ALL COLTRANE IS FASCINATING

A Playlist as Furnace, Chapel, Garage and Open Wound

By Buzz Drainpipe

There are musicians you admire, musicians you imitate, musicians you study, and musicians who make the whole idea of “music” feel embarrassingly small.

John Coltrane belongs to the last category.

You do not put Coltrane on because you want some jazz. That is like opening the furnace because you want a little warmth. Coltrane is what happens when breath, discipline, physical force, terror, love, mathematics and spiritual hunger all get locked inside one human rib cage and told to fight their way out through a brass tube.

This playlist understands that.

It does not behave. It does not arrange Coltrane’s career into a respectable little educational staircase where the young man learns standards, invents some frightening chords, finds God, blows the roof off the temple and then dies tragically on schedule.

Forget the staircase.

This thing is a live electrical panel with the cover ripped off.

“Shifting Down” sits near “Kulu Sé Mama.” “Just Friends” gets thrown into the same weather system as “Selflessness.” Blue Train, Giant Steps, A Love Supreme, Ascension, the Village Gate material, the late interstellar detonations, all of it is allowed to occupy the same room.

That is not disorder.

That is the truth.

The Same Fire Wearing Different Clothes

People talk about Coltrane’s “periods” because critics need filing cabinets. Early Coltrane. Atlantic Coltrane. Impulse! Coltrane. Spiritual Coltrane. Late Coltrane. Free Coltrane.

Fine. Useful. Label the jars.

But the organism inside them is the same.

Listen to “Moment’s Notice.” The man is already pushing against the walls. The tune swings, the structure holds, the suit is pressed, but something behind the eyes is measuring the distance to the ceiling.

Listen to “Giant Steps.” That ceiling is now being dismantled with industrial equipment.

Listen to “A Love Supreme.” The dismantling has become prayer.

Listen to “Ascension.” Prayer has become collective combustion.

Listen to “Leo,” “Saturn” or “Jupiter Variation.” Combustion has become weather.

The mistake is treating these as separate Coltranes. They are not. They are different pressure readings from the same buried source.

The young craftsman and the late screaming mystic are not enemies. The tenderness in “Naima” and the volcanic assault of Ascension come from the same refusal to sleepwalk through sound. One reaches toward the absolute with delicacy. The other arrives carrying an axe.

Coltrane Never Played Wallpaper

This matters because jazz has been embalmed by polite culture.

Somewhere along the line, one of the most dangerous musical traditions in American history got turned into hotel-lobby steam. Cocktail music for people who want to feel sophisticated while discussing countertops. A saxophone glowing harmlessly behind a plate of expensive chicken.

Coltrane will not cooperate.

Even when he is playing a standard, he is not decorating the room. He is inspecting it for structural weakness.

“Like Someone in Love” is not background music. “Just Friends” is not tasteful ambiance. “I’m Old Fashioned” is not a sepia postcard. He enters these songs like a maintenance worker who has heard something knocking behind the wall.

Then he starts removing plaster.

That is what this playlist preserves. It does not divide the “pleasant” Coltrane from the “difficult” Coltrane because pleasant and difficult are consumer categories. Coltrane was not selling comfort levels. He was following the signal.

Sometimes the signal sang.

Sometimes it screamed.

Sometimes it became a single repeated phrase hammered until repetition stopped being repetition and became a door.

Garage Grease and the Sacred Tone

Now here is where the rock people need to pay attention.

Beneath the psychedelia, the stomp, the fuzz, the blown speakers, the cheap pedals and the garage-floor gasoline rainbow, there is often the same hunger.

Not the same vocabulary. Not the same technique. Certainly not the same harmonic sophistication.

The same hunger.

The desire to play until the instrument stops being an accessory and becomes an event.

That is why Coltrane belongs beside psych, noise rock, garage punk, metal, dub, industrial music and every other form built by people trying to force open a space larger than the room they were given.

The connection is not “Coltrane was punk.”

Do not put that bumper sticker on this man.

The connection is deeper and more demanding. Coltrane proved that intensity did not have to cancel intelligence. He proved discipline could produce delirium. He proved repetition could be devotional rather than lazy. He proved virtuosity did not have to become vanity.

Most importantly, he proved that ugliness and beauty are often just two angles on the same necessary sound.

A distorted guitar can learn from that.

A basement drummer can learn from that.

A noise musician with one functional cable and a head full of static can learn from that.

Do not copy the notes. Copy the commitment.

“A Love Supreme” Is Not the Safe One

A Love Supreme has become the Coltrane record everyone agrees to respect. It sits on shelves like scripture in a house where nobody reads scripture. Four movements, beautiful cover, spiritual reputation, culturally approved masterpiece.

But listen to the thing.

It is not safe.

“Acknowledgement” does not politely announce faith. It circles a phrase until the phrase feels physically carved into the air.

“Resolution” is not serenity. It is forward motion under spiritual pressure.

“Pursuance” is a chase.

“Psalm” sounds less like a composition than a man making his instrument speak the contour of prayer itself.

This playlist wisely keeps the suite together. It allows the whole arc to occur. Because A Love Supreme is not a collection of tracks. It is an act.

You do not shuffle a ritual halfway through because the algorithm thinks you might enjoy something breezier.

Then Comes Ascension

And then there is Ascension.

Both editions.

Both halves.

Good.

Put the entire animal in the cage.

Ascension is one of those records people describe with architectural words because ordinary musical language begins sweating and looking for the exit. Monument. Cathedral. Tower. Collapse. Structure. Ruin.

But it is also flesh.

You can hear people straining. Breath turning coarse. Instruments crossing and scraping. Individual voices rising out of the ensemble mass, declaring themselves, then being swallowed again.

It is not chaos.

Chaos is random.

Ascension is organized overload. It is a room full of serious musicians using collective pressure as compositional material. The density is the point. The friction is the point. The sensation of too much is part of the design.

The listener is not standing outside the music.

The listener is trapped inside the engine.

The Playlist as Biography Without a Timeline

By mixing eras, the playlist does something a straight chronology cannot.

It reveals recurrence.

You hear the ballad player inside the late works. You hear the late seeker lurking inside the standards. You hear the engineer inside the ecstatic performances, still building, still arranging, still controlling shape even while the sound appears to be tearing loose from civilization.

Chronology tells you what happened next.

Juxtaposition tells you what was always there.

That is why “Shifting Down” can speak to “Vigil.” Why “Cousin Mary” can stand near “Selflessness.” Why “Blue Train” does not feel like a primitive draft of later greatness, but another complete chamber in the same impossible structure.

Coltrane did not shed his earlier selves.

He carried them forward.

The craftsman remained inside the seeker.

The romantic remained inside the destroyer.

The student remained inside the master.

The man who could make “I See Your Face Before Me” ache remained inside the man who would later blow sound into something resembling the birth of matter.

Not a Style. A Standard.

This is the real reason Coltrane frightens musicians.

He removes excuses.

You may not have his technique. Almost nobody does.

You may not understand his harmonic language. Most people do not.

You may never enter the spiritual territory he entered, because it was his territory and imitation would only produce incense-flavored fraud.

But you can still hear the standard he set.

Total engagement.

No passive notes.

No hiding behind genre.

No treating experimentation as permission to become careless.

No treating discipline as permission to become lifeless.

No choosing between intellect and blood.

Coltrane played as if every phrase might contain information necessary for survival. Even when the music was gentle, it was alert. Even when it was violent, it was listening.

That is the hidden north.

Not “sound like Coltrane.”

Not “play jazz.”

Not “be spiritual.”

Go further into the thing than convenience recommends.

That applies to a tenor saxophone, a fuzz guitar, a drum machine, a cassette loop, a cheap keyboard, a voice cracking in a basement, or three chords beaten until the neighbors begin receiving transmissions from God.

Coltrane is the greatest because he made music feel less like entertainment than evidence.

Evidence that a human being could keep searching.

Evidence that technique could become liberation instead of display.

Evidence that tenderness could survive inside force.

Evidence that the body, pushed hard enough by devotion, might briefly become a receiver for something larger than itself.

Put the playlist on shuffle.

Let the eras collide.

Let “Giant Steps” crash into “Welcome.” Let “Lazy Bird” open into “Saturn.” Let A Love Supreme stand beside Ascension without explanation.

The explanation is already sounding.

All Coltrane is fascinating.

Because all Coltrane is movement.

And the movement never arrives at a comfortable destination.

It keeps going.

🎷🩸🪐

Buzz Drainpipe
Crease Magazine, Outer Order Listening Department