JAZZ : This Trane Keeps A-Rollin’ : Twenty-five years after John Coltrane’s death, jazz and pop musicians remain in the long shadow of the saxophonist’s innovation and influence

Branford Marsalis tells of once sitting with bassist Buster Williams and listening to one of his tracks on the Shirley Horn album “It Had to Be You.�

Says Marsalis: “I had a solo where I sounded a little like Ben Webster, then I sounded like myself. Then I threw in a lick--I didn’t know where it came from. ‘Wow, that sounds just like John Coltrane.’ Buster said, ‘A lot of us would like to sound like him.’ �

Tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, who died 25 years ago this week, still casts a giant shadow over the worlds of jazz and pop music and leaves a haunting, memorable sound.

Few who came up after Coltrane, from talents as disparate as the late Jimi Hendrix and Keith Jarrett and Bobby McFerrin, have been unaffected by his techniques and ideas. In spirit at least, his efforts to compose an inclusive multicultural music are echoed today by David Byrne, Paul Simon and Sting. You’d expect the jazz world to take his changes closest to heart, but he’s also influenced rockers, from Santana, the Byrds and the Grateful Dead to Public Image, Jane’s Addiction and U2.

“I’ve just discovered John Coltrane in the last year or two,� U2’s lead singer, Bono, once said in a newspaper interview. “I don’t want his influence to be so strong that U2’s identity gets overpowered. But I don’t think we’ve been overpowered. I think we’ve been enriched.�

“In the full history of jazz,� says songwriter-producer Bob Thiele, who recorded Coltrane on the Impulse! label, “how many innovators have there been? There’s Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Coltrane. There aren’t many.�

Coltrane combined a fierce energy and an affecting poetic tone that had not been heard on the tenor sax quite the same way before. His technique of arpeggiation, in which he broke chords into their constituent notes and piled them and their variants into voluminous runs of unprecedented height and depth, opened the instrument’s range. And the time it took to make these explorations meant that solos had to be longer than anyone had played them before.

Too, where jazz had drawn from standards and show tunes and from its own traditional glossary, Coltrane listened to music that extended everywhere from North Africa to Tibet. He was one of the figures who opened jazz and rock to a new world of possibilities.

By the time he died of liver disease on July 17, 1967, at the age of 40, Coltrane had navigated his way through every musical genre, from the voluptuous Ellington era to rhythm and blues, be-bop, straight-ahead and, toward the end, a florid, mystical style that broke free of Western rhythmic restraint. His influence was felt beyond music.

“When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hang-ups,� he once said. “I think music can make the world better, and if I’m qualified, I want to do it. I’d like to point out to people the divine in a musical language that transcends words. I want to speak to their souls.�

Coltrane was that rare bird in any art form in being both an innovator and a great technician. From the moment he began finding his own voice in the early to mid-’50s, his energy and melodic intensity grew bigger, more alluvial, more uncontainable .

When Coltrane first joined the Miles Davis group in 1955, the stylistically austere leader asked him why his solos had to be so lengthy, to which Coltrane replied: “It takes me that long to get it all in.�

“If Miles went outside the chords, Coltrane went all the way,� says jazz critic Nat Hentoff, who knew Coltrane. “When he broke from the bop tradition, his pieces were unlike anything we’d heard before. He found new connections and kept them going through all kinds of permutations. There was always more than one picture going on at once. His sense of singing and harmony influenced all kinds of people, including Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and what became ‘the free jazz.’ �

If we remember the increasing mantric obsessiveness of Coltrane’s last years, the tidal swells that could extend a solo through the better part of two hours, we also remember him as a lyric poet. There was nothing gushy in his romantic ballads. In one short, sweet phrase he could capture every nuance of sensual longing, consternation and pleasure with such emotional accuracy that you could feel the words urging to sprout through his notes.

“When the critics were putting him down in Down Beat, I said, ‘Why don’t you do an album of ballads?’ � Thiele says. “We did one with Duke Ellington, then one with singer Johnny Hartman. They were just beautiful. His phrasing, his timing, his tone were lovely.�

“John had a very aggressive style of play,� says saxophonist Marsalis, the “Tonight Show’s� new bandleader. “But he had a wonderful melodic sensibility.

“A lot of musicians have taken from him, but nobody can touch him. . . . He was special for his dedication, but he had an immense talent. He was just a great artist.�

By virtue of its range and deliberative energy, Coltrane’s music also offered an uncanny backdrop for the surge of black nationalism and the struggle for a new African-American identity that swept through America in the ‘60s. Coltrane wasn’t an an overt proselytizer, but his musical ambition was undeniably linked to a profound spiritual quest.

“My goal is to live the truly religious life and express it through my music,� he said. “If you can live it, there’s no problem about the music, because it’s part of the whole thing.�

John William Coltrane was born in Hamlet, N.C., on Sept. 23, 1926, the son of a tailor. John was 13 when his father died, and after graduating from high school he followed his mother to Philadelphia. He had already started playing the clarinet, and then he picked up the alto sax, which took up more and more of his interest. He returned to Philadelphia after a hitch in the Navy to join the Joe Webb Blues Band, and switched over to the tenor saxophone when he joined Eddie (Cleanhead) Vinson’s outfit in 1947.

This was around the time that Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie had become the central architects of be-bop, which had shifted jazz into a new and vibrant transitional idiom, much the way Georges Bracque and Picasso had used Cubism as a final wedge between Modernism and the lingering remnants of the 19th Century.

This was also the period, unfortunately, that heavy drugs were considered de rigueur for musicians. Coltrane had a habit, and he drank, and he was one player who couldn’t function while under the influence. First he was fired from the Dizzy Gillespie band. Then he found himself broke and stranded in Los Angeles with the Earl Bostic band, before Eric Dolphy gave him the money to go home.

In 1954, Coltrane joined the Johnny Hodges band. Hodges had a sweet, easy, big-cat lyrical sound that spread the calm of total self-assurance. He and Lester Young had been idols of the young Coltrane, and his lyrical approach had a lot to do with the formulation of the Coltrane style, which was beginning to take shape.

By 1955, his peers knew that Coltrane was ready to happen. He hired on to the Miles Davis band, which once had such a laissez-faire attitude about drugs and booze that it was called, according to Coltrane biographer Bill Cole, the “D and D Band� (for “drunk and dope�). Davis had begun cooling into his spare, elegiac style, against which Coltrane’s torrential solos made a nice contrast. But Davis didn’t countenance using while playing. Coltrane was fired once again.

It was the most humiliating period of his professional life, but slowly he began to come around. His wife, Naima, was a Muslim. “You have to go back to her as a source of his strength at that time,� says drummer Billy Higgins. “He went through periods when he would shed everything. He needed the kind of understanding and support she was willing to give.�

In a single week in 1957, Coltrane went clean.

As pianist McCoy Tyner told Cole: “It must have been somewhat of a forecast to . . . that band that was to come later. During the first part of that week Trane wasn’t articulating that well, but I could still hear his sound. His sound was different from any other saxophonist’s I ever heard--his tone, his approach to chords. His approach to music was different. There was something in his playing that . . . drew you to it.�

Coltrane had yet another fruitful apprenticeship, this time with veteran pianist Thelonious Monk, whose unique sense of chordal spacing and intervals was pushing jazz’s harmonic walls further than they had ever been pushed.

Monk was one of those rare individualists whose style was never overrun and assimilated into a mainstream. Coltrane had successfully begun experimenting with collapsing whole chords into single notes, which gave his tone a new edginess and shape. He had always been a good listener, and now his influences began to jell. His early blues training, Johnny Hodges’ lyricism and Monk’s continuous openness of approach now were of a piece.

Much has been made of the steady if easygoing contretemps that went on between Miles Davis and Coltrane (when Coltrane explained that his solos went on so long because he couldn’t stop, Davis reportedly told him, “Why don’t you just take the horn out of your mouth?�).

But when Coltrane’s “Giant Steps� album came out, Davis told Nat Hentoff, “I always liked Coltrane. . . . What he does, for example, is to play five notes of a chord and then keep changing it around, trying to see how many different ways it can sound. It’s like explaining something five different ways.�

Davis’ 1959 “Kind of Blue� album--with Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Wynton Kelly, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb--was the definitive album of the late ‘50s. Coltrane followed in 1960 with his greatest commercial success yet, “My Favorite Things,� by which time he had formed the group that helped him create some of his greatest, most original work.

Pianist Tyner, who first met Coltrane when he was 17, already had an original, full-bodied sound. Though only a year younger than Coltrane, drummer Elvin Jones had played with Bud Powell and Harry (Sweets) Edison and had a strong musical personality of his own. Bassist Jimmy Garrison rounded out the group, which with various additions and occasional dropouts stayed together through five years and 33 record dates, the high point of which was its 1963 recording of “A Love Supreme.�

The jazz idiom was at a peculiar junction at this point. It had fairly burned up its show-tune and rhythm-and-blues sources; the public at large was turning to folk music and rock as the counterculture began taking shape. In the meantime, the civil rights movement, which had been gathering momentum ever since the 1955 Rosa Parks incident in Montgomery, Ala., was cresting toward an explosive show of black anger and protest nationwide.

The changes were coming swiftly, and with them the hunger for an identity that would link the new black American with an ancient, nourishing African root.

Coltrane was hardly immune to all of this. Though apolitical, he wrote and performed the bleak “Alabama� after the 1963 church bombing in Birmingham. And though he never formally became a Muslim, his religiosity was one of his most distinctive personal traits, as well as his musical generosity.

“Politics had nothing to do with his playing,� says Pharoah Sanders. “Spiritual is spiritual. It has no color. He was a great influence on me. He was a very religious type of person.�

For as long as Coltrane had Tyner, Jones and Garrison as sidemen (as well as Reggie Workman), he had a group that knew how to shoulder him through his lengthy, voluminous solos. And “A Love Supreme� is a magnificent achievement. There’s a genuine spiritual grandeur in its concluding episode, “Psalms,� in which you hardly think of it as music at all, but a vista to which the music leads us. A lot of people consider his later works “Meditation� and “Ascension� further expressions of a spiritual resonance that had never been achieved in jazz before.

“When I first heard ‘Ascension,’ it was an exhilarating experience,� critic Hentoff recalls. “It was such an extraordinary experience, and a revelation about where music could go.�

But Tyner was replaced by Coltrane’s second wife, Alice, in 1966. Though a skilled pianist, she offered no contrasting point of reference and was all too willing to go with the flow. Jones, who couldn’t stand working with drummer Rashied Ali, left the same year.

Coltrane was always an obsessive player--he practiced through virtually all his waking hours and once played a lengthy number through a horrendous nosebleed. But now his music had grown so involuted that it was unintelligible. Even his 1966 reconception of the somber, moving “Naima� sounded like someone whose foot was being crushed in a door.

Wrote the Chicago Tribune’s Jack Fuller: “By the time of this death, I think Coltrane himself must have realized he had reached a place he did not know how to get out of. There was nothing left to strip out of his music, nothing forbidden that he could try, no freedom left. Only the universal rumble and buzz, which is random, which is utterly liberated, which is noise.�

Nonetheless, Coltrane’s music headed off in directions that he probably never imagined. Critic Gene Santoro of the Nation found Coltrane’s influence emerge in some important rock compositions of the late ‘60s:

“He introduced (rockers) to the extended solo, complete with chromatic tinges and modal feel. The Byrds’ ‘Eight Miles High’ had Roger McGuinn mimicking him on 12-string guitar. The Grateful Dead’s ‘Dark Star’ echoes themes from ‘Your Lady’ on ‘Coltrane Live at Birdland’ and ‘India’ on ‘Impressions.’ And Trane’s brooding Eastern modalities--he’d met Ravi Shankar in the 1950s--and multiphonics filtered into the Yardbirds, whose guitarist Jeff Beck used effects boxes and feedbacks to similar ends.�

But, above all, Coltrane left jazz and popular music infused with his spirituality.

“He was a prince of a man, such a gentleman and such a sensitive person,� drummer Elvin Jones says. “You could feel his spirituality, his compassion in just about everything. He captivated everybody’s imagination. Certainly mine. I’d heard Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins, but to me, I never heard anybody play as good. His approach was extraordinary. He opened a new universe of thought to this art form. I could listen to him for hours, and it’d only seem like minutes.

“In jazz, as in most aspects of music, the highly visible, highly talented people bring their personalities to what they’re doing. It’s a mysterious thing. Miles Davis, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Ben Webster--they all brought their personalities. With John Coltrane, you had his soul.�