Coltrane at 100

I loved jazz as soon as I discovered it, but it was when I heard John Coltrane that I realised it could take me to a different place. That would have been around 1960, and the first thing I heard was his solo on Miles Davis’s “Milestones”, on an EP. Then I used the money from my paper round to buy another EP, this time released under Coltrane’s own name. Issued in the UK on the Esquire label, it paired “Bass Blues” and “You Leave Me Breathless” from his third studio album for Prestige, recorded in 1957. These were fairly conventional performances but I already knew, from reading Down Beat, that he was heading somewhere else. Soon there would be Coltrane Plays the Blues and Olé, which made that new direction very clear. From the very start, though, there was that sound. You can hear it in the opening notes of his solo on “Bass Blues”. It was like nothing you’d ever heard before. Nothing like Lester Young or Dexter Gordon or Sonny Rollins. It spoke in a different way, to a different…