Wise One Hundred: The John Coltrane Centennial

Elvin Jones Quintet - Naima

I've been at work on this all week and I need to just pop it loose already... obviously with a figure like this there are a zillion different possibilities and sometimes you just have to make decisions.

Equally as obvious is that our subject matter today is among the greatest exponents American music of any kind will ever produce, and likely the only person I'll ever post about on here that has his own church.

There's no hint of hyperbole to suggest that our honoree today is possibly the single most influential musician in American, and perhaps even global, history. Bold, but not necessarily exaggerated.

It's almost as if there was music in black and white before him, and he inaugurated an age of unprecedented color.

Really he's almost like a prism, with all music that came before him transmuted and refracted into a whole new visible spectrum after he showed up and changed the DNA and the perceived possibilities of things.

The story is well documented so I'm not gonna rehash. He was from North Carolina, had been in the Navy, and really made the scene when he joined fellow 2026 centennialist Miles Davis' band in around 1958.

His time in that group included Kind of Blue, widely considered the world's favorite Jazz recording, in 1959 before he split to go solo and really mess up the world's hair.

I guess if you had to describe in words (impossible) what his most potent innovation was, it was to use the mathematics of music to determine what every modal avenue was for every single possible chord change, and to be able to play every note of the connective tissue between keys as the chords went by in a sequence. At about 5000 miles an hour.

For me, I see John Coltrane -- born this day in 1926 -- as just as much a mathematician as a musician, or rather as a most world-altering combination of the two.

So yes, speaking of math and numbers, John Coltrane is 100 today. I've whipped up a folder full of blissful goodies as you might imagine I might do. Let's get it!

Elvin Jones Quintet

A Love Supreme: A Tribute to John Coltrane

Yubin Chokin Hall

Tokyo, Japan

6.13.1988

01 Chim Chim Cheree

02 I Want to Talk About You

03 Body and Soul 

04 Blues Minor

05 Naima

06 A Love Supreme

07 Bessie's Blues   

Total time: 1:49:35

disc break goes after Track 04

Elvin Jones - drums

McCoy Tyner - piano

Freddie Hubbard - trumpet & cornet

Sonny Fortune - tenor saxophone

Richard Davis - bass

256/48k audio extracted from a Japanese DVD of a 1992 laserdisc-only release on the Pioneer label

spectral analysis is lossless to 20 kHz, making this equivalent to a preFM source

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited & remastered by EN, September 2026
687 MB FLAC/link is below

Charles Tolliver & Jazz Orkestar HRT

John Coltrane's "Africa/Brass": a re-creation

JAZZ.HR Festival/Spring

Vatroslav Lisinski Concert Hall

Zagreb, Croatia

4.11.2014

01 Blues Minor

02 The Damned Don't Cry

03 Song of the Underground Railroad

04 Greensleeves

05 Africa

06 Household of Saud

Total time: 1:07:44

Charles Tolliver - trumpet & cornet

Sasa Nestoroic - tenor & soprano saxophones

with Jazz Orkestar HRT:

Antonio Gecek, Zvonimir Bajavic, Davor Krizic & Branko Sterpin - trumpet

Zvonko Kosak & Andrija Petej - trombone 

Marin Ferketin & Luca Zuzic - euphonium

Miro Kadoic, Zdenko Ivanusic, Zeljko Kovacevic, Mario Bocic & Damir Horvat - saxophones & clarinets

Joe Kapiowitz - piano 

Elivs Penava - guitar 

Sasa Borovec - bass 

Marko Lazaric - drums

Jazzrita capture of a digital Croatian FM broadcast, prepared by Lewojazz

spectral analysis is lossless to 22 kHz, making this equivalent to a high-end preFM source or an official release

edited, denoised and slightly remastered by EN, September 2026
478 MB FLAC/direct link to both concerts and who knows what else

In addition to the two (banger) concerts I put in there, you'll find a truly bizarre (yet strangely beautiful) dark ambient remix I made of a famous Coltrane ballad, where I used the Audacity stretchy tool and the AI splitter to concoct a 50-minute fantasia that's something like a cross between No Pussyfooting (Fripp & Eno), 2 H.B. (Roxy Music) and of course, Alabama. This features both JC and son, Ravi on tenor sax.

Also lurking stealthily in the folder is a little mixtape I smashed together yesterday, which features all sorts of killer Coltrane covers, as well as music that has a direct aesthetic lineage tracable to him.

OK? That oughta tide everybody over until Friday, when I pay tribute to another icon of American music who sadly departed our realm last month. What a way to make a living, eh?

But that is in 48 hours, according to Eddie Murphy or Reggie or whatever his name is. Today is the day we honor and celebrate the Wise One, John William Coltrane, on his 100th birthday, and wish that a few dozen more like him would pick up actual musical instruments and save culture from itself.--J.

9.23.1926 - 7.17.1967