Artist of the Month, September 2026: John Coltrane

It’s not unusual for ardent fans to venerate their musical heroes and declare them other-worldly in one way or another. “Bird Lives!” was scrawled on buildings and subway cars in New York City after the 1955 death of jazz icon Charlie “Bird” Parker. Starry eyed devotees of the young guitarist turning blues and rock on its head in Britain in the mid-1960s began spray painting “Clapton is God!” on walls in London when Eric Clapton was still honing his style in his early 20s.

But an actual church devoted to your musical hero? And a declaration of sainthood? Yes! That’s the effect saxophonist John Coltrane had—and still has—on his followers, and on jazz, one hundred years after his birth on September 23, 1926.

The Church of Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church holds regular services in San Francisco, featuring recordings and live performances of the music of a man they consider a saint, John Coltrane, who is WICN’s Artist of the Month for September 2026. 

It is both his music and his spirituality that inspire his acolytes to celebrate John Coltrane as a saint and jazz fans to remain devoted to his music to this day. Coltrane grew increasingly spiritual as he cast aside his twin addictions to drugs and alcohol in the late 1950s. And at the same time, he broke free of the heavy reliance on chordal structures that had been the hallmark of jazz since the bebop of the 1940s, and helped bring jazz into a more modern world.

It is this unique blend of creativity and spirituality that has made John Coltrane’s music transformative, and turned him into the Mount Rushmore-like figure in jazz that he remains to this day.

Jazz musicians, even those who are not wrapped up in his spiritual path, are still processing the lessons as he explored the boundaries of jazz and popular music during his roughly 10 years as a lodestar in the world of modern American music, before his death at age 40 in 1967.

“I think playing jazz saxophone, it’s hard to imagine John Coltrane not being a part of your life,” alto saxophonist Vincent Herring told radio station WBGO in 2022. “It was just kind of the core curriculum of everything that I was working on.”

*        *       *

John William Coltrane changed jazz throughout his relatively short career in ways that will probably be felt as long as people play and listen to the artform.

Coltrane’s first recording, an informal session not commercially released at the time, took place when he was still in the Navy, in 1946. He’s just a journeyman, playing with similarly skilled musicians, but astute listeners, including his future employer, Miles Davis, heard something unusual and promising in Coltrane’s work on the recording, which included several bebop standards. 

Following his discharge from the Navy in 1946, Coltrane used the GI Bill to pay for music theory classes and saxophone lessons at the Granoff School in Philadelphia, and began to get work in bands, including playing with trumpeter King Kolax, a band led by saxophonist Jimmy Heath, a fellow Philadelphian who later became his practice partner, and saxist Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson. He also played in bands led by trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, and saxophonists Earl Bostic and Johnny Hodges. 

Coltrane also began to listen to and learn from some of the performances and recordings of master saxophonists who came before him, among them Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster and Tab Smith.

Along the way, unfortunately, Coltrane began to abuse heroin and alcohol, which led to erratic behavior and unreliability, including sometimes nodding off on the bandstand. Nonetheless, his musical brilliance earned him a spot in the Miles Davis Quintet in 1955, perhaps the best known and most influential small group in jazz at the time.

The band was on the road much of the year, honing its repertoire of jazz and Great American Songbook standards. Being in tip-top shape was very helpful when the trumpeter-leader decided to fulfill his contractual obligation to Prestige Records in two marathon recording sessions in 1956, so he and the quintet could jump to the much larger, more influential Columbia Records, where a lucrative record deal was waiting. Davis and the band turned those two Prestige sessions into 26 songs  used for four of the most significant albums in the burgeoning hard-bop school of music—Steamin,’ Relaxin,’ Cookin,’ and Workin,” recordings that gave Trane his first substantial international exposure. 

After the recordings, though, Davis grew disenchanted with his tenor saxophonist, whose continued struggles with alcohol and heroin were adversely affecting him. He let Coltrane go.

Trane and Monk

Trane retreated to his mother’s house in Philadelphia and, in May 1957, quit alcohol and heroin cold turkey. This intense time also coincided with a profound religious transformation, Coltrane stated, which led him on a spiritual path. Later that year, he joined pianist Thelonious Monk’s quintet and played an extended stint with his group at the New York jazz club The Five Spot. The band was creating some of the most inspired music in jazz, and Coltrane exhibited a new assurance and was teeming with musical ideas—as evidenced by a long lost recording of the group at a Carnegie Hall concert over Thanksgiving weekend of 1957, which was finally released, to great acclaim, in 2005, long after Monk’s and Coltrane’s passing. 

This is the period when Coltrane began to break away from being just another promising, but still meat-and-potatoes, hard-bop player. Looking for a new sound, he began to experiment with multiphonics (playing two or more notes at once), and how he approached chordal structures, resulting in a rapid-fire delivery of notes that record producer and jazz historian Ira Gitler dubbed “sheets of sound.” 

Said Coltrane, “I found that there were a certain number of chord progressions to play in a given time, and sometimes what I played didn’t work out in eighth notes, sixteenth notes, or triplets. I had to put the notes in uneven groups like fives and sevens in order to get them all in.”

And he was increasingly obsessive about perfecting that ability to play so many notes and master the ideas he had in his head. His Philadelphia practice partner Jimmy Heath, later one of the leading lights of jazz tenor saxophone, recounts that Trane practiced so hard he made his reeds red with blood. “Nobody practiced that much at that time that I knew,” Heath recounted. Coltrane’s mother would sometimes find him asleep in his practice chair, the tenor still in his hands, the mouthpiece ajar in his mouth.

Shortly after kicking his dual addictions, Coltrane went into the recording studio to cut an album for Prestige that was released as, simply, Coltrane. For the remainder of 1957 and all of 1958, he cut three more albums for Prestige and one for Blue Note, Blue Train, each showing his increasing mastery. 

Blue Train, with an all-star lineup that included Lee Morgan on trumpet and Curtis Fuller on trombone, is considered one of the classic jazz albums of the 1950s, and the four Coltrane compositions on the record—“Blue Train,” “Locomotion,” “Moment’s Notice,” and “Lazy Bird,” have become jazz standards.

Miles Davis Redux

Miles Davis took notice of this new John Coltrane, and shortly after his stint with Thelonious Monk, he asked Trane to rejoin his group, which soon grew to a sextet with the addition of alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley.

In 1959, the Miles Davis Sextet, with Coltrane on tenor and Adderley on alto, recorded Kind of Blue, one of the most popular—and important—albums in jazz history. The harmonic structure of the songs on the recording were largely based on modes—scales—rather than individual chords, which was the way most jazz at the time was played. The soloists had the freedom to stretch out, which was, pardon the expression, music to Coltrane’s ears. He was able to expand and develop his abundant ideas more fully.

As Coltrane continued to experiment, reaction to his playing was split. During his last tour with Miles Davis before once again leaving the band, in Europe in the spring of 1960, some French audiences whistled their disapproval when the saxophonist went on (and on and on) experimenting in rapid-fire bursts of notes and multiphonics. At the end of his solos, the two different reactions could be heard—some in the audience were cheering, while others continued whistling their disapproval.

Trane had by this time signed with Atlantic Records, and in 1959, roughly the time he was recording Kind of Blue with Davis, he recorded his own album Giant Steps, which included his original song of the same name, based on a complex chordal structure (chord “changes,” in jazz lingo) that came to be known as “Coltrane changes.” He was nearing the end of his “sheets of sound” obsession with chordal structures and increasingly exploring the use of modes. 

For his third album for Atlantic, recorded in 1960, My Favorite Things, he took the title song, which many thought of as a sweet, almost overly saccharine show tune by Rodgers and Hammerstein, and turned it into an unlikely radio hit in early 1961—a hit that defined his entire career. 

Coltrane and his band at the time, including McCoy Tyner on piano and Elvin Jones on drums, kept the melody to “My Favorite Things” largely intact, but changed what happened underneath, both harmonically and rhythmically. 

Tyner, with his full, tapestry-like playing, laid down a bed of sound that simplified the chordal structure, which was somewhat complex in the original Broadway show version. Tyner and rhythm section set up a recurring pedal note, with the solos alternating between two sonorities—E minor and E major—simpler than the original structure. This gave Trane enough freedom to roam on what was a relatively new instrument for him—the soprano saxophone, a smaller saxophone pitched one octave higher than his tenor saxophone.

The recording would prove so popular that, for the rest of his life, Coltrane was frequently asked to sign performance contracts that stipulated he play “My Favorite Things” during the concert.

One aspect of Coltrane’s art, which had always been present, but was even more in evidence from this point on, is the seriousness of his playing. Not seriousness, necessarily, in terms of solemnity or sternness, but the fact that everything you hear is, one can tell, deeply felt. Even Coltrane at his softest, on a ballad, is playing with deep feeling. Even on songs that might seem to be bordering on novelty tunes or, at least, were commonly thought of as only semi-serious. A few years later, he recorded a tune from the musical Mary Poppins—”Chim Chim Cheree”—imbuing it with a seriousness, but not solemnity, which wasn’t quite in evidence in the original recording from the movie. 

Impulse! Records

Later in 1961, Impulse! Records, a relatively new label that focused on somewhat avant garde jazz musicians, bought Coltrane’s Atlantic contract. 

His third album for Impulse!, Live at the Village Vanguard, the renowned New York City jazz club, released in February 1962, created a tidal wave of controversy.

Trane’s playing in concerts and clubs had been growing even more emotional, and sometimes even modes were growing less important than the feeling he sought to impart. And his sound was continuing to become deeper and more nuanced.

He essentially dispensed with chord changes and embraced a greater sense of freedom than he had thus far in his career on his recording of “Chasin’ the Trane,” recorded live during a four-night stand at the storied jazz club in November 1961 and included on Live at the Village Vanguard.

The number, fifteen-plus minutes of Coltrane on tenor, with Elvin Jones on drums, Jimmy Garrison on bass—no piano or other chordal instrument to tether him tightly to a harmonic structure—brought both acclaim and scorn. It was spontaneously generated. Coltrane later said, “the melody not only wasn’t written but it wasn’t even conceived before we played it. We set the tempo, and in we went.”

In they went, indeed—straight up to heaven, or down to hell, depending on the listener weighing in. And everyone from jazz stars to esteemed record reviewers seemed to weigh in. The consensus was that Coltrane was baring his soul. But to what end? Was it quality music?

Downbeat magazine critic John Tynan described the group for that four-night Vanguard stint, which also included bassist Reggie Workman, McCoy Tyner, and Eric Dolphy, primarily on bass clarinet, as producing “musical nonsense being peddled in the name of jazz” and “a horrifying demonstration of what appears to be a growing anti-jazz trend.” 

But critic Gary Giddins called the piece “preeminent and indispensable… a sweat-soaked fury of resolute musical invention.” Critic Robert Christgau, reviewing a reissue several years later, called it groundbreaking in the way that Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues” or the Beatles’ “I Love You” was. 

Tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp, a Coltrane contemporary and sometime collaborator, said it was “one of the most innovative pieces in the history of African American improvised music, as important as Charlie Parker’s ‘Ko-Ko’ or Coleman Hawkins’ ‘Body and Soul.’ ” 

It had stripped away most of what had been considered essential in music – strict chord changes, and a strict number of measures in the form. What was undeniably present in every note was emotion—and Coltrane’s unique sound.

Perhaps because of the firestorm over Live at the Village Vanguard, Coltrane recorded and released three no less serious, but far less controversial, albums in the following months.

Ballads, Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, and John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, include more traditional song forms, many of them jazz standards, and are still played and enjoyed to this day by fans of far more mainstream jazz than Coltrane created on the Vanguard sessions.

John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, featured the relatively little known deep-voiced jazz singer and it mostly contained ballads. It was the only record Coltrane made as a leader with a singer, and it helped propel Johnny Hartman’s career; he went on to release four more albums for Impulse! and worked regularly until his passing in 1983.

Whether on genre-challenging albums like Live at the Village Vanguard, or his three more traditional follow-ups, Coltrane’s sound was continuing to evolve. 

Coltrane’s Sound

And as time went by, Trane’s sound increasingly set him apart from everyone else in jazz at the time. Former New York Times music critic Ben Ratliff, in his book, Coltrane, writes, “This is a book about jazz as sound….Coltrane’s was large and dry, slightly undercooked, and urgent.”

And with his sound, came meaning and emotion. And, Ratliff, argues, morality. Later in the book, he writes:

Musical structure, for instance, can’t contain morality. But sound, somehow, can. Coltrane’s large, direct, vibrato-less sound transmitted his basic desire: ‘That I’m supposed to grow to the best good that I can get to.’

And how do we know that Coltrane was involved in a spiritual quest in his art, and that he was trying to be the best version of himself? 

Coltrane was increasingly becoming a jazz icon, and with that came frequent interview requests. Asked by one journalist in 1966, roughly one year before his death, what he would like to be, ten or twenty years in the future, he replied, “I would like to be a saint.”

Whether Coltrane was one-hundred-percent serious or was having a little fun with the interviewer, this was 18 months after he had released his best-known and most highly acclaimed album, A Love Supreme, a four-part suite which is about his spiritual quest and journey to reach a higher, more holy station in life. He makes that clear in the liner notes. 

Coltrane recorded A Love Supreme in December 1964 with his so-called Classic Quartet that was with him from November 1961 through December 1965. Tyner was on piano, Jones on drums and Garrison on bass. Impulse! released the album to great acclaim one month after it was recorded. The liner notes contain a poem Coltrane wrote to God, and in the fourth movement, “Psalm,” Coltrane follows the spoken words to the poem, mirroring the syllables on his tenor saxophone note by note.

Spiritual Journey 

Many of Coltrane’s albums from his Impulse! period had titles focused on spirituality—Om, Ascension, Meditations—and he recorded frequently. (His discography includes 45 studio albums and 11 live albums, most recorded in the last 10 years of his relatively short life.)

These Impulse! albums, particularly Om and Meditations, both from 1965, point to the East, and reflect his growing interest in Eastern spirituality and Indian and other non-Western musical concepts. Coltrane had been fascinated with Eastern music since the late 1950s. One of the cuts from the 1961 Village Vanguard sessions, a Coltrane composition, is titled “India,” and it features Ahmed Abdul-Malik on oud, an Arabic lute-like instrument.

As the ‘60s progressed, post-A Love Supreme, Coltrane’s music became even more experimental and avant-garde, as it had during his Village Vanguard stint in 1961. His lineup changed, as well. Trane added drummer Rashied Ali to his group (which prompted Elvin Jones to leave the band, not being keen on sharing the percussion duties), and when McCoy Tyner departed at about the same time as Jones, he was replaced by Trane’s second wife, Alice McLeod, a professional jazz pianist and harpist who had worked in vibes player Terry Gibbs’ band. Coltrane frequently added tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders.

Trane continued to tour and record with this group. He also went into the studio with only Ali in 1967 to record tenor/drum duets, six of which were released as Interstellar Space in 1974, seven years after his death.

The jazz world was taken by surprise by Coltrane’s death from liver cancer on July 17, 1967, two months shy of his 41st birthday. His touring had slowed dramatically in 1967 as his endurance required for long tours diminished, but he had still gone into the studio to record. Many of his closest associates hadn’t known he was ill when he passed away. Speculation was that his heroin use, and the possibility the needles he injected the drug with had been infected with the hepatitis virus, may have contributed to his liver cancer.

Church of John Coltrane

The death of John Coltrane left a void among some of his most dedicated followers. 

One  couple, Franzo and Marina King, who had a spiritual awakening during a Coltrane concert in California in 1965, in 1969 opened what today is known as the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church, a Christian church that considers John Coltrane a saint. The church, based in San Francisco, holds regular services at which Coltrane’s music is played, both recorded by the artist himself, and performed live by congregants.

Go to coltranechurch.org for news and a listing of upcoming services. And tune in to WICN, 90.5 FM, wicn.org, to hear John Coltrane, in honor of his centennial and his selection as the WICN Artist of the Month, all through September of 2026.

Centennial Celebrations and Releases

The world, as well as The Church of Saint John Coltrane, is actively celebrating the centennial of this Mt. Rushmore figure in modern jazz.

Musicians are conducting tribute tours and record companies are released historic recordings.

Perhaps the most significant development is the first-ever release of the legendary recordings made by musician Frank Tiberi of some of Trane’s live performances in New York and Philadelphia in the early 1960s. Impulse! is releasing the complete set, under the title The Tiberi Tapes, on Coltrane’s centennial birthday, Sept. 23, 2026.

 The label is also reissuing a spate of Trane’s recording during 2026. Several other labels—among them Rhino High Fidelity and Craft, are also issuing Coltrane recordings.

Tribute tours include Coltrane 100: Legacy, which will include a performance at the Hollywood Bowl Sept. 23 featuring saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin. Coltrane’s saxophonist son with Alice, Ravi Coltrane, has his own quarter on tour honoring his father, and he is also playing with trumpeter Terence Blanchard in a centennial tour honoring both his father and Miles Davis, whose centennial birthday was May 26.