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John Coltrane,

he could get in his spaceship

and it could take him anywhere he

wanted to go.

Just to say the name

John Coltrane, it makes me shake

and tremble.

It's like talking about Beethoven, Shakespeare.

You're talking about an artistic genius and

a spiritual giant.

Trane had a sound

that was heavenly, it was like, oh, my God.

Coltrane's strength of

character is in his journey through music.

He sacrificed, and he had the

insight and the consciousness to touch

that thing that's inside of all of us.

Right now,

we're gonna take you down to a favorite

little spot of ours here in New York,

Café Bohemia.

Down there at the present time is

a young man whose name is Miles Davis.

I'm sure you know who he is.

He's a real cool stylist,

Miles Davis is.

1957, John Coltrane is

part of one of the groundbreaking

groups of the day, the Miles Davis Quintet.

Miles Davis is looked upon as the harbinger

of everything new.

He is on the cutting edge,

everyone is looking at him for the promise

of what is to come.

Are you really asking me a question like that?

How good was that band?

Well, I think it was

probably one of the-the greatest,

uh, jazz bands that was ever formed.

Everybody in the band

had their own voice, and John was really,

really special in that regard,

in that you could hear that he was

going somewhere,

and I think that Miles heard that he

was going somewhere.

Being with Miles Davis

was huge for Coltrane,

absolutely huge.

It catapulted him from being somebody

that only really serious record collectors

knew about to being somebody that

everybody knew.

John Coltrane's

experiences in Miles Davis' quintet

was sort of like going up to the

high diving board every night,

allowing himself to be scared,

allowing himself to not know exactly what

was gonna be ahead of him.

It's of a high, high

caliber to be able to play on a level

which is exceptional.

You've got to be touched by the

supreme whatever to be able to play

like Miles played and like Coltrane played.

At this time,

Coltrane is a relative newlywed with the

entire Miles Davis band as best men.

Coltrane marries Naima Austin,

a woman he'd met in Philadelphia.

Naima has a child, Antonia.

This is a man who

gets his first experience at fatherhood

with me, you know, so, and I was a handful,

OK, I was a handful.

I was remembering one

time John had this gig, it was a bad night,

snowy, he did the gig.

I needed some shoes.

He walked back from that gig home so he

wouldn't spend any of the money so

that I could get the shoes the next day.

You know, then you make that sacrifice,

you work all night and then you walk home

so that I can get a pair of shoes?

That's father.

John Coltrane is

working consistently to support the

wife and daughter he adores.

Life is good, but there's a problem.

We are playing in

nightclubs where the pimps and hustlers

are around, and you, uh, go for the hype,

and hey, man, you take some of this

and you feel up and good, you feel good,

and you go for it and then you're stuck.

Hard drugs is an addiction.

Charlie Parker, a great prophet

before Coltrane, Charlie Parker,

he was on drugs.

He wanted to get off. He didn't quite make it.

There was the misguided

notion that artistic ability was enhanced

with hard drugs.

Charlie Parker is the example.

You're gonna turn from

somebody that can't play into Charlie Parker

by doing this?

It doesn't happen. It's a myth.

Geez, and some of my friends, I mean,

they died following that trail.

Before Coltrane was

really aware of it,

he was using the needle and he was

really heavily addicted.

He had become a heroin addict,

and it's not generally known that he

was also drinking to excess.

The funny thing about him, though,

is everybody loved him.

I'd spoke to over 250

people when I did my book, and I couldn't

find anybody that said, oh,

when he was drunk, he was a terror.

They all said, oh, I didn't even know

when he was drunk because he was always

so sweet, you know?

He was that kind of person,

but he was unreliable.

Miles Davis famously wrote in his

autobiography, he would come to

the gig in clothes that looked liked he

had slept in them, so this was not making

a great impression on Miles Davis.

John Coltrane's fired.

He's never been higher in his career,

and so the drop down is long and hard,

and he realizes that he can go the

way of Charlie Parker and just continue

in a self-destructive path or really is he

gonna find a way to dedicating himself to

a clean, spiritual existence that brings

together everything that has inspired

him from the time he was a child?

And so here's John Coltrane at

a pivotal point of his life.

He's gotta make a decision.

I was born in a small town called

Hamlet in North Carolina in 1926.

My family moved from there when

I was a few months old to High Point.

I was an only child. I was brought up Methodist.

It wasn't too strict, but it was there.

In my early years when I was going to

church every Sunday, I was under the

influence of my grandfather.

He was the dominating cat in the family.

Both of my grandfathers were ministers.

I grew up in that and I guess just accepted it.

To understand

John Coltrane's beginnings is to

understand that he comes from the American South,

and the racial realities that he

grew up with, the idea that the

black church was the primary force that

held his family together and also

it was the source point for his first

musical experiences, and the fact that music

and the spirituality were there as one

at the very beginning, is to really get at the

DNA of what John Coltrane is all about.

The Jim Crow South

was basically a reference to what

the South was like after the Civil War,

after Reconstruction, where segregation

had been re-imposed.

It was a place ready-made for the blues,

ready-made for jazz, ready-made for people

using their pain to catapult their art.

The Jim Crow South

where Coltrane grew up proceeded

from slavery and under slavery,

it was against the law for us

to read or write.

How will our humanity be expressed,

creativity, courageously?

It was against the law for black people

to worship God without white supervision,

so what do you do?

You steal away at night near the creek,

hold hands in a ring shout and

lift your voice.

Lift your voice, vocals,

create a community, camaraderie and so forth.

Black music was the

black response to being terrorized

and traumatized.

We're gonna share and spread some

soothing sweetness against the backdrop

of a dark catastrophe.

That's black music.

John grew up in an extended family.

He was living in the same house with his

mother and father, his grandfather and

grandmother and aunt and uncle and cousin,

and then within a period of two years,

his father died, his uncle died,

his grandfather died, and eventually,

so did his grandmother.

It was a devastating few years for

the family.

He's only 12 years old.

Can you imagine what that does for

any human being?

How you gonna respond?

And the one thing

that happens just at the point in

John Coltrane's life is that he started

to take up music.

He's gone from playing clarinet to

alto saxophone, and it's almost like

he hangs onto music like a life preserver.

He finds in music a way of dealing with

these harsh, harsh realities that are

suddenly thrust upon the Coltrane family.

Their standard of living

was all of a sudden totally changed,

all the men are gone, and Coltrane's mother

just had to leave and go north to find work.

When I finished high school,

I moved to be with my mother in Philadelphia.

This was 1943.

I worked for a year in a signal depot.

We had a war, you know.

Then I decided to study music again.

My mother made many sacrifices to

enable me to study music,

and I was able to take lessons

from a private saxophone instructor.

I was 16.

I'd been playing saxophone for

two years when one of the kids came

home from school.

He said, "There's a new guy that moved

into the projects and he plays alto,

and he sounds just like Johnny Hodges."

I said, "Really?

"Do you think you can bring him by

the house tomorrow?"

He says, "I think so."

About four o'clock, the doorbell rang

and there was this country bumpkin

looking guy standing on the street,

and he stood in the doorway with this horn,

just stood there.

I didn't know what to say.

The only thing I could think to say was,

"Play something."

And that's what he was waiting for.

Now, John and I became very close,

and he joined our little coterie there.

He was quiet.

I had to talk all the time.

He never talked until he put that

saxophone in his mouth.

Yeah.

June 5, 1945,

first time Coltrane sees Charlie Parker,

blows his mind.

What kind of person is he?

This brotha got so much creativity in him,

willing to cut against the grain,

courageous to the core, and you can just

see Coltrane just, his mind was blown.

John and I were screaming, screaming.

It's a wonder we didn't fall over the balcony.

We had never heard anything like that

in our lives.

We never heard double time.

It's impossible.

The first time I heard

Charlie Parker, I knew that was the thing for me.

Charlie Parker did all the things I would

like to do, and more.

He really had a, a genius.

Coltrane was in the

Navy in 1945 to '46,

and stationed at Pearl Harbor.

The very first

John Coltrane recordings, quote-unquote,

come from 1946 when he's a part of

a Navy band and they do this recording

in Hawaii and they're playing Bird tunes

and, uh, you can hear

this very young John Coltrane, uh,

playing in, uh, and imitating the style

of Charlie Parker, his hero.

When you hear that

recording from when he was in the Navy,

he doesn't play that well.

It's not possible to even believe

it's Coltrane.

Some people blossom

very early.

For Coltrane, that was not the case.

I don't think you could listen to that

and say great things ahead.

And just that he could

go from that way of playing to what

he became, man, that's all you need to

know about him.

Heh heh.

After a year in the Navy,

I came back to Philadelphia

and then went on the road.

I accepted work with all kinds of groups,

even if I didn't agrees with their musical

tenets, because I could learn something

while I was making a living.

They were, in comparison to baseball,

like the minor leagues.

I then went with Dizzy Gillespie from

1949 to 1951.

I wanted to find my own way,

but I wasn't ready.

There was so much to learn yet.

For John Coltrane

to be playing with someone of Dizzy's

stature had to be like waking up to

all of your Christmases at one time.

Dizzy was wonderful

in every way you can imagine.

His sense of humor was incredible-

that's how he got the name "Dizzy"-

but he was a genius.

So Dizz was hearing

something in Coltrane's playing

as being promising, as being filled with

possibilities and that this guy

needed nurturing.

When we finally got

with Dizzy's band, John would be practicing

in the hotels, and invariably,

somebody would holler, "Hey!

"Tell that guy to stop all that noise

up there with that horn!"

And Trane would stop practicing and just

finger the horn for an hour,

just practicing fingering.

I never seen anybody do that.

He always had that horn.

He'd play it all day long,

and when he worked, at work

during the intermission, he was in the men's room

playing his horn.

I mean this is Spartan practice,

you know?

Not everybody was into that.

I wasn't into that, but it was like

he was trying to best himself.

Dizzy had a very

strict rule about drug use, and that

December of 1950, he caught Coltrane

and Jimmy Heath shooting up.

We were getting high

down in the basement, and Dizzy came

down in intermission and he caught us,

you know, and he fired us,

but Trane begged his way back in

and I-I didn't.

Coltrane begged.

"No, please, I won't do it again.

"Let me stay.

I really love playing with you," so forth

and so on, and it worked.

Dizzy let him stay,

but it only lasted a few more months.

By April of '51, Coltrane was out again.

I stayed in obscurity

for a long time because I was happy to play what was

expected of me without trying to add anything.

All this time, musically,

I was progressing very little in the

way I wanted.

I had not reached the point when

I could take active steps by myself.

In fact, I don't think I reached that

point until after I'd got with Miles.

It was Miles who made me want to be

a much better musician.

In 1955, I joined Miles on a regular

basis and worked with him until the

middle of 1957.

Why he picked me, I don't know.

Maybe he saw something in my playing

that he hoped would grow.

I had this desire, which I think we

all have, to be as original as I could be,

but there were so many musical conclusions

I hadn't arrived at that I felt inadequate.

In the spring of 1957,

Miles Davis hits a breaking point

with John Coltrane in his group.

John Coltrane's drug habit is getting

in the way of the music.

For Miles, there's no way of

getting past that.

Getting fired by Miles

was really the shock of his life,

and there was no other gig like

a Miles Davis gig

that was the top of the field,

number one, and number two is that

he was kind of counting on this gig for

security and stability and building

a home and having a married life.

John Coltrane was

by no means the only great musician

who had drug problems.

It killed Charlie Parker at an early age,

and many others were afflicted.

When he looked into the abyss,

he decided that he couldn't stay

where he was.

He was either gonna go down and die

or go up and become even greater.

He quit, what they call "cold turkey,"

which means he didn't go to an institution,

he didn't have any kind of medical support.

During the days, he would just stay

home and keep the door closed.

Only one time did it

ever become difficult for me,

and that was when he was withdrawing

and I could hear him.

I could see Mommy taking him

to the bathroom because he was

always regurgitating.

He was doing the cold turkey.

One night it was really, really bad,

and I became really afraid,

and I remember praying,

saying to myself, "Please, God, don't.

Don't take my father."

And each night he

seemed to, um, not be as sick.

And we thank God,

you know, that He allowed John Coltrane

to get past, you know,

the gates of hell.

He just decided to do it,

and by the strength of will and faith,

he did it.

So he cleaned up,

and when he cleaned up,

things began to unfold.

During the year 1957,

I experienced, by the grace of God,

a spiritual awakening,

which was to lead me to a richer, fuller,

more productive life.

At that time, in gratitude,

I humbly asked to be given the means

and privilege to make others happy

through music.

John Coltrane returns

to New York after he gets himself clean,

and he's very much like a man

on a mission.

After going cold turkey

and not using drugs, his energy level

went up a notch.

He smiled more.

You know, that gorilla off your back.

Yeah. I think he was really happy.

When I stopped drinking and all

that other stuff, it helped me in all

kinds of ways.

I was able to play better right then,

you know?

I could play better and think better.

Everything.

Very significantly,

that's also the time period that he started

playing with Thelonious Monk on an

informal basis and then joined his band

in July of '57.

If you say Thelonious Monk's name to any musician,

say it to Miles, "Thelonious Monk,"

said, "Oh, Monk, Monk."

Dizzy-"Oh, whoa, whoa, Monk, Monk, Monk."

First, his musicianship was supreme.

Just his knowledge, his ability to play,

his harmonic sophistication, the structures

of his songs, and it's Coltrane

learning from Monk.

Trane would come in the morning, and they would just

practice all day.

You know, when you're

spending time in Monk's house,

and he's going through things,

that level of genius taking time to

help nurture your genius...

After working with

Thelonious Monk, Coltrane is fully

on his feet.

He's got the confidence now,

and it is in 1957 that he records

his first album as a leader.

The cover says, "Coltrane".

You know, it's like once you're known

just by your last name,

you know you're already getting big,

and then it said up in the corner,

it said, "The NEW", in capital letters,

"tenor saxophone STAR."

And the other thing is that he had an

opportunity to do some of his own

original music.

His music sounded different.

It was like there was new blood in it.

His playing, there was new blood in

his playing.

There was a certain kind of

almost recklessness.

He's pushing forward

such that he may not even know

what he's pushing forward to.

After my late teens,

I questioned a lot of what I had found in religion,

but I never did anything about it.

I was too busy doing other things.

Recently, I started looking into what

people are thinking when I saw there

was so many religions and kind of

opposed somewhat to the next and so forth.

It screwed up my head.

I just couldn't believe that one guy

could be right, because if he's right,

somebody else has got to be wrong.

The three of us,

we didn't go to church every Sunday,

but I knew that my parents believed in God,

they had a strong belief in God.

We had bibles, we had the Quran.

My father was looking at different

Eastern religion, Buddhism, Shinto.

He never set out

specifically to say I'm a Christian

or I'm Muslim

or I'm Hindu or a Buddhist.

I think he studied all of these religions

and understood that there is something

higher than that.

There's something that a... that,

that all these religions are basically

saying that's, you know, universal.

I like to describe

it as a little picture, which is our world,

and the big picture.

John was about the big picture.

John was very celestial.

Celestial meant spiritual.

He had a deep understanding,

a deep feeling for higher worlds than

this world.

Coltrane was definitely

someone who was inspired by the concept

of the infinite and imagining how science

and music and math all work together

and that there was some kind of

universal truth, and so for Coltrane

to be inspired by Albert Einstein,

who is a deep thinker, not just about

space travel and time and energy,

but the biggest of the big questions:

Why are we here?

What are we supposed to be doing,

and where are we supposed to take ourselves?

Coltrane was absolutely on

that same road.

At the end of 1957,

Coltrane came back into Miles' band.

The difference, though, the second stint

with Miles is that now Coltrane kinda had

a sense of who he was.

One of the reasons that being with Miles

was so productive for Coltrane is that

Miles gave him tons of space.

Miles let him solo at length, and,

you know, he really didn't try to edit Coltrane.

He didn't say, you know,

"When you're playing with me,

you gotta play shorter solos than I do."

Almost invariably, Coltrane played

longer solos.

There is a famous story about Miles making

a joke to Coltrane and saying, uh,

"Why do you play so long?"

And Coltrane saying, "Well, I can't find

a good place to stop,"

and Miles saying, "Well, you could just

take the horn out of your mouth."

Miles is a strange guy.

He doesn't talk a lot and he rarely

discusses music.

You always have the impression that

he's in a bad mood and that he's not

interested in or affected by what

other people are doing.

It's very hard in a situation like

that to know exactly what you should do,

and maybe it's because of that that

I just started to do what I wanted.

Here we go.

Wait. OK.

Uh, Trane and I,

Trane and I'll play one, you know,

together out.

You know what I mean? Can you hear me?

Yeah. Let's go.

Oh, "Kind of Blue" was

one of the greatest records ever made.

It's just got a great feel.

You can never grow tired of that album,

and it crosses all boundaries.

People who don't understand jazz get it.

"Kind of Blue" is so

key to understanding where John Coltrane

would go in the 1960s.

That really is sort of the fuse to the

Coltrane explosion later.

It's very interesting.

You've got the first session for

"Kind of Blue" in early '59.

A little while later, about a month and a half,

you've got the second session.

In between, John Coltrane's doing

"Giant Steps."

It was unprecedented

that it was something that forced all of us

to call into question what we had been

hearing as that which was innovative.

Every tune on

"Giant Steps" was composed by Coltrane,

so that album was huge for him because

it showed something that I don't think

people yet knew, which is that he

was as brilliant a composer as he

was a saxophonist.

Writing has always been a secondary

thing for me, but I find that lately,

I'm spending more and more time at it.

I'm trying to tune myself,

to look to myself, and to nature

and to other sounds in music

and interpret things I feel there.

So Miles' band was

a great environment for Coltrane to grow,

and he grew so much that he

grew too big for the band.

I mean he grew out of it.

He couldn't exist in it anymore.

He was actually saying

to me he was gonna leave Miles Davis,

he said, "I'm gonna leave Miles because

"what I'm playing with that group

sounds incorrect, sounds wrong."

It's like he took off a suit of clothes

that he wasn't going to wear anymore.

And from the time

we started out in my living room,

he knew nothing was going to happen.

It just happened when it happened,

but when it did happen, I said it should have

happened because he was really ready.

He had his stuff together then.

Yes, this should be.

You know, some people play jazz, some people play reggae,

some people play blues and,

you know, he played life.

You can't describe

music with words.

We can say, oh, yeah, this guy was doing

a lot of technical stuff, wow,

when we analyze it and wow,

look at this.

Look at these changes and these harmonics,

but it's not about that.

It's about hearing it.

His sound, you know,

it makes people cry, like, "Oh, damn,

"you know, what, what is this tears?

"Why am I crying?

Wh-what's going on?"

Your body's doing something that your

mind don't want to do.

His sound is stunning.

It ranges through the different emotions

people have in a way that very few

people can do, and as I said,

he did it, uh, partly from his

own inner spirit, but he also was

intellectually brilliant.

That is, he wrote brilliant music,

and he could take a standard

and play it in a way that made you

think you were hearing it for

the first time.

Within a year of leaving

Miles Davis for good, John Coltrane

has an incredible radio hit with this

tune that is from "The Sound of Music."

So here's this Broadway,

uh, melody, oh, and he just transforms

it into this gorgeous thing.

"My Favorite Things"

was a record that I actually played

for my friends because I felt like

they would like it.

The reason that music touches everybody

is that was Coltrane's intention,

and he put a lot of everybody's music

in that music, you know, and then that

soprano-saxophone, that kind of nasal

sound is really popular all over

the world.

Coltrane had worked on that

his entire life.

How can I bring people together

and how can I bring these cultures

and how can I bring this music together?

And what allowed him to bring it together

was a spiritual consciousness.

I've gotta keep experimenting.

And I feel that I'm just beginning.

I have a part of what I'm looking

for in my grasp, but not all.

I like Eastern music, Africa, Spain,

Scotland, India or China.

It's that universal side of music

which interests and draws me,

and that's where I wanna go.

For Coltrane,

I think there was a pattern of doing

something that is unexpected when

you look at what came before it,

so he would do something that would

sort of trip himself up so he could

figure out what to do next,

and that sense of struggle and

thinking through the next problem

propelled him and made him

keep getting better and stronger

and more interesting and challenging.

There's an intensity

that I've never heard anything like

it before him or after him.

I always liken it to like looking

at the sun.

Like hearing John Coltrane is like

the brightest light you can hear.

I mean his tone is,

is so unique.

I mean it's so striking.

I mean no one had that tone on the,

on the horn, uh, during that time.

It became the standard.

It's not the car,

it's the driver, so his sound,

it sounds like it's coming from some deep

part of himself, and even though,

like, you hear him on different horns,

you hear him on different mouthpieces.

You can see him playing different setups,

like, but still, it doesn't matter,

like it's coming from that soul.

His grandfather was

a preacher, and I can hear that,

uh-they said there's

a wailing sometimes, a wailing.

I can hear Trane's appreciation for

what his grandfather's mission was.

The evolution of

John Coltrane's band, 'til he develops

what we now called 'The Classic Quartet,"

is typical Coltrane experimentation.

It's him trying out new ideas,

new players, new things.

He went through

a lot of try-outs with different people

and finally, he got the group

that he wanted, and he was able to

fly like he wanted to do.

I'm very lucky.

I work with very fine musicians.

They are very inventive.

I don't have to tell anybody

what to do.

We have a great confidence in one another.

That's essential.

They're with me and always wanting

the band to move into new areas.

We don't believe in standing still.

And just to have Elvin,

the level of intelligence and seriousness

he was on, and Jimmy, the type of

heart he had, and McCoy was the young-

was a kid.

They are originals.

They set music in another direction,

gave us another way to perceive the

universe through the music.

People who heard them would, would-

their lives were transformed.

When I was 17,

I had heard that Coltrane was coming

to Shelly's Manne-Hole in Hollywood,

saw them, oh, I don't know,

five or six times.

Unbelievable.

I didn't know that Coltrane would

be such an icon, but I sensed that

I was witnessing magic.

It would be just like Coltrane

would be saying something on his

tenor or soprano...

Elvin would answer-

And then it would get all intertwined,

and, uh, it was free.

Elvin Jones gave

me my hands, which he did.

I copied all his style,

and then I found my own.

I think it gave me the courage to maybe-

A drummer's job is to keep the beat,

but then if you can be expressive,

have a conversation with the singer

or the soloist, you can push him,

and I witnessed that with Elvin and Coltrane,

and I pushed Jim Morrison

because of those guys.

The greatest quartet in the history of jazz.

Miraculous.

We were like brothers

and we were there for a reason,

which was to create beautiful music,

you know?

I use the word beautiful because

I couldn't think of a better word.

But it, uh, we were committed.

We thought that what

we were doing, the gift came

from the almighty,

not that we were walking around, "I'm th-,

I'm, you know, I'm this, I'm that."

It's not, it's not ego at all.

It's what you were put here for.

What your, what's your reason

for being here?

Birmingham is a symbol of hardcore resistance

to integration.

It is probably the most thoroughly segregated city

in the United States,

and the injustices inflicted upon Negroes

are the notorious realities.

Growing up in the South,

of course, I know he wanted

things to be better,

but he didn't talk about it.

I think he put that in his music.

Coltrane did talk

politics in his music.

It was only a few months after that horrible

bombing of a church and he wrote

a piece called "Alabama."

And it shows the

creativity and depth of Coltrane,

a beautiful elegy screaming with pain,

undergirded by love.

I mean it was just, it's-it's-it's a

masterful piece, really.

[Martin Luther King, Jr. These children,

unoffending, innocent and beautiful,

were the victims of one of the most

vicious and tragic crimes ever

perpetrated against humanity.

Coltrane himself

told McCoy Tyner, his piano player,

that he developed the melody out of

a speech that Martin Luther King gave.

And today as I

stand over the remains of these

beautiful darling girls,

I paraphrase the words of Shakespeare,

goodnight sweet princesses,

goodnight those who symbolize a new day,

and may the flight of angels

take thee to thy eternal rest.

Martin Luther King, Jr.,

John Coltrane go hand in hand, hand in hand.

Why? Because they're love warriors.

They represent the best,

not just of black people, not just for America.

They represent the best

of the human spirit.

That song has a soul

that lets you know that it was

a lot of pain going on there,

but it's something that's inspirational

about that song.

When you hear "Alabama,"

you feel all that struggle from

those times,

the times of the civil rights days,

but you also feel the progress.

John Coltrane was

ahead of his time.

I don't think that his music

is a thermometer, it's a thermostat.

See, a thermometer just reflects the climate,

a thermostat shapes the climate.

So when you hear "Alabama,"

it's not just his deep love

of the precious four girls who were

killed by cowardly white supremacists

in 16th Street Baptist Church,

it's not just a refiguration

musically of certain speech patterns

of Martin Luther King, Jr.

He's looking at black people all the

way down the road.

He's already telling us you're gonna need courage,

vision, and most importantly,

love at the center of it.

As black people,

we've been through a lot in this country,

and we stay hopeful,

and that's what I feel in "Alabama"

is the pain we went through,

but the hope that we have.

It was at night

when all of a sudden the voices

got louder and louder and louder,

and I'm like, "Uh-oh.

Oh dear. What is going on?"

It's hard to know

specifically what was happening in

John Coltrane's personal life

in the early '60s,

but certainly there's indications that

he was not that happy with

his marriage to Naima.

They didn't know

I was sitting around the bend

of the stairway,

but I could hear everything.

Neither one of my parents were arguers,

so when that argument erupted,

I knew something was really,

really, really bad, and, um,

that was the, the day he left...

but he came back and he talked to me.

He said, "There are things

"going on I can't explain.

"I love you very much.

"You're my daughter.

I'll always take care of you,"

and that was it.

My mother,

Alice McCloud, at the time,

was playing with a vibraphonist

named Terry Gibbs,

and they were doing a double bill

with John Coltrane's Quartet at

the original Birdland on

52nd Street in New York City.

They noticed each other,

and it was a little bit like, you know,

there's a young lady here and, oh,

she's a pianist.

John definitely stuck around to hear

a little bit of her playing

and admired that.

Something in the

sound of his tenor caught her ear,

and, uh, at one point in between

the breaks of the band,

my father started to follow my mother

around the club with his horn.

So he was serenading her through the club,

and I guess at that point,

they began to sit and have conversations.

They spoke,

they had a lot of things in common

when they spoke.

I just remember my

mother saying that he's a very,

just a very kind, gracious person,

a very decent man,

and they hit it off very well.

She was interested

in the harp,

and he bought her a concert-size harp.

Beautiful, it's painted in gold,

you know, like a real,

like what an orchestra would have.

I think that's true love-

When someone buys you a harp.

They're both gentle people,

I think perfectly paired by the universe.

John Coltrane used

to leave little notes, little poems expressing

his love for Alice around the home.

He would leave for the gig,

you know, she would come back

to the house and she would find these

little messages,

and I don't think the romance ever left

John and Alice's relationship.

You know,

he was married before,

and for whatever reason,

did not have any children with Naima.

Clearly when he met my mom,

they, uh, they didn't waste much time.

In a very short span,

three sons were born.

He was an only child, and his father

was an only child, as well,

so I think maybe there-

it was something that he wanted to do in,

in his lifetime to father children,

and I think it,

I think it made him extremely happy.

John Coltrane has

set aside some time, and he secludes

himself above the garage in his

house at Dix Hills, Long Island,

to put together what he sees as a suite.

He doesn't know how it's gonna go.

He has some loose melodies,

some ideas.

Mrs. Coltrane tells the story about

him coming down and grabbing little

bits of food now and again,

and then disappearing for a whole day.

This is just after John, Jr. is born,

so she's got her four year old daughter,

and an infant,

and a disappeared husband.

And she said he was upstairs.

It was like two weeks he was up there,

and she always related these stories

to us, you know, in a, in a happy way,

that what he was doing was significant

and important and she understood

that as if he was on a mission

and she was there to support it.

A few days later,

he comes down the stairs,

and as Mrs. Coltrane put it,

it was like Moses coming

down from the mountain.

And for once, the guy who really

thought and re-thought

about music seemed very satisfied

with where he was with his project

and his words to Mrs. Coltrane were,

"It's the first time I have everything ready.

"I've completed the project on paper.

"I know exactly what I'm gonna do

in the studio."

All praise to God.

This album is a humble offering to him,

an attempt to say, thank you, God.

Through our work, even as we do

through our hearts and with our tongues,

may He help and strengthen all

men in every good endeavor.

It's the individual

expression of a, um,

a musical titan who wants to give

a certain message to the world

in light of his own

relationship to God.

"A Love Supreme"

is something I think every great

musician aspires to, which is finding

that one moment or that one song

or that one recording,

that one album which really kind

of encapsulates everything that they are,

what their message is.

The thing about "A Love Supreme",

all of Trane's mysticism is in it.

The totality of his consciousness

expresses itself most fully on that record.

I don't even think he knew why.

Sometimes in the life of artists or people

who search and practice

and study and work on stuff,

they find things and it's, it's in there,

and, and, uh, it was in there.

The second piece

on there is the one that touches me.

That's the one that touches me, that melody.

Where does it take you?

It takes me to heaven

where I want to be when I leave here.

That's it, isn't it?

And the audacity

that someone would absolutely speak

to the heavens using a jazz group,

it speaks to the singularity of

John Coltrane's vision.

I think I've played

that album more than I've played any other

album in my life.

When somebody's music is that uplifting,

it's something angelic about it,

it's something that just touches you

in your spirit where you're like

I know this is coming from another place.

I just thought, "Oh, my God.

"You know, this guy,

"his mind and his heart is so-

"they're in a place that everybody

ought to reach for."

May we never forget

that in the sunshine of our lives,

through the storm and after the rain,

it is all with God, in all ways and forever.

All praise to God.

I myself don't recognize

the word jazz.

I mean we're sold under this name,

but to me, the word doesn't exist.

I just feel that I play John Coltrane.

I think the main thing a musician would

like to do is give a picture to the listener

of the many wonderful things he knows of

and senses in the universe.

That's what music is to me.

It's just another way of saying this is a big,

beautiful universe we live in that's been

given to us, and here's an example

of just how magnificent

and encompassing it is.

John Coltrane,

he was outward bound the way he was playing.

He could get in his spaceship,

metaphorically, and it could take

him anywhere he wanted to go.

That's the way he was.

One of the most incredible

chapters in John Coltrane's

life is 1965, 'cause he has achieved

a level of success that includes

Grammy nominations.

He's been inducted into the

"Downbeat" Hall of Fame,

one of the very first living

jazz musicians to be afforded that honor.

He has an outstanding best-selling album in

"A Love Supreme."

There's an awareness that is starting

to creep into all levels of music fandom,

and he starts to dismantle that because

he is now gonna try new musical ideas,

musical ideas that are not popular,

musical ideas that challenge most ears,

musical ideas that in effect will

take apart his classic quartet.

By the end of 1965,

he will lose Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner

because of this new path that he's

going along, and he will replace

them with a very young drummer

named Rashied Ali from Philadelphia

and his wife Alice Coltrane on piano,

and he'll expand the band

and bring in a second horn

with Pharaoh Sanders.

Here's the thing.

John Coltrane went from bebop to

Miles Davis quintet, modern cool,

to his own quartet.

He went the whole transition,

so he could play standards.

He had the right to go out as far as he wanted.

John Coltrane's sound

rearranges molecular structure.

People were like... "What?"

Some said that he

was taking jazz in the wrong direction,

which was of course, a lie.

He's taking it forward

and the reason you're not aware of it,

because you've never heard it before.

Coltrane was definitely

one of the scientists of the saxophone,

someone who was pushing the instrument

to its limit, kind of what Jimi Hendrix

would later do with the electric guitar.

I don't care what the critics say.

If you like it, you like it.

If you don't, you don't.

He may have been reaching for something

else spiritually that they don't understand.

Would you want him to tiptoe, to,

to where he's trying to get, you know?

It, you know, John Coltrane is,

you know, he's mean.

You know,

I don't understand it.

I'm open to it. I try to embrace it.

I try to follow it.

But it's not the kind of, uh,

music I would just sit there

and listen to all the time.

I got to really gotta zero in,

and I still don't fully grasp what's going on.

Later when I saw

him play, I would say half

the audience left before it was over.

They just didn't know they were

witnessing something ahead of its time,

something spiritual but cathartic

and tumultuous, and I just ate it up.

He could go to Mars.

I'm with him.

I have no fear about my music being

too way out.

My goals remain the same,

and that is to uplift people

as much as I can to inspire

them to realize more and more of their

capacities for living meaningful lives

because there certainly is meaning to life.

I was a first year student

in junior high school when it happened.

I saw the flash and gazed at the center

of that overpowering light.

The Earth was shaking.

The heat was intense.

Much of Nagasaki vanished.

Perhaps as many as 75,000 people

died instantly, and another 75,000

were wounded and exposed to

massive radiation and an uncertain future.

I dislike war. Period.

So therefore, as far as I'm concerned,

it should stop.

It was July 14th, 1966,

when I went to pick up John Coltrane

and his musicians at the train station.

Everyone came out except Coltrane.

I looked all over for him and found him

in a car of the express train playing the flute.

I was so surprised.

Then he looked at me and grinned.

I asked him a question,

"Why were you playing the flute?"

He said that he was searching

for the sound of Nagasaki.

I was extremely moved by this.

I asked him if he wanted to go

straight to his hotel, and he said no.

He said he wanted to go to the atomic

bomb hypocenter.

For me, that place is sacred.

It's the same as a gravesite.

He took a wreath

of flowers and put it down in front

of the pillar, and then he stood up

and he prayed.

He was praying and looking up at the sky.

He just kept staring up above

the pillar for a

considerable amount of time.

I asked him why,

and he replied that he was

imagining the sounds, the plane, the bomb,

the suffering of the Japanese people.

I think that Coltrane had studied about

all of these things,

and for that reason,

he chose to come to Nagasaki on

his Japanese tour.

Coltrane's concert in

Nagasaki was something special.

I was the announcer that night.

The second song was "Peace on Earth."

He must have wanted to perform

that here in Nagasaki.

The whole concert hall was

totally caught up in Coltrane.

It was an amazing atmosphere.

At that time,

we were still so struggling from the

atomic bombing and many people

are still struggling,

and, uh, Coltrane was so kind to play for us.

Coltrane composed the song

"Peace on Earth" almost as

requiem for victim of the atomic bomb

as well as his wish to stop all war.

His passion was

peace and love for the universe.

You know,

the last time I talked to John

on the phone, his, uh, his voice sounded-

it sounded, uh...

There were indications

by the end of 1966 and into '67

that Coltrane wasn't doing well.

His sidemen later would report that he

was holding his side like he was in pain,

and sure enough,

he was later diagnosed with liver cancer.

At first when Coltrane died,

I think it was just shock.

I mean he was only 40,

and he hadn't been ill for a long time.

My mother did speak

of John's death in this way,

which it was, this just floored me.

Uh, she said it was beautiful.

It was warm, and the breath when

went out of him.

He was not in any pain.

She said at the very-this is the, the moment of transition.

She used the word beautiful.

That's what-how she revealed it to me.

All the things flash

through my mind that we had done together,

and I went into my apartment,

shut the door and cried.

Boy.

That was rough.

Phew.

That really got me,

and you can see it's getting me now.

I'm sorry.

I was at the funeral.

They wanted me to be a pallbearer,

and I, man, but I could not do it.

I looked at him in the casket

and the way he was embalmed and all that.

Only thing I recognized was his hands.

He had fingers that went kinda strange,

'cause I've been looking at his hands.

We'd been practicing together,

and that's the only thing that reminded

me of Trane, you know,

so that wasn't him.

He had passed on to the next place.

His spirit was gone.

John was my best friend.

He wasn't like 99 percent of other people.

He existed in the real world.

I mean he had a family,

he had kids,

but that's not where he was at.

He was not in the real world.

He was someplace else.

So he's, he's cool.

He's cool.

He was cool when he was here

and he's cool in the big picture.

He's cool.

Since Trane passed away,

his music has transcended,

and it's more and more known, people-

That type of artistic

achievement stays around.

It's mythic because of the,

the sacrifice involved,

and it will remain mythic.

If you go to any

kind of comprehensive retrospective

of Picasso's art,

it's breathtaking what he did,

how he went from being a very good

traditional painter to the blue period,

his abstract and then his cubist work.

If you think about what John Coltrane did,

moving through his various phases

of musical creativity,

he basically did everything Picasso

did in about 50 years less time,

and I just think that if you got any kind of

love for music and regard for the craft,

you hear three or four notes and say,

this man owns this horn,

owns this music,

and at least when he's playing,

is the master of his soul.

His spirit is still

very much alive,

and he's saying, "I'm gonna use music

"to try to convince you to grasp

"in time a love supreme so that you

"don't remain just a prisoner of time.

"You will be a maker,

a creator of a better world."

That is a Coltrane version of what

he learned in Sunday school,

what he was taught, that the kingdom

of God is within you,

and everywhere you go,

you ought to leave a little heaven behind,

and he left some heaven behind.

To be a musician is,

it's really something.

It goes very, very deep.

My music is the spiritual expression

of what I am.

My faith, my knowledge, my being.

I know that there are bad forces.

I know that there are forces out here

that bring suffering to others

and misery to the world,

but I want to be the opposite force.

I want to be the force which is truly for good.

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