John Coltrane and Ray Charles: Two Jazz Lives, One Birthday
John Coltrane and Ray Charles were both born on September 23, four years apart: Coltrane in 1926 and Charles in 1930. Both changed what a jazz musician could sound like, and both did it with a craftsman's discipline and an obvious love of the music. They took very different roads.
John Coltrane
Coltrane started on alto saxophone and switched to tenor in 1947, the instrument he became known for. In the early 1960s he added the soprano. In 1955 Miles Davis hired him, and the quintet recorded some of the defining music of the decade. In 1957 he played a summer residency at the Five Spot in Thelonious Monk's quartet, then rejoined Davis in December.
The Craft
Coltrane became fanatical about practice. Jimmy Heath said he practiced "25 hours a day", and it was common for him to fall asleep with the horn still in his mouth or to work on a single note for hours. Heath also remembered him, after a hotel complaint about the noise, taking the horn out of his mouth and practicing fingering for a full hour.
That work shows on the records:
- Giant Steps (1960): his first release as a leader on Atlantic. Critic Ira Gitler had coined the term "sheets of sound" for the dense, rapid runs he developed.
- My Favorite Things (1961): his first album on soprano saxophone, which turned a waltz from a musical into a modal jazz hit.
- The Classic Quartet (1962–1965): with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, it produced searching, spiritually driven work.
- A Love Supreme (1965): a four-part suite, an ode to his faith in and love for God.
The recognition came later: a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997 and a special Pulitzer Prize in 2007, citing his "masterful improvisation, supreme musicianship and iconic centrality to the history of jazz".
Ray Charles
Charles played piano first, but also alto saxophone, clarinet, trumpet and organ. He learned to read and write music in Braille, a difficult process because each hand's part has to be learned separately. He began by modeling himself on Nat King Cole, and he was keen to lead his own band early on, forming a trio with guitar and bass.
The Craft
At Atlantic Records he found his own sound by putting gospel phrasing on secular songs. "I've Got a Woman" (1954) and "What'd I Say" (1959) helped pioneer soul, a blend of blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, and gospel. His contemporaries called him "The Genius".
Jazz stayed close to his hands:
- The Genius of Ray Charles (1959): six songs with a studio big band and six ballads with a string orchestra.
- Genius + Soul = Jazz (1961): an instrumental album on Impulse!, with two groups drawn from members of the Count Basie band and top New York session players.
- Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (1962): country songs sung with the same phrasing.
He won 17 Grammy Awards, five of them after his death, including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987, and was one of the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986.
Where They Meet
Coltrane's contract moved to Impulse! in 1961, the year Genius + Soul = Jazz came out on the label. The two men never made a record together, but they share a habit: take a form you inherited, whether a standard, a hymn or a country song, and work at it until it sounds like nobody else.
Coltrane went deeper into the music, and Charles went wider. Listening to both in one sitting is a good way to hear how much room jazz has.