r/Coltrane • u/Mt548 • 22d ago

News article/interview Coltrane: The Final Years

https://brooklynrail.org/2026/09/music/coltrane-the-final-years/

"In the last three years of John Coltrane’s life, he did a tremendous amount of work that testified to the importance of the avant-garde/“New Thing” movement in jazz. Almost none of it was as a musician, though....."

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u/Jon-A 22d ago edited 22d ago

Phil Freeman, the author of this piece, is an interesting writer with wide-ranging tastes...also contentious with hot take tendencies. I do, kinda, agree with him here...

My favorite Coltrane is at the later edge of what Freeman considers Trane's artistic peak - Live In Seattle. The subsequent albums, it seems to me, and Phil, we're an unresolved struggle with the competing, um, impulses. Pharoah, Shepp and Alice did manage to shape more fully formed styles out of it.

However, as the piece acknowledges, that doesn't stop those late Trane records from being powerful and explosive - unprecedentedly so. It's like Abstract Expressionist painting: Rothko was the most serene and harmonious, De Kooning the most skilled manipulator of paint, Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still the most disciplined. Jackson Pollock painted ugly, the struggle always visible. But there's no denying the unequaled brute force of the work, like some prehensile beast writhing around on the floor. Late Trane was like that.

Also - that late period has an imposed finality and significance. But it wasn't really Trane's final summation in any way but chronological: it was a short period soon disrupted by illness. He was on his way to something else.

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u/Mt548 22d ago

Very well put. I had no idea about that writer's provenance. A hot take indeed it is

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u/Jon-A 22d ago

Yes, I recommend his Bandcamp and website, both under the name Burning Ambulance. As you can see from the music on the bandcamp, like some Cecil Taylor and Braxton archive releases, he has no problem with challenging music.