John Coltrane of High Point, NC: Jazz Music’s Patron Saint

John Coltrane was born in 1927 in Hamlet, North Carolina, but his family moved to High Point when he was still an infant, and he was raised there. His grandfather, William Blair, served as presiding elder in the A.M.E. Zion Church; his father worked as a tailor and played music at night. By the time John was 12, however, his father and both grandparents were dead. That same year he joined a local band and began playing clarinet and E-flat alto horn. His mother moved north at the start of World War II, and he joined her in Philadelphia in 1943, after graduating high school.

By the time he got to Philadelphia, Coltrane was playing alto sax, but eventually he switched to tenor sax, and later in his career, to soprano. He recorded his first side with a quartet while in the Navy, and later went on to play with Cheraw, S.C.-born Dizzy Gillespie, and later with trumpeter Miles Davis, who fired Coltrane in 1956 because of his heroin addiction, hired him back, and fired him again in 1957.

In 1957, Coltrane experienced what he later described as a spiritual awakening, of which he later wrote:

I do perceive and have been duly re-informed of His OMNIPOTENCE.

Though he’d have some setbacks, Coltrane successfully kicked heroin and signed as a solo recording artist for the first time. His music, always creative, became more radical—“anti-jazz,” Down Beat called it. Now traveling with the Thelonious Monk Quartet, Coltrane experimented with sounding several notes simultaneously. He recorded with Miles Davis on the landmark Kind of Blue, and in 1961 scored a pop hit record with his version of “My Favorite Things,” which became his signature song. This was Coltrane’s most prolific period; he wrote most of his own material, and every year brought several recordings. Perhaps 1965 was his watershed year; he finally reached a happy medium between his experimental leanings and the traditional style with his deeply spiritual album, A Love Supreme, which earned two Grammy nominations. The music was divided into four parts entitled "Acknowledgment", "Resolution", "Pursuance", and "Psalm." It was his best-selling record of all time.

Coltrane died unexpectedly of liver cancer in July, 1967, but he has lived on in the release of his previously unrecorded works—for which he posthumously won a Grammy.

But perhaps his greatest impact has been on another level: Coltrane’s music has been cited by many listeners for its spiritual power—for its ability to convey spiritual truths through sound. The saxophone player named a saint by the African-Orthodox Church, which sees his music as a conduit to the Divine—a sort of aural icon, akin to the traditional painted icon. Coltrane’s image is itself the subject of several such icons to be found clear across the country from High Point, in San Francisco, where the small congregation of St. John the Divine worships each week, using the Tar Heel saxophonists’ music as a sonic liturgy.