Chasing Trane

John Coltrane,

he could get in his spaceship

and it could take him anywhere he

wanted to go.

Just to say the name

John Coltrane, it makes me shake

and tremble.

It's like talking about Beethoven, Shakespeare.

You're talking about an artistic genius and

a spiritual giant.

Trane had a sound

that was heavenly, it was like, oh, my God.

Coltrane's strength of

character is in his journey through music.

He sacrificed, and he had the

insight and the consciousness to touch

that thing that's inside of all of us.

Right now,

we're gonna take you down to a favorite

little spot of ours here in New York,

Café Bohemia.

Down there at the present time is

a young man whose name is Miles Davis.

I'm sure you know who he is.

He's a real cool stylist,

Miles Davis is.

1957, John Coltrane is

part of one of the groundbreaking

groups of the day, the Miles Davis Quintet.

Miles Davis is looked upon as the harbinger

of everything new.

He is on the cutting edge,

everyone is looking at him for the promise

of what is to come.

Are you really asking me a question like that?

How good was that band?

Well, I think it was

probably one of the-the greatest,

uh, jazz bands that was ever formed.

Everybody in the band

had their own voice, and John was really,

really special in that regard,

in that you could hear that he was

going somewhere,

and I think that Miles heard that he

was going somewhere.

Being with Miles Davis

was huge for Coltrane,

absolutely huge.

It catapulted him from being somebody

that only really serious record collectors

knew about to being somebody that

everybody knew.

John Coltrane's

experiences in Miles Davis' quintet

was sort of like going up to the

high diving board every night,

allowing himself to be scared,

allowing himself to not know exactly what

was gonna be ahead of him.

It's of a high, high

caliber to be able to play on a level

which is exceptional.

You've got to be touched by the

supreme whatever to be able to play

like Miles played and like Coltrane played.

At this time,

Coltrane is a relative newlywed with the

entire Miles Davis band as best men.

Coltrane marries Naima Austin,

a woman he'd met in Philadelphia.

Naima has a child, Antonia.

This is a man who

gets his first experience at fatherhood

with me, you know, so, and I was a handful,

OK, I was a handful.

I was remembering one

time John had this gig, it was a bad night,

snowy, he did the gig.

I needed some shoes.

He walked back from that gig home so he

wouldn't spend any of the money so

that I could get the shoes the next day.

You know, then you make that sacrifice,

you work all night and then you walk home

so that I can get a pair of shoes?

That's father.

John Coltrane is

working consistently to support the

wife and daughter he adores.

Life is good, but there's a problem.

We are playing in

nightclubs where the pimps and hustlers

are around, and you, uh, go for the hype,

and hey, man, you take some of this

and you feel up and good, you feel good,

and you go for it and then you're stuck.

Hard drugs is an addiction.

Charlie Parker, a great prophet

before Coltrane, Charlie Parker,

he was on drugs.

He wanted to get off. He didn't quite make it.

There was the misguided

notion that artistic ability was enhanced

with hard drugs.

Charlie Parker is the example.

You're gonna turn from

somebody that can't play into Charlie Parker

by doing this?

It doesn't happen. It's a myth.

Geez, and some of my friends, I mean,

they died following that trail.

Before Coltrane was

really aware of it,

he was using the needle and he was

really heavily addicted.

He had become a heroin addict,

and it's not generally known that he

was also drinking to excess.

The funny thing about him, though,

is everybody loved him.

I'd spoke to over 250

people when I did my book, and I couldn't

find anybody that said, oh,

when he was drunk, he was a terror.

They all said, oh, I didn't even know

when he was drunk because he was always

so sweet, you know?

He was that kind of person,

but he was unreliable.

Miles Davis famously wrote in his

autobiography, he would come to

the gig in clothes that looked liked he

had slept in them, so this was not making

a great impression on Miles Davis.

John Coltrane's fired.

He's never been higher in his career,

and so the drop down is long and hard,

and he realizes that he can go the

way of Charlie Parker and just continue

in a self-destructive path or really is he

gonna find a way to dedicating himself to

a clean, spiritual existence that brings

together everything that has inspired

him from the time he was a child?

And so here's John Coltrane at

a pivotal point of his life.

He's gotta make a decision.

I was born in a small town called

Hamlet in North Carolina in 1926.

My family moved from there when

I was a few months old to High Point.

I was an only child. I was brought up Methodist.

It wasn't too strict, but it was there.

In my early years when I was going to

church every Sunday, I was under the

influence of my grandfather.

He was the dominating cat in the family.

Both of my grandfathers were ministers.

I grew up in that and I guess just accepted it.

To understand

John Coltrane's beginnings is to

understand that he comes from the American South,

and the racial realities that he

grew up with, the idea that the

black church was the primary force that

held his family together and also

it was the source point for his first

musical experiences, and the fact that music

and the spirituality were there as one

at the very beginning, is to really get at the

DNA of what John Coltrane is all about.

The Jim Crow South

was basically a reference to what

the South was like after the Civil War,

after Reconstruction, where segregation

had been re-imposed.

It was a place ready-made for the blues,

ready-made for jazz, ready-made for people

using their pain to catapult their art.

The Jim Crow South

where Coltrane grew up proceeded

from slavery and under slavery,

it was against the law for us

to read or write.

How will our humanity be expressed,

creativity, courageously?

It was against the law for black people

to worship God without white supervision,

so what do you do?

You steal away at night near the creek,

hold hands in a ring shout and

lift your voice.

Lift your voice, vocals,

create a community, camaraderie and so forth.

Black music was the

black response to being terrorized

and traumatized.

We're gonna share and spread some

soothing sweetness against the backdrop