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Ravi Coltrane got to know his late father through music. Now he’s searching for something new. 14%
By Jeremy D. Goodwin0%
6/5/2026, 10:00:00 AM
Topics: Jazz, Biographies
BS Summary: This article contains 28 faulty reasoning types, including False Dilemma, Halo Effect, and Appeal to Emotion, with Indoctrination as the most egregious example at 13.7% saturation with 176 hits. Analysis detected 1,767 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,288 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 30.6% and a BS Rank of 14% (17,693 of 20,445 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 86.50% of the article peer group.
Miles Davis had already authored an enviable body of work when he hired tenor saxophonist John Coltrane to play in his new quintet in 1955.
Coltrane was only four months younger than his new bandleader but was still an up-and-comer on the jazz scene.
In later work, Coltrane and Davis found new musical worlds to conquer, much further from the sturdy ground of the bebop tradition.
But their partnership produced some of the best-loved recordings in jazz — including museum-quality hard bop that rippled with propulsive energy, yet was deepened by soulful lyricism.
A band led by composer, bandleader and trumpeter Terence Blanchard and Ravi Coltrane, the legend’s son, will pay tribute to the two musical forefathers at Powell Hall on Saturday as a celebration of the 100th anniversary of their births.
Coltrane’s time was cut short by liver cancer in 1967.
Davis died in 1991.
Their former hometown residences are historic landmarks today.
Devotees can visit the John Coltrane House in Philadelphia and the House of Miles in East St.
Louis.
Ravi Coltrane, 60, has found his own way in the jazz world as a bandleader and collaborator with his late mother, Alice Coltrane, who was a jazz pioneer and spiritual leader in her own right.
The younger Coltrane was nearly 2 years old when his father died.
St.
Louis Public Radio’s Jeremy D.
Goodwin spoke with him about getting to know his late father through his work and finding creative space to pay tribute to a musical innovator while adding something of his own.
Jeremy D.
Goodwin: I’ve read that you grew up hearing jazz around the house but didn’t really listen intently to John Coltrane’s work until a little later.
What changed?
Ravi Coltrane: I always appreciated the music, but it didn't really impact me until I was 17 or 18.
This was during the time where we lost our older brother John Jr. in an automobile accident.
He was 18.
I was 17.
And obviously, 15 years earlier we had lost our father.
So there was definitely some trauma emotionally that took place in our environment, and music seemed to fill that void for me.
Something needed to come into my life, and it was me embracing the music, primarily my father's music.
Goodwin: What did you start hearing at that point that maybe you weren’t hearing before?
Coltrane: When you start to recognize someone's voice, you're not just hearing a style of music or a genre of music.
You're not just hearing the instrument itself, a saxophone or a piano.
You're hearing that person's humanity.
You're hearing them expressing from their hearts and souls.
I think that's really what started to affect me.
Goodwin: As you know, John Coltrane talked a lot about his music as an expression of his personal, spiritual quest.
Does that resonate with how you think about music?
Coltrane: Absolutely.
My mother would often say that to create, you must give.
It's not about the individual, it's about what we share.
And I think that makes the music more powerful, more meaningful.
Goodwin: Do you have memories of John?
Coltrane: Unfortunately, I don’t.
Maybe more like impressions and things that occur to me in dreams.
And of course my mother raised me, so I was always aware of the type of person he was, through her accounts of him.
When I started working professionally, I got to work with many musicians who not only knew my father but also performed with him.
So they began to paint a picture that fills it in.
I feel like I've got to learn about my father through his music, of course.
You do get a sense of his humanity through his sound, through the power of his intention and everything he set out to do musically.
Goodwin: I lost my father when I was 18, which is a lot different from what you went through.
But I found that as I had my adult experiences and went through life and hit different milestones, I felt like I understood him better in retrospect.
Do you feel like you’ve gotten to know your father in a deeper way over the years?
Coltrane: Yeah, absolutely.
I think as we age, we start to learn more and more about ourselves and through that process we can start to see how that applies to the ones that came before us, our forefathers and mothers.
It's nice to be able to relate to these figures as human beings.
They can seem pretty mythic, you know, the father I never knew.
And he is a mythic figure in many regards, in terms of his stature in the creative world, in the world of music.
But at the same time he was still my father.
He was still a human being, born on this planet, not in another galaxy.
A saintly human being for sure, but essentially he was one of us.
Goodwin: Anyone who plays tenor sax in a jazz context needs to reckon to some extent with the legacy of your father, even when their last name isn't Coltrane.
Tell me about your relationship with the music of John Coltrane as a professional jazz musician.
Coltrane: All musicians need to investigate the music of the masters.
Of course, saxophone players are going to be drawn to the music of John Coltrane — in addition to the music of Sonny Rollins and Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman and Wayne Shorter and Joe Anderson.
Those are the leading voices for the type of music that we want to perform.
So it’s unavoidable.
I will never get tired of listening to these players play their instruments, to hear their voices, their expression.
It's uplifting.
It's a form of sustenance for us.
It brings us to tears.
It's why we do this.
And for someone like John Coltrane, we know the power of his music, the power of his intention, and we all seek to be a part of that in some way.
For me, it’s not about a technical thing.
And it’s not about emulation, either.
It’s about getting closer to the spirit.
Goodwin: How did these tribute shows with Terence Blanchard come about?
Coltrane: I was really just thrilled to receive a call from Terence Blanchard asking me to be a part of this project.
I don't do tributes very often, and I figure a tribute once every 100 years is probably not so bad.
Goodwin: That's tasteful.
It’s not overdoing it.
Coltrane: Not overdoing it at all.
And it'll probably be another 100 years before I do something like this [again].
But it's impossible not to acknowledge this milestone.
Goodwin: I looked at some of the setlists from the tour, and you’re playing songs that were in the book of Miles’ quintet with John Coltrane back in the day.
When you’re playing a Cole Porter number, or “Someday My Prince Will Come,” how do you find space in there to say something new.
Coltrane: Well, we start with the arrangements.
They’re not the arrangements they were playing in the ‘50s.
They didn’t really look back.
It wasn’t about emulating the past, it was about finding something unique and personal in the present.
We're adopting a similar approach.
It’s more a reimagining of those songs.
That gives us an opportunity to interject our own personal voices in the music.
It also allows us not to just merely emulate what Miles and John did.
We forever and constantly stay inspired by what they did, but that inspiration is supposed to lead us to seeking and finding our own paths within that music, within that repertoire.
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88%flagged-word coverageRavi Coltrane
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