Description
On July 14, 1967, John Coltrane met with his producer Bob Thiele to finalize plans for a new album. He had been suffering from liver cancer for over a year, though almost nobody outside his immediate circle knew it. The meeting lasted long enough to settle a title. Coltrane had one word: *Expression.* Three days later, he was dead. He was forty years old.
The story the music world received was a sudden shock, and it was both true and false. Miles Davis said: "Coltrane's death shocked everyone, took everyone by surprise. I knew he hadn't looked too good... but I didn't know he was that sick, or even sick at all." What Davis didn't know was that Coltrane had been privately carrying the illness for more than a year while continuing to perform and record. He kept it from his band, from journalists, from the jazz world that had spent a decade treating him as its north star. The concealment was deliberate, and it was very Coltrane. He had always processed the hardest things through the horn rather than through conversation.
In May 1967, Coltrane spent days stretched out on a couch, listening back to his recent recording sessions, canceling concerts, the cancer now winning. He endured stomach pains for weeks but refused to see a doctor. He entered the hospital for an inflamed liver and died two days later.
Months before that couch, he had played his last New York concert. April 23, 1967. The venue was the Olatunji Center of African Culture in Harlem, a modest space run by Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji. The concert was recorded for broadcast on Billy Taylor's radio station, WLIB. No major label, no career milestone being marked. Just Coltrane, Alice on piano, Pharoah Sanders, Jimmy Garrison, and Rashied Ali, playing "Ogunde" for twenty-eight minutes and then dismantling "My Favorite Things" so thoroughly it barely resembled the tune that had made him famous.
His last public appearance came May 7, 1967, in Baltimore. Alice was home with their newborn son Oran. There is almost no documentation of what was played or how he looked. Coltrane got on the bandstand, played, and then went home and stopped performing forever.
He died July 17, 1967, at Huntington Hospital on Long Island. His funeral at St. Peter's Lutheran Church was started by the Albert Ayler Quartet and finished by Ornette Coleman's. No standards. No eulogies in the form of familiar melodies. The avant-garde played him out.
The untold story isn't a hidden scandal or a suppressed tape. It's quieter than that: a man who spent the last year of his life actively dying while producing some of the most uncompromising music of his career, telling nobody, keeping the horn in his hands, working right up until the couch, then the hospital, then one final meeting about a final album title.
He called it *Expression.* That was the whole story, and he told it himself.
Coltrane Biographer and jazz historian Lewis Porter discusses Coltrane’s final days. Performance, France, July 1965, at the Jazz à Juan festival in Antibes. "Ascension" John Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass and Elvin Jones on drums.
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