Coltrane Talks About LIfe and Music

John Coltrane arrived in Japan in the summer of 1966 carrying a lifelong suspicion of words. He had always believed that music was the thing itself, not a subject for conversation. Liner notes, interviews, explanations, the whole apparatus of jazz criticism that swirled around him, he regarded it all with the polite wariness of a man who knows that pointing at the moon is not the same as the moon. Archie Shepp, who knew him well, said Trane didn't say very much at all. He was a soft-spoken man. Quiet in rooms. Loud only on the bandstand, and even that loudness had a quality of listening in it.

Yet on July 9, 1966, the day after his quintet landed at Haneda Airport, Coltrane sat down with broadcaster Kazuaki Tsujimoto at the Tokyo Prince Hotel and talked. He talked about his music, his life, other musicians, vegetarianism, and how he thought people ought to hear what he was making. That he agreed to this conversation at all tells you something. Japan had gotten to him already, in the space of a single day.

What Tsujimoto received was not what journalists usually got from Coltrane, which was careful silence occasionally broken by short, carefully chosen sentences. Something about Japan loosened him. He had been studying Japanese folk music for years. He was genuinely curious about temple life and about how rural people in the countryside actually lived. He was not visiting Japan as a celebrity passing through; he was visiting the way a student visits, with a notebook in his head and his ears open wide.

The interview touched on his spirituality without him ever using that word. He talked about music the way certain people talk about prayer, as something you do because the alternative, not doing it, is a kind of spiritual suffocation. He spoke about other musicians with the generosity of a man who had learned something valuable from everyone he ever played with and never forgot it. He talked about what he ate, which was mostly vegetables, and about the body as something you had to tend carefully if you wanted to play the way he played, which demanded everything a body had and then asked for more.

On how people should hear his music, he was characteristically direct and also characteristically generous. He did not insist on correct interpretation. He wanted listeners to bring themselves to the music rather than waiting for the music to explain itself to them. This was a radical position in 1966, when even adventurous listeners sometimes felt they needed a guide into the territory his late records had opened up. He was saying, in effect, that there was no wrong door. That wherever you entered, the music would meet you there.

The Japan tour was not a commercial triumph. The first Tokyo concert played to a half-empty hall. Critics at Swing Journal divided sharply. The late-period quintet, with Alice Coltrane at the piano, Pharoah Sanders pushing free energy from the second horn chair, Jimmy Garrison anchoring the deep bottom, and Rashied Ali building polyrhythmic weather systems on the drums, was simply too far from where most of the Japanese jazz audience had been living. They had been raised on the classic quartet, on the Impulse records, on A Love Supreme. What Coltrane brought them instead was something that had moved past all of that, past even what he could easily describe.

Which is perhaps why the Tsujimoto interview matters so much. It is one of the few times in his final years that Coltrane sat still long enough for a sustained conversation. He was, by most accounts, sixteen months from his death, though of course no one knew that in the humid July air of Tokyo. He was a man in full possession of his powers, still adding to them, still reaching, still convinced that music could do things that no other human activity could do. He had come to Japan to listen as much as to play. He bought a shakuhachi and a koto before he left. He visited the Peace Memorial Park in Nagasaki and bowed in prayer.

Archie Shepp was right. Coltrane didn't say very much. But when the music was in the room, you didn't need him to.

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