John Coltrane and a saxophone in search of India

His quest, cut short by death at 40 from liver cancer, continues to be heard in the phenomenal standards he left behind.

2 min readSep 25, 2026 06:15 AM IST First published on: Sep 25, 2026 at 06:15 AM IST

In 1961, saxophonist John Coltrane, who would have turned 100 on September 23, recorded a piece at Village Vanguard in New York and called it ‘India’. It was a country he had never visited but whose music and philosophy entered his imagination through listening to and collecting records of sitar giant Pandit Ravi Shankar (he even took lessons from him). Coltrane would also name his second son Ravi. He later made the jarring ‘Om’, but it was ‘India’ that perhaps came closer to capturing the Hindustani classical influences. Criticised at this time for being anti-jazz, Coltrane was looking beyond conventional jazz.

Born into a musical family in North Carolina, Coltrane began playing saxophone as a teenager. After serving in the US Navy band, he worked through the jazz world before joining Miles Davis’s quintet in 1955, when segregated clubs and racial discrimination were the norm under Jim Crow laws. Davis was once beaten and arrested by white officers for standing on the sidewalk. His pain was heard in the haunting ‘Alabama’, where Coltrane’s saxophone is patterned after Martin Luther King Jr’s eulogy for four African-American girls killed in a Ku Klux Klan bombing.

Coltrane got heavily into heroin and alcohol, which led Davis to drop him. This wake-up call led him to spiritual music, including music from India. In A Love Supreme, jazz became a means for finding faith. Coltrane absorbed sounds and ideas from different traditions, making them part of a voice unmistakably his own. His quest, cut short by death at 40 from liver cancer, continues to be heard in the phenomenal standards he left behind.