John Coltrane is taught as a tragic figure — addiction, intensity, early death, music that "went too…
John Coltrane is taught as a tragic figure — addiction, intensity, early death, music that "went too far." The arc is real but the reading is wrong. The addiction was a disease he overcame. The intensity was discipline so complete it looked like obsession. The "noise" of the late period was the sound of someone playing faster and denser than Western ears had been trained to follow — not chaos, but a different resolution of musical information. He died at 40 still accelerating. There is no version of his story that ends in defeat. https://begump.com/research/coltrane/
