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By the time of his passing in 1967, just two months short of his forty-first birthday, the tenor (and sometime soprano) saxophonist John Coltrane had established himself as one of the very finest artists and composers in the history of jazz. With those accolades, I am restraining myself.

Before his death, some admirers pondered the possible significance that John Coltrane's initials were identical to those of Jesus Christ—blasphemous foolishness that shocked and dismayed a man who was by all accounts profoundly religious and genuinely humble. After his death, a church in San Francisco declared Coltrane its patron saint and retooled its liturgy around one of his chief achievements, the four-part suite A Love Supreme. Critics and historians, if not compelled to resort to such literally religious terms to comprehend Coltrane's greatness, nonetheless gravitate toward metaphorically religious language. Trane has quite soberly been declared a "jazz messiah" and, in Hegelian epochal terms, "the end of jazz history."

Indeed, to date Coltrane is arguably the last great innovator in jazz—a music that, rooted as it is in spontaneity and slaves' hope for a tomorrow brighter than yesterday or today, is innovative by definition. Coltrane's lifework ended in free jazz, an untethered form that ignored steady rhythm and encouraged instrumentalists to improvise together, all playing at once. His lifework began, professionally, in the bebop era towered over by alto saxophonist Charlie Parker. Partly because Parker so dominated the alto, Coltrane made the heavier, more insistent tenor saxophone his signature instrument.

If ever a musician mastered an instrument, John Coltrane mastered the tenor. As classical pianist Zita Carno wrote in 1959, in what remains one of the best technical studies of Coltrane's art, his range was a full three octaves up from the lowest note on the horn. Carno marveled at Coltrane's "equality of strength in all registers," his sound ringing as clear, full and unforced in the highest notes as it boomed and scudded at the very bottom. "His playing is very clean and he almost never misses a note." A note? The man almost never missed a split note—several tones played on top of one another. His "harmonic conception," Carno added, was extremely advanced. He achieved an immediately recognizable sound tone, sometimes denounced as metallic, but undeniably bold and markedly free of vibrato. Many saxophonists produce a reedy, sometimes sibilant and boozy sound. You might say they play their mouthpieces. Coltrane filled the entire horn.

And then there was the speed. Bebop, of course, required it—when Parisians first heard Charlie Parker, they could not believe he had only two hands. Later, with Miles Davis, Coltrane was a pioneer in modal jazz, which shuffles and roller-coasts up and down the notes in unusual scales. Coltrane often blitzed modes at a frantic bebop pace. He learned circular breathing (a technique of breathing in through the nose while exhaling from the mouth, thereby eliminating pauses) and could furiously unfurl long ribbons of notes so rapidly that they almost blurred into one. Thus critic Ira Gitler famously dubbed Coltrane's approach in one period "sheets of sound" and said the gushing bursts of his outpourings seemed almost "superhuman."

Coltrane studied piano, bass guitar, and harp theory, privately played the flute and bagpipes, and strove to assimilate all these instruments' capabilities into his saxophone. He was born into the blues and later immersed himself in Western classical music (especially Stravinsky and Bartok), Latin music, African and Indian music, drawing reverently, deeply on them all. He built up an astounding stamina that allowed him routinely to solo for 20 or 30 minutes and left him capable of three-hour sets.

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