John Coltrane had already decided to leave Miles Davis when he reluctantly agreed to make a 22-city European tour with the trumpeter in the spring of 1960. Davis’s quintet was part of a Jazz at the Philharmonic package presented by Norman Granz. The tour began in Paris on March 21 and lasted till early May. The bill also included the Oscar Peterson Trio and the Stan Getz Quartet.
In Miles: The Autobiography, Davis said, “Trane didn’t want to make the European trip and was ready to move out before we left. One night I got a telephone call from this new tenor on the scene named Wayne Shorter, telling me that Trane told him that I needed a tenor saxophonist and that Trane was recommending him. I was shocked. I started to hang up and then I said, ‘If I need a saxophone player I’ll get one!’ And then I hung up. BLAM! So when I saw Trane I told him, ‘Don’t be telling nobody to call me like that, and if you want to quit then just quit, but why don’t you do it after we get back from Europe’?”
Miles added, “If he had quit right then he would have really hung me up because nobody else knew the songs, and this tour was real important. He decided to go with us, but he grumbled and complained and sat by himself all the time we were over there. He gave me notice that he would be leaving the group when we got home. But before he quit, I gave him [a] soprano saxophone…and he started playing it. I could already hear the effect it would have on his tenor saxophone playing, how it would revolutionize it. I always joked with him that if he had stayed home and not come with us on this trip, he wouldn’t have gotten that soprano saxophone, so he was in debt to me for as long as he lived. Man, he used to laugh until he cried about that, and then I would say, ‘Trane, I’m serious.’ And he’d hug me real hard and just keep saying, ‘Miles, you’re right about that.’ But this was later, when he had his own group and they was killing everybody with their shit.”
Of course, Miles could also have made the broader claim of having brought Coltrane out of obscurity five years earlier. They were the same age, both born in 1926, but where Miles was a presence in the bands of Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker before his 20th birthday, Coltrane was nearly 30 before he played his first significant solo on record. Who knows what would have become of Trane had Sonny Rollins accepted the job that Miles initially offered him? Rollins was Miles’s man, a mature stylist who by age 25 had already appeared on three of the trumpeter’s Prestige sessions, and he made one more after Coltrane was hired. But the Harlem-born Rollins was recovering from heroin addiction and was eager to take a break from the New York scene. He moved to Chicago later in ’55, and that’s where Max Roach and Clifford Brown looked him up and recruited him for their quintet.
Davis had first met Coltrane in 1947 at a jam session at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem that the 17-year-old Rollins also made. But it was largely on the recommendation of Red Garland and Philly Joe Jones– like Trane, they were based in Philadelphia– that Miles followed up eight years later with the offer that proved to be the most important stepping stone of Coltrane’s career. Trane had gained little notice in the bands of Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson (where he first worked with Garland), Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Bostic, and Johnny Hodges, and he was back in Philadelphia working with Jimmy Smith in 1955. At the time, Smith was emerging as the modern master of the Hammond organ, but his music offered a different and less demanding challenge than Davis’s for an improvisor in the making like Coltrane. In a more essential way than would have been the case with Gillespie, Hodges, or Smith, Miles’s music required Trane to play solos on a par with the iconic trumpeter, a player who followed his solos not only by leaving the stage, but with the emotional charge of the tune in the balance. Coltrane matured quickly under Miles’s leadership; combined with the formative experience he had playing with Thelonious Monk in 1957, and the spiritual awakening that he credited with helping him get clean and sober that same year, John was ready to become a self-employed bandleader by 1960.
According to Granz’s biographer Tad Hershorn, there was additional friction between Miles and Trane on the tour over money. “Granz offered to supplement what Davis paid him to increase his pay to a thousand a week,” Hershorn writes in Norman Granz, The Man Who Used Jazz for Justice. He quotes a conversation in which Granz told journalist John McDonough,”He got $1,000 a week from me. Now that’s the story. Miles was getting enough to pay him, but he wouldn’t pay him [that much].”
Davis’s biographer Ian Carr reports that there was “savage controversy over Coltrane in Germany and France…” Lewis Porter, author of John Coltrane: His Life and Music, heard tapes of the concert from the Olympia Theater in Paris and reported, “After each of his solos, there is tumultuous ovation and whistling…but there is apparently a smaller contingent who dislike his playing…and during his solo on ‘Bye Bye Blackbird,’ it comes to a head with a number of ovations countered by loud booing.”
Such behavior among the Parisians drew inevitable comparisons to the violent reaction set off by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913, and the May 1960 issue of Le Jazz Hot surveyed critics under the heading, “For or Against John Coltrane?” Opinions ranged from “The avalanche of notes and labyrinth of phrases…don’t interest, move or touch me,” to “Coltrane is the biggest shock that a musician has ever given me in person,” to “He seems to have made enormous progress since his first records with Miles. He has truly found himself.”
At one major concert in Germany, when Coltrane was booed, Miles angrily stopped the music and took his group offstage.” Such behavior infuriated the autocratic Granz, whom Hershorn says “bit his lip…when Davis decided at the last minute not to play on three half-hour shows that Granz had negotiated with German television.” Carr’s 1982 biography, Miles Davis, reports that Granz was “furiously angry when he tried to set up a jam session involving Coltrane and Stan Getz for a television program, and Trane had the audacity to refuse to do it.”
While the YouTube clip above reveals that at least one “jam session” took place before television cameras, Carr writes insightfully about the cultural shift that Miles and Trane then epitomized in jazz. “Given the direction and development of Coltrane and Miles since 1955, it should have been obvious that neither of them would want to indulge in this kind of activity. Their battle was not an external one with other instrumentalists, but an internal affair against old, received ideas and old habits of thought.” The performance of Thelonious Monk’s “Hackensack,” reveals that neither Coltrane nor Peterson attempted a rapprochement in their disparate approaches to the material.
Coltrane went ahead and also made a television appearance with the sympatico Wynton Kelly at the piano. In addition to their work together on the tour, Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb had backed Trane on his 1959 sessions that produced “Naima,” “Like Sonny,” “Harmonique,” and several other titles that appeared on the Atlantic album, Coltrane Jazz. They’d also backed Trane on The Cannonball Adderley Quintet In Chicago, and they’d all played together with Miles on “Freddie Freeloader.”
Why Miles refrained from these ad-hoc arrangements is open to speculation. Maybe it was his dismay with the German audience’s hostility toward Coltrane; a personal gripe with Granz; or his own lack of interest in jamming with Peterson and Getz. Or maybe he just didn’t want this last tour with Trane framed and fossilized in a German TV studio. Like most everyone else he ever knew, Miles had mercurial feelings about Coltrane, but he conveyed a great deal of respect and tenderness for the man in his memoir and in interviews. Along with Charlie Parker, Coltrane was Miles’s truest peer as an artist, and Trane’s personal demons were ones Miles also knew. Indeed, their commonality elicited some of Davis’s most empathetic reflections. “He used to tell me that he had messed up enough, had wasted too much time and not given enough attention to his own personal life, his family, and most of all to his playing.” After returning from Europe, the quintet played a concert in Philadelphia that Carr says brought Miles close to tears. “He went to the microphone and made a brief announcement about the saxophonists’s imminent departure from the group,” Carr wrote. “And as Jimmy Cobb said, ‘He never talks with nobody about nothing, so you know, he really must have felt something for Coltrane’.”
Jackie McLean famously said of his formative experience with Charles Mingus, “He gave me my exploration papers.” Miles did the same for numerous musicians, and none more than Coltrane. It was Miles who heard something intrinsically true to John when he bought him the soprano saxophone at an antiques shop in Paris. Davis later observed, “[Coltrane] found he could also think and hear better with the soprano than he could with the tenor. When he played the soprano, after awhile it sounded almost like a human voice, wailing.” Miles’s prescience was confirmed only a few months later, on October 20, 1960, when Trane recorded “My Favorite Things,” a record he described to Francois Postif in a 1961 interview that appears in Coltrane on Coltrane, as “My favorite piece of everything we’ve recorded. I don’t think I’d like to redo it in any other way, although all the other records I’ve done could be improved by a few details.”
In Geoff Dyer’s essay collection, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, he writes about Coltrane’s recording of the Rodgers and Hammerstein song. “Certain characteristics that run through all subsequent performances are there in the first one: the pretty melody gradually breaking up into squalls and coils of sound, strangled cries and piercing morse that summons back the melody.” Dyer adds, “Trane never tired of playing ‘My Favorite Things’; it became almost his signature tune. In this one song, we can hear in microcosm the relentless journey of search, discovery, and further searching that characterized his most creative period.”
As for Miles’s impact on him, Coltrane told Postif, “I stayed in obscurity for a long time, because I was happy to play what was expected of me, without trying to add anything. I saw so many guys get fired from bands because they tried new things that I was somewhat disgusted to try anything else. I think that it was with Miles, in 1955, that I started to realize what else I could do…Miles is sort of a strange guy: he doesn’t talk a lot, and he rarely discusses music…It’s very hard, in a situation like that, to know exactly what you should do, and maybe it’s because of that that I started to do what I wanted.”
In this interview recorded on the tour in Stockholm, Coltrane counters his interlocutor’s concern that working with Miles was confining. “I’ve been free, I’ve been so free here, that most anything I want to try I’ve been free to do it.”