John Coltrane in Detroit, June 1966 — a first‑hand account

The useful part

John Coltrane in Detroit, June 1966 Wednesday, September 30, 2026 John Coltrane 100 5 comments John Coltrane Memorial in Hamlet, N.C. One's juvenilia is embarrassing almost by definition, but that's my particular gateway here to a world in which Coltrane was playing live a few feet in front of me. Reference (Routledge, 2008) by Chris DeVito, Yasuhiro Fujioka, Wolf Schmaler and David Wild, edited by Lewis Porter (Routledge, 2008) is a monumental work of scholarship.

How it works

• "This is probably the most moving working band in America (…) Tenor saxophonist Farrell "Pharoah" Sanders is now the most important soloist in the group.
• As a result, I want the music more intense, more personal, more unpredictable and I'll stand up for it anywhere.
• My absorption in jazz had begun in childhood with the 1957 TV special The Sound of Jazz and followed with the eventual LP.
• We arrived early, conveying Rashied to the venue since we were staying in the same place, the Detroit Artists Workshop.
• I had an association with John Sinclair (then in jail on drug charges -- not sure how current John's name is, but his greatest moment of celebrity came when imprisoned during Woodstock:

What to take from it

I write this hopefully to communicate something of the challenging world in which Coltrane made his music, that ever more intense, more radically free music, as testimony to his courage and vision as a great artist, as large a person as one might be in that world. Reviewed in Coda ("John Coltrane Quintet – Drome Bar—Detroit" by Stu Broomer, Aug-Sept., 1966, pp.32. The review is represented by just a few of its sentences, but I'll restrict myself to the Reference editor's choices and their punctuation as well.

Example or evidence

• I had also published a poem and a record review in John's mimeo'd music journal Changes, which I think may have only gone to two (or maybe three) issues.
• More television: I saw the Robert Herridge Presents episode with Miles Davis and John Coltrane in 1960 and loved it.
• My brief initial puzzlement and rapid-onset rapture with free jazz started when I picked up the September 1961 Metronome at the corner variety store.
• It included an epic essay on the jazz avantgarde by the then LeRoi Jones (I still have the essay somewhere — stapled together — the issue is gone).

Details worth keeping

By Stuart Broomer If I can write anything meaningful about the music of John Coltrane, it may be about the context in which I came to experience his work live, in 1966, after listening intently to his work for four years on record and writing reviews of some of it as well. After the introductions, there's a Chronology of Coltrane's life and career that runs to 357 large pages of fine print, followed by a Discography of 404 similarly sized pages in identical print, followed by 49 more pages of appendices, index, etc. This band has recorded five times but nothing has been released.

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• Freejazzblog: John Coltrane – The John Coltrane Quartet Plays (Impulse, 1965) By Dan Sorrells Most of my listening hours are spent on freely improvised music.