Lewis Porter, John Coltrane: His Life and Music

Why are so many jazz biographies so bad? There are some excellent ones, of course - Peter Pettinger's How My Heart Sings comes to mind - but in any other subject area, those would be all we would have. A manuscript of anything less would not even get past the desk of a junior editor at any self-respecting publishing house. But when it comes to jazz musicians, it seems that anyone who happens to like the music, regardless of their ability to write or their having had any actual connection to the subject, can write a book and have it published. The latest example to cross my path is John Coltrane: His Life and Music by Lewis Porter (University of Michigan, 1998).

I suppose I should be fair. Porter is a musician, and a professor of music at Rutgers, so he knows something about playing. An enormous amount, actually. But that fails to redeem the book. Porter bills his work as a biography, and starts out with an excruciatingly detailed examination of Coltrane's family roots in North Carolina. He spends three full chapters - 34 pages - doing it, and much of those are not even about Coltrane himself but his cousins, aunts and uncles, twice or more removed. Porter's excuse seems to be the fact that it has never been done before, but so what? Maybe there is a reason it hasn't. His conclusion seems to be only that the fact that Coltrane's father died of cancer when John was very young significantly affected the formation of his personality. I grant that this is valid, but it could have been dealt with in a few paragraphs, or a handful of pages at the most.

At the same time, however, the book offers virtually nothing about Coltrane's personal life and lifestyle at the height of his success. Like most musicians of his generation, he had once been a drug addict but kicked the habit. He was married twice and had several children and step-children, the maternity of at least one of whom remains uncertain. One could argue, as Porter probably would, that dirt has no place in a serious biography, but I believe it is possible to write about these aspects of a subject's life in a way that is not prurient, and it is a pity that Porter barely tries. Where he does, he further undermines himself by claiming, early on, that his is the first biography to be based on objective research and then proceeding to fill the rest of the book with phrases like "it is reasonable to suppose" or "it was likely that..." and so on.

What Porter does focus on is Coltrane's music. His compositions and improvisational style are analyzed in mind-boggling detail with copious transcriptions for illustration, some of entire solos. This will have some use to a narrow audience - musicians who want to study Coltrane's style in depth and have a sufficiently deep understanding of music theory to make something out of Porter's analysis. But again, if this is a biography, this level of technical detail is excessive. If you do want to focus on it, call the book "The Musical Style of John Coltrane" or some such and dispense with biographical information altogether. But Porter can't seem to decide what he wants the book to be, or, rather, he seems to want it to be a technical analysis masquerading as a biography.

Yet for all these complaints, there is some value in what Porter has done. Pretty much everyone agrees that Coltrane was an innovator. I am not aware of charges of outright charlatanism ever leveled against Coltrane the way they were against, say, Ornette Coleman. The disagreement lies in whether the direction in which he took jazz was a good one. What Porter's analysis shows is why Coltrane's music was so innovative. Just looking at some of the lines on the printed page you realize that they look weird. He played stuff that no one had played, or even thought of playing, before, and Porter proves it. He is not afraid to take his analyses to their logical extreme, even if he ends up concluding on occasion that a particular fragment fits no known pattern or harmonic device, not even any of the ones Coltrane himself had used previously. Does that make Coltrane's music meaningless, at least from a formal perspective? Porter doesn't say, but he provides the raw material to let us decide on our own. I suspect, fully acknowledging my severely limited knowledge of music theory, that the answer is yes.

Finally, despite the distractions, Porter does manage to give us a smidgen of insight into why some of Coltrane's music, especially from Giant Steps onwards, sounds so abrasive. Long before he had given up tonal harmony and straight-ahead swing, his solos started to sound jarring, off-putting and unsettling, and not in a good way according to this pair of ears at least. He was the first, and is still the most infamous, exponent of the "where the hell is the melody?" school of jazz. Porter's explanation is that Coltrane was hearing multiple things - melodies, chord sequences, what have you - in his head simultaneously, and was unable to organize and prioritize them in his mind, resulting in his trying to play all of them at the same time:

...it was difficult to construct a smoothly flowing melodic line that would connect all of the harmonies he was hearing with a minimum of extraneous notes. (p. 158)

Porter doesn't suggest why he couldn't, but that's probably expecting too much from anyone. Just putting this phenomenon into words is valuable - it offers us a possibility, admittedly extremely daunting, to try to hear those individual threads of Coltrane's thinking the next time we pop Giant Steps into the CD player.

So approach John Coltrane: His Life and Music with caution. Lots of caution. I emphatically do not recommend it as a biography, but for those wishing to gain technical insight into Coltrane's style, it may be worth the effort.