John Coltrane

Hamlet
Vance & Raleigh St.

John William Coltrane was born in Hamlet, N.C. on September 23, 1926. He is a giant of 20th century music, a saxophonist and composer who helped defined jazz as an American art form. 

Coltrane studied music under the G.I. Bill after a two-year stint in the Navy towards the end of World War II. He spent the next decade backing various jazz and R&B singers, and playing in bands led by the likes of Johnny Hodges, Jimmy Smith, and Dizzy Gillespie.

In 1955, he joined Miles Davis’s band, and then in 1957, began collaborating with Thelonious Monk, a Rocky Mount, N.C. native. Under the tutelage of Davis and Monk, and with unflagging determination, Coltrane developed a delivery that critic Ira Gitler dubbed “sheets of sound.” After the release of his own Blue Train in 1958 and Davis’s landmark 1959 album Kind of Blue, Coltrane pushed further out on his own. 

He recorded regularly with a quartet of pianist McCoy Tyner, drummer Elvin Jones, and bassist Jimmy Garrison, and later, his wife Alice, drummer Rashied Ali, and Pharoah Sanders. From the classic Giant Steps, to the masterful A Love Supreme, to the far out Meditations, and everything in between, the impact of Coltrane’s output in a short span was astonishing. He was just beginning his quest when he died at the age of 40, in 1967. He was survived by his wife Alice, daughter Michelle, and three sons, John Jr., Ravi, and Oran. 

He received many posthumous awards, including the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and, in 2007, a Pulitzer Prize.

For a full biography, please visit https://www.johncoltrane.com/biography.