The digitally encoded pudding contains the ultimate proof

John Coltrane: His Life and Music
By Lewis Porter
The University of Michigan Press, 1998, 409 pages
Reviewed by Micah Holmquist
October 16, 1999

Last week’s edition of Digital Pudding featured a quote from the book John Coltrane: His Life and Music by Lewis Porter. The quote was useful to set up a review of ‘Trane’s Interstellar Space but I feel compelled to point out that the book, on the whole, is not that good.

Porter can not be faulted for his research. Several Coltrane interviews were translated into English for the first time for this work. The author also went to the North Carolina region where the saxophonist was born in order to interview his family and other people that knew Coltrane when he was young. Porter also traced Coltrane’s family tree back into the 1800s for this book. Readers will know about all of this before even getting into the core of the book from the preface that comes across as the work of a braggart. Porter is quick to dismiss previous Coltrane biographies as full of errors and no more than "sincere efforts." The implication is that His Life and Music will be more than that. It might be in terms of getting facts straight but Porter’s book has more than its fair share of problems.

To begin with, Porter’s writing style is dull and Porter meanders far too much. Chapters on Coltrane’s early childhood and the history of his family are not going to be all that exciting unless they are connected in some way to Coltrane the later person or Coltrane the musician. Porter does not make this connection, however. Instead he just lets sections on these matters hang out devoid of any connection to the larger story. You can not fault Porter for wanting to include this material. After all some historical record of this information needs to exist. Yet for the purpose of this biography, Porter should have condensed this material or done a better job of putting it into context.

This extra room could have been used to cover the last two or so years of Coltrane’s life. It was in this period that Coltrane moved beyond even the most basic constraints of bop and the legendary John Coltrane Quartet broke up. Porter only gives cursory treatment to these events and does not even mention several major recording sessions. The chronology included at the end does not make things any better. Porter mentions live dates with great detail but then does not even note the date that drummer Elvin Jones left Coltrane’s group.

Porter also fails to look at the influence of Coltrane as a musician. He mentions a host of notable players that were influenced by Coltrane. Oddly though, Porter fails to mention Coltrane proteges such as Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp along with other leading lights like David Murray and David S. Ware.

Nor does Porter really examine the influence of Coltrane as a cultural figure. Much is made of the use of Coltrane’s name in an obscure commercial and a U2 song. Porter does not mention the connection between Coltrane and the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Craig Werner devotes only a few pages to Coltrane in his 1999 book A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America. Yet those few pages cover Coltrane’s significance in far more detail than anything in Porter’s book.

These weaknesses do not take away from the central strength of His Life and Music. Porter is both a professional musician and a professor of music at Rutgers University. He uses these skills to meticulously look at the innovations in Coltrane’s music. Even readers with nary a musical skill will be able to get a lot out of those sections.

Unfortunately there is little else that makes this book worth reading. In short, Porter does not rise above other "sincere efforts."

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