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An Interview with John Coltrane (1958)

John Coltrane, August Blume

[Multimedia content blocked]

Listen to a 46 minute recording, or download the file



November 15-January 15, 2004
Slought Foundation
Reception on Saturday, November 15, 2003

Reel-to-reel box, 1958

This previously unreleased full recording (from June 15, 1958) has been made available in conjunction with the Slought Foundation "Coltrane." initiative. An excerpted transcription, "An Interview with John Coltrane” by August Blume, was first published in The Jazz Review 2, no. 1 (January 1959): 25. Recorded at Blume’s home in Baltimore, Maryland prior to that evening’s performance of the Miles Davis Quintet (with John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones) at The Crystal Caverns, Washington, D.C.

Opening November 15, 2003, Slought Foundation, Philadelphia will present a two-month exhibition and series of events revisiting the work of John Coltrane through archival material and contemporary art. Philadelphia’s rich jazz heritage provides an ideal backdrop for this tribute, which includes archival material pertaining to Coltrane’s life and artistic practice (e.g. original photographs, recordings, and posters), and work by conceptual artists that, since the 1960s, have executed homages to Coltrane’s oeuvre.


Arguably the most influential musician in modern jazz, spiritually and technically, Philadelphia's John Coltrane (1926-67) recorded for the first time under Dizzy Gillespie, before shifting from bebop towards a more open-ended experimentalism in Miles Davis's preeminent quintet which introduced modalism to his work. A brief period with Thelonius Monk in 1957 effectively signaled his career as a leader; over the next ten years his quartet - particularly with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones - evidenced Coltrane's ambitious vision. Espousing a personalized version of Judaeo-Chistianity with elements of African and Eastern animism, John Coltrane radically shifted jazz harmony. Seminal recordings on Impulse Records include "A Love Supreme" and "Ascension," Even today, a substantial critical divide exists between Coltrane's earlier conventional, albeit highly-inventive, work and his late free-explorations.

Organized by Osvaldo Romberg, Mark Christman, Aaron Levy


Creative Commons License
Media files on the Slought.org website are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

MLA Style: John Coltrane, et al. "An Interview with John Coltrane (1958)." Slought Foundation Online Content. [15 November 2003; Accessed 21 May 2013]. <http://slought.org/content/11161/>.






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