A new book commemorating the centenary of one of the most unique voices in jazz, Coltrane: The Definitive Visual Celebration of the Legend, which John Coltrane‘s son Ravi edited, pairs stunning photos of the saxophonist with commentary from some of his biggest admirers. Essays by Wayne Coyne, Dev Hynes, Phil Lesh, and Julie Mehretu, among others, survey the impact of the musician who redefined the genre on albums like Blue Train, Giant Steps, A Love Supreme, and Ascension in ways still resonating decades after his untimely death at age 40 in 1967.
Excerpted here ahead of the book’s Sept. 1 release are contributions from Patti Smith and Carlos Santana. Smith compares listening to Coltrane as a religious experience and how his music affected her at different stages of her life. Santana writes about the conflicting feelings he experienced while listening to A Love Supreme for the first time, squaring the calmness on Coltrane’s face on the album sleeve with the intensity of the music.
Here is what they had to say:
Millions of Positive Vibrations
By Carlos Santana
The infinite influence of Maestro John Coltrane is to the level of Albert Einstein. He created a quantum leap in the frequency of sound-rhythm and light vibrations that helps accelerate the listener’s spiritual unfoldment. It is the frequency of supreme honesty and true sincerity.
His music has so much light; it’s illuminating. For years I have said that the music of John Coltrane rearranges your molecular structure. This means that your DNA remembers that it is light and love, and you remember that you are forever in the now. His music gives me chills, transmits cosmic waves of light, wisdom, and divine emotions. He makes it known that God is always ever present . . . now. His tone truly puts demons on a leash. His gift is directly from the mind of God and is very powerful.
The first time I heard “A Love Supreme,” it was really an assault on my senses. It could’ve been in another language, from another galaxy. The first thing that moved me was Coltrane’s volume and intensity. It fit the times we were living in as the 1960s had a very present, violent darkness that came from the Vietnam War, the riots, social unrest, and assassinations. Coltrane’s tone and emotion reminded me of the intergalactic sounds of Jimi Hendrix, but it sounded like his horn was radiating holes of light in the darkness, and each note he blew emitted more light. I remember looking at the album cover of A Love Supreme and seeing his face so calm and intense. It was then I realized the paradox of his music and all music: it can be violent and peaceful at the same time. I had to step away from it at first and let it digest into my DNA. Over time I was able to understand the supreme passion of Coltrane’s music and his message of crystallizing your intentions with impeccable integrity, for the highest good of the planet. It allows you to receive the highest gift—abundance of miracles and blessings, so that we may heal all and everyone.
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John once said, “One positive thought produces millions of positive vibrations.” This profound vision-life message is one I share often and echoes how I feel: that music and spiritual-life intention are assigned and designed to invite the listener to help us bring to this beautiful planet the frequency of compassion, joy, and divine peace. I believe if we played John Coltrane’s music in shopping malls, elevators, and in public places, we could create a bridge of love and compassion—a real, tangible, solid channel of positive vibration that can change molecular structures, create a visible change in human conduct and behavior, and help stop violence and mental illness around the world. It will make us stop and think with light and love only, and help heal, restore, and correct the global events in our lifetime.
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John Coltrane’s music defies gravity and time, and changed the way people think and live. It is a blueprint for us all to reach higher toward the unknown and make a difference, a tangible difference in this world. Nothing penetrates the heart deeper than a melody, and Coltrane could always come back from the beyond and define a melody that could pierce the center of our being and existence to make us strive for higher consciousness. He taught me about balance. Miles Davis played “Human Nature” or “Time After Time,” and Coltrane did the same before that with “My Favorite Things.” That balance-hug to his listeners showed me that in order to touch more hearts, you need to dial in your song/radio frequency to reach more people, and then you can penetrate deeper with other sounds and songs to expand their musical Rolodex. That is a lesson that allowed me to be open to collaborations that eventually became Supernatural. It is the same intention that allows me to play “Evil Ways” in my set list and then segue directly into “A Love Supreme.” The dynamic has a very yin-yang effect and is very powerful and sensitive at the same time. When I look at the intensity of Coltrane’s face when he is playing a note, it is focused and peaceful at the same time. I have found that a lot of my favorite musicians make the ugliest faces to create the most beautiful note. He is making this face because it feels like he’s leaving the stratosphere, leaving Earth, and gravity is pulling him back, but the note that’s coming out is like the most precious diamond note, with intention that pierces the sonic heart of the listener. Listening to Coltrane breaks the barriers of human limitation and creates for me a blood-flood stream of consciousness, inspiring me to go beyond what I know and don’t know.
Now and forever I offer my deepest gratitude to him. Just like Jackie Robinson, he not only broke the color barrier, but his supersonic sounds also broke, dismantled, and disintegrated the false illusion of fear, distance, and separation from our own light. He is a sentient being who left an imprint beyond time—forever in our hearts and in this world. He will forever illuminate us with his songs’ vibrations, sound, and resonance.
John Coltrane is always alive in my heart! A Love Supreme, One Love!
Courtesy of Penguin Random House
To Talk With God
By Patti Smith
To speak of John Coltrane is to speak of the admission and ascent of the creative soul. God is everywhere, yet there are times when we feel an amplified sense of closeness: within nature, within inspirational works of art, and perhaps most fluidly, within music. Musicians have long sought to give form to the formless, unconstrained yet palatable, inspirational and divine. I imagine the stained lace of Mozart’s cuffs as he penned his “Requiem,” Beethoven striding through forests transmuting the calls of songbirds as the Symphony No. 5, and John Coltrane, yielding to an interior need, connecting with the mouthpiece of his saxophone to express a unified force of love.
At sixteen, I was introduced to his work at an informal jazz gathering in the basement of a classmate. On Saturday afternoons we would listen to the records we possessed among us. The older fellows, some being aspiring musicians, would occasionally bring us something new, put on a side, and talk about aspects of what we were hearing. Nina Simone, politically and emotionally. Roland Kirk, the sounds of freedom. But listening to John Coltrane drew a mystical silence, as we followed where he would go, returning transformed. For the young in the early 1960s, the possibility to connect with the Creator outside of an intransigent system was acutely sought, a pursuit that led to Coltrane, who was embraced as a spiritual leader, a role that in his humility he would never seek. His was a body of work that demanded much, gave much—an evolutionary process that gave rise to the listener’s own. Giant Steps. My Favorite Things. Coltrane “Live” at the Village Vanguard, Impressions, the venerated reverberations of 1963.
Those formative years, which included an ill-fated excursion to the Showboat on Lombard Street in Philadelphia, were among my happiest teenage memories. When the Quartet played the Showboat that summer, the oldest among us bought tickets. We all dressed up, the younger ones, including myself, were unconvincing versions of twenty-one. I have a vague memory of descending half-lit stairs, strains of McCoy Tyner, a glimpse of Coltrane and several minutes of Impressions, before being escorted back into the night. I was not disappointed but ecstatic, for those precious moments were the closest I ever came to seeing Coltrane live.
Four summers later, wandering New York City, I found myself passing St. Peter’s Lutheran Church. It was a late morning in July, quite hot, and a crowd had gathered across the street. Within the church, a service was being held for John Coltrane, who had died a few days before. I was a twenty-year-old girl looking for a job and had inadvertently slipped into an organism of grief. Somewhere in the heated mist hovered the howls of Albert Ayler and the clarion call of his brother Donald’s trumpet, followed by the Ornette Coleman Quartet, saluting him with joyous cacophony.
Walking downtown, I felt that the atmosphere had shifted. I was stunned by the fleetingness of existence. He was here then gone, lost in the summer of love. Only a handful of years had passed since I graduated from that South Jersey basement, an awkward acolyte with a small pile of albums. I went my own way, and continued my devotional education, spinning the five parts of Meditations, the threshold of a celestial portal.
When I wed the musician Fred Sonic Smith in 1980, we merged our record collections. Between us we had every available work by Coltrane. Fred had few heroes but revered Coltrane like no other, privately mourning his too-early passing. Fred had an old, thirty-foot, wooden Chris-Craft with a broken axle. We didn’t have the resources to make it seaworthy, so it sat in our yard outside Detroit, to the amusement of our neighbors. But Fred and I mystically traveled in that stationary boat. During heavy rains, with a few beers and a thermos of coffee, we’d sit inside and play our Coltrane records. We listened to Live at Birdland, Olé, Meditations against a backdrop of pounding rain, all the elements melding as we soared and sailed in grateful silence. Through the years, those many hours absorbing the work of the great master were as near to tracing a spiritual path as we required.
Like Coltrane, my husband died young. Now, listening to our favorite pieces, I remember the uplifting conversations they inspired. We spoke of breaking through levels of consciousness, traveling to uncharted places, the benevolence of safe return, improvisation as prayer. Sitting under the stars, we contemplated his closing passage, a supreme synthesis of the infinitesimal and the immeasurable, a musical phrase propelled by the breath of God.
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Excerpted from COLTRANE: The Definitive Visual Celebration of the Legend edited by Ravi Coltrane. Text copyright © 2026 by Jowcol Music LLC. Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
