Ascension: John Coltrane’s Final Experiment 1965–1967

A Biography of John Coltrane’s Free Jazz Years, Spiritual Journey, Revolutionary Recordings, and Legacy in the Turbulent 1960s Avant-Garde

De: Southerland

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

John Coltrane’s final years burned with a ferocity few could endure and even fewer could understand. Between 1965 and his death in 1967, Coltrane abandoned the safety of melody and form, dismantled the very structures he had once perfected, and plunged headlong into sound as spirit, sound as prayer. Ascension, Meditations, Om, Kulu Sé Mama, Expression, and the stark duets of Interstellar Space—these recordings, once dismissed as chaos, now stand as some of the most radical music ever made.

This book is not a cradle-to-grave biography. It is a forensic, passionate chronicle of those last two years: the breaking of the Classic Quartet, the arrival of Pharoah Sanders, Rashied Ali, and Alice Coltrane, the endless concerts that stretched until body and breath gave out, the resistance and backlash, and the unyielding sense that Coltrane was reaching beyond jazz itself into the infinite.

Set against the turbulence of the 1960s—civil rights uprisings, the Black Arts Movement, the collision of politics and art—Coltrane’s music becomes inseparable from liberation itself. Critics recoiled; poets and prophets embraced him. What many once derided as noise is now recognized as revelation.

Told here as both narrative and testimony, Ascension: John Coltrane’s Final Experiment 1965–1967 traces not decline, but culmination. It shows how a man, aware of his failing body, chose to spend his last breath breaking every limit: from time, from harmony, from expectation. His final recordings are not documents of collapse, but of transcendence.

Coltrane died at forty, but the fire he carried did not. It burns still—in the work of Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, and in every musician who dares to treat sound as sacred. His late years were not an aberration. They were his testament.