coltrane’s secrets. For example, pages 122–123 contain sheet music for many of Coltrane’s favorite licks.
Dr. Porter analyzes eight different takes of the song Giant Steps. Yet he misses that Giant Steps is a variation of Skippy, a tune Coltrane learned while working with its composer, Thelonious Monk. He gets so absorbed in analyzing Coltrane’s 1967 recording session playing duets with drummer Rashied Ali — 12 pages of text, including sheet music, to review six songs — that he neglects to mention the title of the album they were released on: Interstellar Space. His entire analysis is unindexed.
John Coltrane: His Life and Music is a little intimidating and you could say it doesn’t swing. However, Dr. Porter doesn’t get lost in the details and recognizes that right around the time A Love Supreme was released in 1964, “Coltrane had come to see his music as an extension of his religious beliefs.” Dr. Porter unearths this vital lost quote, cut from a Newsweek interview with John Coltrane in 1966:
“When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hangups. I think music can make the world better and, if I’m qualified, I want to do it. I’d like to point out to people the divine in a musical language that transcends words. I want to speak to their souls.”
John Coltrane was “just serious and musical all the time,” bandmate Julian “Cannonball” Adderley told Dr. Porter. And this book is serious and musical all the time, which is in keeping with its subject. Both the book and the musician it chronicles move away from the science of sound into the expression of pure emotion.
Dr. Porter sets the record straight when he says John Coltrane was not a modern Mozart — he was a modern Stravinsky, a powerful force to be reckoned with, who thought he could use his music to wake people up and take them to an elevated plane. The book and the musician never quite got there but we thank them both for trying.
