John Coltrane by Bill Cole
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"... I want to be a force for real good... I know that there are bad forces, forces put here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the force which is truly for good."
(John Coltrane, as quoted by Frank Kofsky

John Coltrane, one of the greatest artists in history, creator of many pieces of music of unparalleled beauty, compositions that transcend the usual human limitations and have inspired thousands and thousands of listeners to be forces for good as Coltrane himself set out to be, deserves a better biography than Bill Cole's John Coltrane (1976). This is a horribly dated book, full of obsolete New Age claptrap and pseudo-intellectual gibberish, stuffy, pretentious, and hardly readable. It avoids the bottom rating from me only because it contains quite a lot of musicological theory ruminations and being a complete dummy in this area I have to give the author the benefit of the doubt: at least in the theory of music he may be saying something worthwhile. I trust that when he writes about "vertical" (chordal) vs. "horizontal" (melodical) playing, he knows what he is writing about.

The first sentence of the Preface is quite promising:

"There are two things in particular that I would like to get at in this book: John Coltrane as a musician, and John Coltrane as a religious person."

But then, already on page 15, the reader is offered a diagram of four concentric circles that represent the "four worlds of the traditional man," the worlds of "Action," "Formulation," "Creation," and - wow - "Emanation." Even worse, on the next page the author begins to quote fragments of research works by Fela Sowande who treats us with such groundbreaking concepts as John Coltrane's "western lobe or the intellectual side of [...] brain" as opposed to "eastern lobe or the intuitive side."

The author continues quoting Sowande all the way through the entire book. We have to suffer the New Age mumbo-jumbo on "central energy" (the "life force" in Coltrane's music), on intuition vs. intellect, moving from Zodiac period of Pisces to the Aquarian period, and - that's a good one - masculine vs. feminine elements of Coltrane's mind and how his compositions depend on their proportions. The gibberish reaches its apex in Sowande's diagram (page 158) that supposedly illustrates "how art is connected with will, content, form, idea, and imagination."

The reader gets all this blather instead of a portrait of John Coltrane, a great artist and true innovator of contemporary music. Since the book is a reworking of the author's doctoral thesis I suspect that Mr. Sowande was on the committee that decided whether Mr. Cole would be granted a PhD degree. Alice Coltrane's short yet wonderful quote that opens Chapter 17 adds more to the text than all passages by Sowande combined.

Another telling detail is that the author heavily praises Om, a late album recorded in 1965, called by many critics the worst album in the composer's career (Coltrane himself seemed to be ashamed of that work and did not want the album to go public - it was released only posthumously). Mr. Cole writes more about Om, a piece of heavily dated curia, than about, for instance, one of Coltrane's masterpieces, Transition.

At least the author has enough common sense to dwell on how unique in the history of music John Coltrane's so-called "classic quartet" was. How the four great instrumentalists composed a unit that far transcended the sum of their individual talents.

Two stars.

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