05/19/2026
This reminds us John Coltrane was a progressive musician , he was pushing boundaries and constantly seeking new heights and sounds. Music critics were not happy about the direction he moved , the gate keepers were not happy it took them while for them to catch up and some still don’t get it .
Don’t chase the past , be your own person , move in a positive forward direction always .
When John Coltrane died in 1967, one of his final wishes was for two groundbreaking saxophonists to play at his funeral.
To many listeners at the time, both musicians represented the outer edges of jazz — radical, spiritual and deeply controversial figures who had pushed beyond traditional harmony and structure.
Their names?
Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman.
By the final years of his life, his own playing had moved far beyond the modal jazz of A Love Supreme into freer, more intense territory shaped by spirituality, emotion and collective improvisation.
At the funeral itself, Ayler’s group reportedly played for nearly an hour, delivering music that some mourners found overwhelming and others found transcendent.
It was not a conventional goodbye.
But then very little about Coltrane’s musical journey was conventional.
[📸 Ornette Coleman by Geert Vandepoele, CC BY-SA 2.0 & Albert Ayler public domain by an uncredited photographer thought to be Chuck Stewart - both via Wikimedia Commons]
