Choose artist...
Stories   >   Conversation with Coltrane / Jazz Journal

Stories for February 18, 2025

Top 10 for Feb

More Albums with John Coltrane

Conversation with Coltrane / Jazz Journal

Posted: January 22, 2022

Jazz Journal writes….Sixty years ago Valerie Wilmer came face to face with the source of those frantic sheets of sound on tenor and ugly wailings on soprano. First published in Jazz Journal January 1962.

“Melodically and harmonically their improvisations struck my ear as gobbledegook,” wrote John Tynan in the November 23rd Down Beat. He was speaking of the recent musical experi­ments of John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy, experiments which confounded even ar­dent Coltrane supporters when he toured England last year.

The in-person sound of Coltrane was so different from his recorded work that most people wondered whether their auditory processes were in order. It seems they were, for Coltrane himself confirmed that his music had radically altered over the last twelve months or so.

Meeting the man himself, it is hard to believe that such a quiet, calm and serious individual could be responsible for the frantic “sheets of sound” which emanate from his tenor saxophone, or that such a sensitive person could think of some of his uglier wailings on soprano as beautiful.

“The sound you get on any instrument depends on the conception of sound you hear in your mind,” he told me. “It also depends on your physical properties, such as the shape and structure of the inside of your mouth and throat. I only tried to find the sound that I hear in my mind, a sound any artist hears and hopes to be able to produce. I suppose I did strive to get it with using different reeds and things as any artist does, but now I’ve settled on a reed at least, and I use a hard one.”