John Coltrane died on July 17, 1967, at age 41.
The last album he recorded was Interstellar Space, sessions from February 1967. Just five months before he died, he was still working, still composing, still trying to push the saxophone and his own playing into places nobody had gone before.
Interstellar Space is a duet album. Coltrane's saxophone and Rashied Ali on drums. That's it. No bass, no piano, just the two of them in the studio, playing extended pieces that move between melody and abstraction, between the recognizable and the completely unknown.
It's an extraordinary record. Coltrane's playing on it is searingly beautiful and also kind of terrifying. You can hear someone who is at the absolute edge of what he can do, who is pushing into places that no one else has ever gone, who is asking questions about sound and space and time that the instrument isn't really designed to answer.
By 1967, Coltrane had already revolutionized jazz multiple times. He'd been the tenor saxophone player in Miles Davis's first great quintet, the one that established modal jazz. He'd started his own period as a leader and made A Love Supreme, an album that became almost sacred in the jazz canon. He'd pushed into free jazz, into spiritual music, into experimental territory. He'd done everything.
And he was still pushing. That's what's remarkable about Interstellar Space. He was already considered a genius, already made the albums that would define his legacy, already changed the music forever. And he was still trying to go further.
The late Coltrane pieces are difficult to listen to sometimes. They're not immediately beautiful in the way that A Love Supreme is beautiful. They're searching, restless, sometimes chaotic. You can hear Coltrane looking for something that he couldn't quite reach, and he's not trying to hide that search. He's making it part of the music. He's making the reaching the content of the album.
This is what spiritual seeking sounds like, I think. Not arrival. Not peace. But the process of looking for something transcendent and not being sure you'll find it. Coltrane had always been interested in spirituality, in meaning, in what music could express that words couldn't. By the end of his life, that search had become the whole of his artistic project.
He was dealing with health problems by then. The heroin addiction he'd beaten in the fifties had left scars. He was working with young musicians like Pharoah Sanders and Rashied Ali who represented the cutting edge of free jazz. He was moving away from the audiences who had loved A Love Supreme toward something more experimental, more challenging, less obviously beautiful.
And he died before he could finish the search.
The question that Interstellar Space leaves you with is: what was Coltrane reaching for? What was the thing he couldn't quite articulate, that he was still trying to express in February 1967, five months before his death? What was the further thing beyond the free jazz, beyond the spiritual albums, beyond everything he'd already accomplished?
We don't know because he ran out of time.
Sometimes the most important art gets made by people who are running out of time and know it. There's an urgency to Coltrane's late work that you don't feel in the earlier recordings. He was pushing harder. He was tolerating less comfort, less compromise. He was saying this is what I need to express before I go, and I don't have time to make it pretty.
The result is music that is sometimes difficult and challenging and not immediately rewarding. But it's also honest in a way that few things are. It's the sound of a person at the absolute edge of their capability and their mortality, asking the deepest questions they can ask, and not waiting for the answers before moving on to the next question.
That's a model for how to live, I think. Not waiting for certainty. Not waiting for comfort. But continuing to push, continuing to ask, continuing to reach for the thing that's just beyond your grasp. Continuing right up until the end.
THE MUSIC
If the history is what brings you here, the music is what keeps you here.
Until next time.
Sid