The World According to John Coltrane: His Life & Music Revealed in Heartfelt 1990 Documentary

In his short life, John Coltrane con­tin­u­al­ly pushed the bound­aries of music. From swing to bebop to hard bop to free jazz, Coltrane was a rest­less seek­er of new sounds. Inspired by the hyp­not­ic, trance-induc­ing tra­di­tion­al music of North Africa and Asia, Coltrane cre­at­ed a new kind of music that fused jazz and East­ern spir­i­tu­al­i­ty.

The World Accord­ing to John Coltrane tells the sto­ry of Coltrane’s quest, from his child­hood in a deeply reli­gious house­hold in North Car­oli­na to his ear­ly days play­ing sax­o­phone in the Navy, to his appren­tice­ship with Miles Davis in the 1950s and his emer­gence as a band­leader and inno­va­tor in the 1960s. Most of the one-hour film is devot­ed to Coltrane’s lat­er peri­od, when he came into his own. The film is not a biog­ra­phy, in the tra­di­tion­al sense. There is very lit­tle about Coltrane’s per­son­al life — his mar­riages, chil­dren, drug prob­lems and declin­ing health. Direc­tor Robert Palmer focus­es instead on Coltrane’s jour­ney as a musi­cian.

The World Accord­ing to John Coltrane was made in 1990, and includes inter­views with Coltrane’s sec­ond wife, pianist Alice Coltrane, and a num­ber of oth­er musi­cians who knew Coltrane and played with him, includ­ing sax­o­phon­ist Wayne Short­er, drum­mer Rashied Ali and Pianist Tom­my Flana­gan. It pro­vides some excel­lent insights into one of the 20th cen­tu­ry’s great­est musi­cians.

via metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Coltrane’s Naval Reserve Enlist­ment Mugshot (1945)

John Coltrane Plays Only Live Per­for­mance of A Love Supreme

John Coltrane: Three Great Euro­pean Per­for­mances, 1960, 1961 and 1965