Working in the bebop and hard bop idioms early in his career, Coltrane helped pioneer the use of modes and was one of the players at the forefront of free jazz.

He led at least fifty recording sessions and appeared on many albums by other musicians, including trumpeter Miles Davis and pianist Thelonious Monk.

[1] Decades after his death, Coltrane remains influential, and he has received numerous posthumous awards, including a special Pulitzer Prize, and was canonized by the African Orthodox Church.

While in high school, Coltrane played clarinet and alto horn in a community band[10] before switching to the saxophone, after being influenced by the likes of Lester Young and Johnny Hodges.

After being discharged from the Navy as a seaman first class in August 1946, Coltrane returned to Philadelphia, where the city's bustling jazz scene offered him many opportunities for both learning and playing.

There were many things that people like Hawk [Coleman Hawkins], and Ben [Webster] and Tab Smith were doing in the '40s that I didn't understand, but that I felt emotionally.

Heath recalls an incident in a hotel in San Francisco when after a complaint was issued, Coltrane took the horn out of his mouth and practiced fingering for a full hour.

Coltrane was with this edition of the Davis band (known as the "First Great Quintet"—along with Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums) from October 1955 to April 1957 (with a few absences).

Recorded by Voice of America, the performances confirm the group's reputation, and the resulting album, Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall, is very highly rated.

[34] In October of that year, jazz critic Ira Gitler coined the term "sheets of sound"[35] to describe the style Coltrane developed with Monk and was perfecting in Davis's group, now a sextet.

"[36] Coltrane stayed with Davis until April 1960, working with alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley; pianists Red Garland, Bill Evans, and Wynton Kelly; bassist Paul Chambers; and drummers Philly Joe Jones and Jimmy Cobb.

During this time he participated in the Davis sessions Milestones and Kind of Blue, and the concert recordings Miles & Monk at Newport (1963) and Jazz at the Plaza (1958).

[37] The album's title track is generally considered to have one of the most difficult chord progressions of any widely played jazz composition,[38] eventually referred to as Coltrane changes.

Harmonically complex music was still present, but on stage Coltrane heavily favored continually reworking his "standards": "Impressions", "My Favorite Things", and "I Want to Talk About You".

In contrast to the radicalism of his 1961 recordings at the Village Vanguard, his studio albums in the following two years (with the exception of Coltrane, 1962, which featured a blistering version of Harold Arlen's "Out of This World") were much more conservative.

[57] On March 6, 1963, the group entered Van Gelder Studio in New Jersey and recorded a session that was lost for decades after its master tape was destroyed by Impulse!

The fourth movement of A Love Supreme, "Psalm", is, in fact, a musical setting for an original poem to God written by Coltrane, and printed in the album's liner notes.

The quartet played A Love Supreme live only three times, recorded twice – in July 1965 at a concert in Antibes, France, and in October 1965 in Seattle, Washington.

He was especially influenced by the dissonance of Ayler's trio with bassist Gary Peacock,[66] who had worked with Paul Bley, and drummer Sunny Murray, whose playing was honed with Cecil Taylor as leader.

The group's evolution can be traced through the albums The John Coltrane Quartet Plays, Living Space, Transition, New Thing at Newport, Sun Ship, and First Meditations.

Jones left in early 1966, dissatisfied by sharing drumming duties with Ali and stating that, concerning Coltrane's latest music, "only poets can understand it".

Coltrane also continued to tour with the second quartet up until two months before his death; his penultimate live performance and final recorded one, a radio broadcast for the Olatunji Center of African Culture in New York City, was eventually released as an album in 2001.

Unless he developed a primary focus elsewhere in later life and that spread to his liver, the seeds of John Coltrane's cancer were sown in his days of addiction.

"[90] Later that year, Coltrane would record the music released posthumously on Offering: Live at Temple University, which features Ali on drums supplemented by three percussionists.

[97] About the breakup, Naima said in J. C. Thomas's Chasin' the Trane: "I could feel it was going to happen sooner or later, so I wasn't really surprised when John moved out of the house in the summer of 1963.

[100] In the liner notes of A Love Supreme, Coltrane states that in 1957 he experienced "by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life.

[102] According to the musician Peter Lavezzoli, "Alice brought happiness and stability to John's life, not only because they had children, but also because they shared many of the same spiritual beliefs, particularly a mutual interest in Indian philosophy.

[107] The 29-minute recording contains chants from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita[108] and the Buddhist Tibetan Book of the Dead,[109] and a recitation of a passage describing the primal verbalization "om" as a cosmic/spiritual common denominator in all things.

F. W. King, describing the African Orthodox Church of Saint John Coltrane, said "We are Coltrane-conscious...God dwells in the musical majesty of his sounds.

Samuel G. Freedman wrote in The New York Times that ... the Coltrane church is not a gimmick or a forced alloy of nightclub music and ethereal faith.