Jazz and Energy | Thank you, John Coltrane!

Photo: IMAGO/Philippe Gras This week marks 100 years of John Coltrane. The spiritual saxophonist is one of the great influences of jazz, whom many rock musicians love and revere like only Jimi Hendrix. “What he had to say on the saxophone, from gentle ballads to the spiritual ecstasies of his later years, has not yet been exhausted, heard or interpreted,” writes Christian Staas in “Zeit”. After Coltrane quit heroin, in just under ten years, until his untimely death in 1967 shortly before his 41st birthday, Coltrane jumped from bebop to the modal jazz of Miles Davis (in whose first quintet he played) to free jazz. In his search for the "pure sound" (Peter Kemper), he was able to play several notes at the same time and wanted to be "a force for good," as he said. But he had enough energy to launch a spaceship, noted jazz historian Ira Gitler.

Even I, as a young teenager, noticed this when I was 16 in the 80s and sitting in the room of my friend Markus, who was having a small private party because his parents were away. I sat down on one of those leather cube seats that were still popular at the time to have two spiritual experiences by chance (or was it cosmically predetermined?). At first we were enthusiastically moving towards Coltrane's album "A Love Supreme" - until someone noticed that the record was on 45 and not 33. She was meant to be much slower! And then I accidentally took a lungful of a blue, filterless Gauloise, which nearly knocked me off my seat. Until then, I had been pretending to smoke just for show, without knowing it. Thank you John Coltrane! I stopped smoking a long time ago. And I can slowly admire »A Love Supreme« too.

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