John Coltrane was one of the greatest improvisers in music history. Throughout his career, whether he was playing as a sideman for Miles Davis, laying out sheets of sound in the late 1950s, or breaking through to the heavens by sheer will, he proved again and again that music is a limitless force. Listen to him and one of his greatest bands spending an hour tugging at the strings of “My Favorite Things” on recordings from their 1966 tour of Japan and you’ll be astonished that a Rodgers & Hammerstein tune from The Sound of Music could contain so many layers. Coltrane’s ability to use seemingly any sound as a vehicle for extended travel would seal his reputation, not only within jazz, but also well beyond its borders: Everyone from Carlos Santana to Patti Smith to André 3000 has cited him as an influence.

Coltrane’s work as a composer is just as striking. Though sometimes overshadowed by his skills as an improviser, his ability to pen songs of delicate lyrical beauty, extraordinary complexity, and technical triumph is no less impressive than his ability to search the music of his mind in real time. Some of his works have become standards for conservatory students and young lions anxious to prove their chops, but they’re sometimes viewed more as tests than as the beautiful, meaningful songs that they are. 

But Coltrane’s compositions weren’t merely atoms waiting to be split. They were thoughtfully composed, gorgeously rendered pieces in their own right that are worth celebrating. On September 23, the 100th anniversary of his birth, saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin does just that, performing a set of some of the greatest pieces in Coltrane’s repertoire. Benjamin clearly knows the ins and outs of these works, as her 2020 album of John and Alice Coltrane pieces, Pursuance: The Coltranes, shows. And just as John himself liked to linger over an intriguing melody for a bit to see what he might find, it’s worth our considering the unique gift the saxophonist had for melody and feeling.

The beauty of much of Coltrane’s work grabs you immediately. “Blue Train,” which he wrote in 1957, goes at a very slow chug, its velvety melody making the song feel like a warm luxury car just pulling out of the station on a chilly winter evening. “Naima,” the tender love song he wrote for his first wife, seems to capture not only the depth and comfort of love, but also the stability of domesticity; few Coltrane songs sound as comfortable with the leisure of two people simply spending time together.

Coltrane’s masterpiece, A Love Supreme, is a kind of quest for the divine that proceeds with the assurance of its own success: The music is so certain of its ability to find God, you can practically sense his presence in the search itself. Coltrane often shied away from assigning direct meaning to his work, talking instead about technical problems he was working through, the spiritual function of the piece, or how he hoped it would make his audience feel. In the liner notes to A Love Supreme, which he wrote himself, he declares, “This album is a humble offering to Him. An attempt to say ‘THANK YOU GOD’ through our work, even as we do in our hearts and with our tongues.”

While Coltrane’s solos have the same ecstatic flow he would explore in his later years, you can hear the yearning, searching feeling in the foundation he sets for his explorations. The great pianist McCoy Tyner made his reputation on tracks like this, keeping the base steady and making sure the emotions behind the wailing are never lost. In what feels like a nod to the idea of God moving invisibly through history, Tyner plays around the rhythm, implying the force that carries the action forward without overtly showing it, which was Coltrane’s intention. There’s so much in what is unsaid but heavily implied in A Love Supreme—you can practically see the dust mites floating in the colored light this stained-glass music gives off.

Implication is a tool Coltrane used regularly and to great effect, perhaps never more so than in “Alabama.” It’s believed that the song was written in response to the Ku Klux Klan’s 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL, which killed four young Black girls. Little is known about the circumstances of the song’s composition: There is the title and the fact that it was first recorded only two months after the bombing. But then there’s all that’s unsaid: the way the long sigh of the theme is let out over a distant rumble of percussion from Elvin Jones, the cloudy and funereal tone that emerges when Coltrane and Tyner’s melodies briefly merge, the slow build into what feels like a gospel shuffle near the song’s end.

The softness of the tone is complicated by the stridency of the rhythm, which seems to match the inflections of a speech Martin Luther King, Jr., gave at the church several days after the attack. The great writer Amiri Baraka, in the liner notes to Live at Birdland, says, “If that ‘real’ Alabama was the catalyst [for the song], more power to it, and may it be this beautiful, even in its destruction.” For Baraka (then writing as LeRoi Jones), this music was a resource for resilience. In listening to Coltrane, he writes, “we are very likely to be moved beyond the pettiness and stupidity of our beautiful enemies.”

Not all of Coltrane’s compositions are so heavy; some are simply impossible for mere mortals to play. Such is the case for “Giant Steps,” which Vox recently called “the most feared song in jazz.” The “Giant Steps” chord changes require the musicians to play in several different keys in rapid succession, while the song itself speeds past at an incredible 290 bpm. The “Coltrane Changes,” as they’re called, move so quickly and so dramatically they essentially prevent the player from thinking about what they’re doing and force them into a position of playing purely by feel—something that happens frequently in jazz, of course, but rarely so dramatically. The changes are so dramatic that on the album version released in 1960, you can hear Tommy Flanagan—an expert pianist—trying and failing to feel his way through them. His solo is halting, uncertain, and timid, and it eventually ends with him returning to the song’s composed structure with his tail between his legs (Coltrane then rips through his own solo at lightning speed). Because of what it asks of the soloists, “Giant Steps” has become one of the ways young jazz musicians prove their mettle; if you can make it through the Coltrane Changes, you can handle just about anything. Do you need to know the music-theory reasons “Giant Steps” is such a massive challenge in order to appreciate it? Absolutely not. Even if you don’t sense its difficulty, you can feel the jolt that it puts through the musicians, the way its jumpiness keeps them on their toes. More than any other song he ever wrote, “Giant Steps” is fun—as long as you’re not the one playing it.

In the final decade or so of his life, John Coltrane transformed himself from solid journeyman saxophonist to one of the most innovative and celebrated musicians the United States has ever produced. It’s true that his music could at times be challenging—illegibility is the risk you take when you’re writing the future. As a composer, he was daring and curious. But more often than not, he treated his own curiosity as a vessel for that of his listener. And in so doing, he made it possible for all of us to get a glimpse of the cosmos.