Lawrence Peryer: John Coltrane, had he lived, would turn one hundred this year on September 23. On this centennial, I'd like to explore how he sounded to the people critiquing him while he was still alive, and how that differs, or doesn't, with how his work is viewed today.
Famously, in the November 23, 1961 issue of Down Beat magazine, critic John Tynan reviewed a Coltrane and Eric Dolphy performance at the Jazz Workshop in Los Angeles. He wrote, "I heard a good rhythm section...go to waste behind the nihilistic exercises of the two horns," and called what they were doing "an anarchistic course in their music that can but be termed anti-jazz."
Anti-jazz in Down Beat about John Coltrane.
John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy actually engaged with the critique. In April of '62, they sat for another Down Beat piece, and Dolphy was asked whether his music even swings. "Of course I do," he said. "It swings so much I don't know what to do. It moves me so much." Coltrane's answer was quieter and sharper: "There are various types of swing," he said. "Every group of individuals assembled has a different feeling."
Sixty-five years later, we're still listening to that music, and Tynan's review is a footnote we bring up to start our exploration.
LeRoi Jones, the poet and critic who would later take the name Amiri Baraka, wrote an essay called "Jazz and the White Critic," collected in his book Black Music. In it, he names Coltrane directly, grouped with Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, and Cecil Taylor, as part of a current bringing back "some of the anarchy and excitement of the bebop years."
There's that word again: anarchy. It's the same root word Tynan used as an insult. Jones uses it as exultation. Most jazz criticism, Jones wrote, "tends to enforce white middlebrow standards of criteria for performance of a music that in its most profound manifestations is completely antithetical to such standards." And on Coltrane specifically: "The catalysts and necessity of Coltrane's music must be understood as they exist even before they are expressed as music."
So it's the same playing, but where one writer heard defect, the other heard history, context, and subversion of accepted norms. That's the story of two critics working from entirely different premises at the same time, in the same country, listening to the same records.
Yet a critic can also be the one to make something legible in the first place. In 1958, Ira Gitler needed a way to describe what Coltrane was doing with all those notes, and he landed on "sheets of sound," first in the liner notes for Soultrane, then in a Down Beat piece called "'Trane on the Track."
His own description: "multinote hailstorms of dense textures that sound like a simultaneous series of waterfalls." The continuous flow of ideas, he wrote, without stopping, "really hit me. It was almost superhuman."
Gitler literally named it, and henceforth critics had language for a technique instead of an excuse to just hear noise. The playing didn't change. First the language did, then the verdict about the playing did.
Something similar happened to 2026's other centenarian, Miles Davis: On the Corner, 1972, one of the most hated records by a major jazz artist at the moment of its release. Critics accused Miles of selling out, of trading jazz for funk and the marketplace. They were gatekeeping purity more than quality, punishing him for crossing a line they thought they had a right to draw. On the Corner is now treated as the record that anticipated and precipitated funk and hip-hop. It only took about twenty years for the critics to catch up.
At this point, it's useful to bring up the case of Albert Ayler. Coltrane did not admire Ayler from a distance. They shared phone calls and correspondence. They shared bills at the Village Vanguard. Coltrane brought Ayler on stage to sit in with his own quartet, in front of an audience that had come to hear Coltrane, not the guy nobody had heard of yet.
Impulse Records, the label behind A Love Supreme, signed Ayler off a run of albums on the smaller ESP-Disk label. By multiple accounts, that happened because Coltrane pushed producer Bob Thiele to make it happen. Ayler's first Impulse appearance was on The New Wave in Jazz, a 1965 live compilation recorded at the Village Gate that put his group on the same record as Coltrane and Archie Shepp. Coltrane was not endorsing Ayler. He was following the same path, sometimes leading the way, sometimes leading from behind.
Coltrane died in July of 1967 at forty years old. The funeral was at St. Peter's Lutheran Church in Manhattan, at Lexington and 54th. Close to a thousand people came. Albert Ayler's quartet opened the service with Ayler on tenor, his brother Donald on trumpet, Richard Davis on bass, and Milford Graves on drums. They played a medley of their own compositions, "Love Cry," "Truth Is Marching In," and "Our Prayer," not Coltrane's music but their own, because showing their understanding of Coltrane's approach by applying it in their own way was the more loving tribute. Ornette Coleman, another figure of disruption and challenge, played that day as well.
And for many critics, artists, and listeners, John Coltrane is now close to a saint. There's an actual church built around his memory, the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco. Albert Ayler is still a name you have to explain to some people who consider themselves jazz literate.
So one of these artists got the full rehabilitation while the other is still waiting. But Coltrane recognized Ayler while it still counted, while they were both working, while they were both alive.
Coltrane's own case is not fully closed either. Just recently, critic Phil Freeman published a piece in the Brooklyn Rail arguing that Coltrane's real peak came in 1964 and the first half of '65, and that most of what followed was, in his words, "the sound of a man in search of something, but never quite finding it." He makes one exception: Meditations, recorded in November of 1965, which he calls Coltrane's final masterpiece. Everything after that, the 1966 and '67 concerts, Freeman calls marathons and endurance tests. Passionate, he says, explosively powerful, obviously meaningful to Coltrane himself, but not offering much to the listener.
Guitarist Nels Cline would tell you that's exactly backwards. In a piece written about Interstellar Space, recorded in February of 1967, the exact stretch Freeman is describing, Cline said late Coltrane has been nearly written out of music history, and that "late-period Coltrane rules."
Drummer Jack DeJohnette and saxophonist Peter Brötzmann backed Cline up in the same Rolling Stone piece. Brötzmann heard the recordings as "a message for all of us as human beings...believing in freedom and humanity."
So one serious listener hears a man still searching, but not quite finding it. Another hears a message about freedom and dignity. The same disagreements from the early 1960s are disagreements happening today about music well over half a century old.
Tynan and Jones split on Coltrane in 1961. Freeman and Cline are splitting on him today. The disagreement never got settled. It got handed to the next generation of critics and listeners, and we're all still arguing about it.
John Coltrane turns one hundred this year, and critics still can't agree on his body of work. Two people called it anarchy, one deriding it as anti-jazz, the other offering high praise. Phil Freeman hears a man searching and not finding much of value to listeners. Nels Cline hears a message about freedom. Coltrane himself spent his last years standing next to Albert Ayler, backing a musician most listeners weren't ready for.
So the harder, more interesting centennial question is whether we're doing that for anyone right now while it still counts for them, their career prospects and audiences, and whether we'll all need another sixty years to catch up.
Happy birthday, John Coltrane.
