John Coltrane
John Coltrane changed the way we think about, let alone hear, jazz. Born in 1926 in Hamlet, North Carolina, Coltrane’s father was a tailor and an amateur musician. Coltrane first began to play jazz with others while in the service with a US Navy band. From the forties through the sixties, Coltrane would often get as much recognition as a sideman as he did for his solo career. He played for Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis. Coltrane’s experiments with “free jazz” became the calling card for a new generation of jazz musicians - and listeners. His soprano sax take on Rogers and Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things” from their Sound of Music, is still a truly unique jazz recording. This recording took place in 1960 in sessions that produced so much music, that the record company, Atlantic, released three different albums over the next four years. Although there are now reissues of many recordings of Coltrane as a sideman, his own 1961 Live at the Village Vanguard is one of the gold standards of jazz albums. Coltrane was only forty years old when he died; his Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award was given twenty-five years after his death from liver cancer.
