The Last Chorus

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 simultaneously. Coltrane’s death surprised many in the music community who were unaware of his condition. 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, what almost no one knew, was that Coltrane had been privately carrying the illness for more than a year while continuing to perform, record, and plan. 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. He had been canceling concerts that month. The cancer had taken hold enough that performing was becoming impossible, and yet even then, even horizontal and in pain, he was doing the only thing he knew how to do: listening, evaluating, deciding what mattered and what didn’t. He endured stomach pains for several weeks, but refused to see a doctor. He entered the hospital for treatment for an inflamed liver and died just a couple of days later.

Months before that couch, he had played his last concert in New York. The date was April 23, 1967. The venue was not a major club or concert hall but the Olatunji Center of African Culture, a modest space on 125th Street in Harlem run by Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji, a man Coltrane had spent years trying to build something with, some bridge between jazz and African percussion that the mainstream music industry had zero interest in funding. The concert was recorded for broadcast on Billy Taylor’s radio station, WLIB. No major label was involved, no industry occasion, no career milestone being marked. Just Coltrane, his wife 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 seven years earlier.

It is not comfortable listening. The sound quality is poor: Ali’s drumming and the two saxophones drown out the other musicians. Alice Coltrane and Jimmy Garrison are barely audible. My old friend Scott Yanow, who has forgotten more about jazz than most people ever learn, called it “unremittingly intense music” and suggested the recording “should have remained legendary and unissued” due to the technical limitations. I understand the argument. I don’t agree with it.

What you hear in that room on April 23rd is a man with a year of secret illness behind him and three months left to live, playing as if the music itself is the only medicine that ever worked. The extended “Ogunde” has none of the beauty-for-its-own-sake of the classic quartet years. It has something harder to describe and harder to look away from: the sound of a spiritual practice pushed past endurance into a zone where endurance is no longer the point. Coltrane had written in the liner notes of A Love Supreme that he wanted to be a force for good in the world. By April 1967, that aspiration had burned down to its absolute core. He wasn’t making an argument anymore. He was just bearing witness.

His last public appearance came two weeks later, on May 7, 1967, as part of Baltimore’s Left Bank Jazz Society’s Sunday concerts. Alice was home with their newborn son Oran. Algie DeWitt was on bata drum. There is very little documentation of what was played, how long it went, or how he looked. What we know is that Coltrane got on the bandstand one more time in Baltimore, played, and then went home and stopped performing forever.

He died on July 17, 1967, at Huntington Hospital on Long Island. His funeral was held four days later at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in New York City. The service was started by the Albert Ayler Quartet and finished by the Ornette Coleman Quartet. It was a valediction chosen with care, the two musicians who most fully understood where Coltrane had been going in those final years, the ones who didn’t flinch at the outer edges of the music. No standards. No eulogies in the form of familiar melodies. The avant-garde played him out.

The Friday before he died, Coltrane had finished and approved the release of Expression, which came out that September, two months after his death. It was the last thing he signed off on: a record that begins in near-silence and builds into something barely recognizable as jazz in the conventional sense, Coltrane on alto flute on one track, the songs refusing to resolve in any comfortable way. He named it Expression because that was, in the end, the only category that held everything: the spiritual searching, the illness he didn’t discuss, the Africa that never happened, the “My Favorite Things” he turned inside out in Harlem in April.

The untold story isn’t a hidden scandal or a suppressed tape. It’s quieter and stranger than that. It’s a man who spent the last year of his life actively dying while simultaneously producing some of the most demanding, uncompromising music of his career, telling nobody, keeping the horn in his hands, working right up until the couch, and then the hospital, and then three days after a 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 and we hear his performance of “Ascension,” France, July 1965, at the Jazz à Juan festival in Antibes. John Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass and Elvin Jones on drums.