John Coltrane at 100

In the history of music there are artists who leave great works behind, and there are artists after whom the language of the art itself is no longer what it was. John Coltrane belonged to the second kind. In this centennial year, the worldwide Coltrane 100 program looks back not only at a great musician but at a path that redrew the boundaries of jazz several times in an astonishingly short time. Coltrane was born on September 23, 1926, and died on July 17, 1967, before he reached forty-one.

From the mid-1950s to his death in 1967, his music went from bebop and hard bop to the most intricate harmonic experiments, then to modal jazz, and at last to free improvisation and spiritual music. In the end, those changes altered the language and tone of jazz itself. Each time Coltrane mastered a musical language, he seemed to recognize its limits and search for a way beyond them.

His work with Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk in the 1950s was decisive. On Davis's 1959 album "Kind of Blue", Coltrane was part of an experiment that explored the more open space of modal music instead of rapid chord changes. At almost the same time he recorded the album released the following year as "Giant Steps", and on it he went the opposite way. He made the harmony so dense and fast that a player has to pass through a demanding sequence of rapidly shifting tonal centers in a few seconds. What later became known as Coltrane changes is still part of advanced jazz training. Many regard the album as the peak of Coltrane's "vertical" approach to harmony and the starting point of a new direction in the language of jazz.

Soon afterward, in pieces such as "My Favorite Things" and "Impressions", the more open modal space let him stay longer within one harmonic structure and, where he had once raced through chords, pursue the color, rhythm, repetition and possibilities of a melody to new limits.

And then came "A Love Supreme".

The four-part suite was recorded on December 9, 1964, and it is one of the few moments in music where technique, structure and personal experience are almost impossible to separate. In those years Coltrane saw music as part of his spiritual search. In the first movement, after a brief introduction, the music settles on a simple four-note pattern that is transformed again and again. Near the end of that movement the motif passes into Coltrane's own voice as he repeatedly chants the three words of the title. The music does not talk about faith. It becomes the search itself. The Library of Congress added the album to the National Recording Registry in its 2015 list. "Giant Steps" has been in the registry since 2004.

But even "A Love Supreme" was not the end of the road. In the last two years of his life Coltrane moved away from more familiar structures and, with players such as Pharoah Sanders and Rashied Ali, toward music that was freer, more abrasive and, at times, more demanding. To a listener who knew Coltrane through the warm sound of "Naima" or "My Favorite Things", the late works could seem almost to belong to a different musician. Perhaps that restlessness is his most important trait. Coltrane refused to repeat the established version of himself.

The centennial has become a chance to hear the full arc of that journey in one place. On October 2 the six-LP set "Coltrane 100: Selections from 1951–1967" was released, a cross-label collection that brings together recordings spanning 1951 to the final year of his life in 1967. Its producers present it as the first comprehensive survey of Coltrane's whole career. In the same centennial program, the private and long-rumored recordings known as "The Tiberi Tapes" are being released for the first time. The saxophonist Frank Tiberi made them in the first half of the 1960s at Coltrane's club dates in New York and Philadelphia. A preview of the tapes came out in April this year, and an eleven-track selection for general release follows on November 6 on LP, CD and digital.

After a hundred years, Coltrane's most important legacy cannot be summed up in one album, one technique or even the sound of his saxophone. What remains is an attitude toward art: that mastery is not the end point, and that at the very moment an artist masters a language, the artist can question it again.

Coltrane showed how an artistic language can remake itself and open a new path in its own field.