John Coltrane

Trane. A love supreme.

Mystic, magician, high priest.

Concentration wasn't his problem (just look at the pictures - you can see it in the furrowed brow). What made Coltrane so melifluous and abstract at the same time? Why so compelled to break things down and start all over? Where is the bridge between 'My Favorite Things' and the frenetic, obtuse division of the album 'Transition', which just rips with desire primordial to restate the issue? Is it defiance? Discomfort?

Coltrane certainly seemed uncomfortable, in his own stolid and steaming, slow burning way. But it wasn't with himself. Moreso, I feel it was with the paradoxical situation of constantly searching for the declaration of an identity, and through the guise of a medium that necessitates change. He put it this way once: "Music, being an expression of the heart, or of human being itself, expresses what is actually happening at the moment...I take off from one point and then go as far as possible."

As a result, he often exhausted himself. The different periods of intense creation (Coltrane with Duke Ellingtion, Coltrane with McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, Coltrane with Miles, Coltrane with Eric Dolphy, to name but a few) needed to be levelled off by pauses. It was his mother who brought him back nearly from the dead when he was suffering through the cold turkey aftermath of heroin addiction. He got through it, but all of this adds up to a short fuse. People who burn through so much in such a brief period of time often live short lives, and Coltrane died shortly afterwards from a liver condition.

Perhaps the thing I like the best about listening to Coltrane's work is that all you have to do is hear one note. One. And you know it's John Coltrane.