These are some of the popular, legendary Coltrane ballads. The smooth, soft, touching songs that just jam; the legendary Coltrane. These are some of his most famous.

The oddest thing is I wasn’t really that into Coltrane until relatively recently (post college, since about 2001).  I grew up playing the saxophone and by high school I was hitting pretty hard with the jazz music and a lot of my influences came from then or even by early college. 

I had plenty of vinyl, I had copies of my old man’s “My Favorite Things” (one of the most famous jazz albums of all times) but hadn’t gotten that into Coltrane. It was actually Miles, and my favorite album of all time (which is still right up there, was Mingus: Live at the Bohemia, that I was much more in to.

Charles Mingus

Anyway, here is a little John Colrane soul on this post’s music player.   Coltrane was sort of tall and thick.  Big round head and rounded nose, bulbus eyes.   There were really only about 8 years that he was in his damn prime according to me.  He had plenty of good stuff and a lot like Hendrix, I think he was in the war that’d ended by then.  By ’52 he was doing some pretty near stuff, and by ’58 he was playing some of the most incredible and soulful Jazz music in history.  Which is why we all know his name.

He, like Miles, struggled with heroin badly.  It sounds messed up but I think his music was pretty heavily influenced by the pain that this drug brought him.  It is just so soft, so touching, and unreal…