What to Expect When You're Reading the Coltrane Interview
The John Coltrane interview has been circulating for decades in various forms. Most people are looking for the 1966 Playboy interview with Nat Hentoff, though there are several other recorded conversations worth knowing about. Here's how to actually find and read the real thing without getting stuck on fan-site copies with typos and incomplete paragraphs. The primary source is the Playboy interview from June 1966. It ran as a two-part piece. The first part appeared in the June issue and the second in July. You can find digitized versions through the Internet Archive's Playboy archive collection, which has the full text scanned from the original magazines. The link is straightforward if you search for the Internet Archive's Playboy collection directly. There's also the 1962 interview with Martin Williams that appeared in DownBeat magazine. It's shorter but technically more interesting because Coltrane was still firmly in his early classic quartet period. I ran into a problem once trying to verify a quote I wanted to use from the Williams interview. The PDF on the DownBeat site had OCR errors that turned "modal" into "model" in a key passage about his harmonic approach. I cross-referenced it with the microfilm version available through university library archives and confirmed the correct word was indeed modal. Always double-check quotes from older music journalism against a second source.
Another option is the 1959 interview with Gene Schoor in Metronome magazine. This one is earlier in his career, right around the time of A Love Supreme. It's less famous but gives you a different angle on how he was being perceived by critics at the time.
What the Interviews Actually Cover
Coltrane's interviews aren't particularly long or easy to digest. He wasn't a natural conversationalist in print. The Playboy piece runs about 6,000 words across both parts, which sounds substantial but covers a lot of ground quickly. He talks about his spiritual practice, his approach to improvisation, the music industry, and some personal matters. Hentoff asks good questions but Coltrane's answers are often short and deliberate. One thing most people miss about these interviews is how technical Coltrane gets when he's comfortable. In the Playboy interview he goes into real depth about his sheet of sound concept, his substitution approach, and the relationship between Hindu music and his harmonic language. Beginners usually skim past those sections looking for the biographical details, but that's where the actual information is. His description of how he approaches chords differently from conventional harmony is worth reading slowly. The Martin Williams interview from 1962 is denser on the musical side. They discuss the quartet setup, Trane's relationship with McCoy Tyner, and his shift away from bebop vocabulary. Williams was a trained musician himself, so the questions go somewhere most interviewer approaches don't.
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Common Problems People Run Into
The biggest issue is finding a complete, accurate text. There are thousands of partial transcriptions floating around music forums and fan sites. Many of them cut off in the middle of paragraphs or combine excerpts from different interviews into one document without noting where the switches happen. I've seen at least three versions online that splice the Playboy interview with the Schoor interview and present it as a single continuous conversation. That's not accurate and it misrepresents what Coltrane actually said in each setting. Another problem is the audio recordings. There are several radio interviews and concert host introductions that circulate online. The quality varies enormously. Some were recorded on poor equipment in noisy venues. If you're trying to study his actual spoken explanations rather than read a transcription, factor in that you'll spend time cleaning up audio or dealing with background noise that makes certain passages unintelligible. The 1961 BBC interview is probably the best audio source available. It's clean and the questions are substantive. But it's only about twenty minutes long and he doesn't go into the same technical detail as the written interviews.
How to Use These Interviews Productively
Don't read them cover to cover in one sitting. They're not structured narratives. Read section by section and pause to work through what he's describing if you're trying to apply his concepts to your own playing or analysis. I keep a notebook open when I go through the Playboy piece because he references specific harmonic movements and his explanations are sometimes elliptical. Writing out the chord progressions he mentions as he describes them helps a lot. Also don't treat everything he says in an interview as gospel truth about his own process. Coltrane was aware he was being interviewed and he sometimes gave answers he thought the interviewer wanted to hear. There are moments in the Playboy piece where his responses about spirituality feel like they're tailored for a mainstream magazine audience. Compare what he says in different interviews from the same period and you'll notice some inconsistencies. That's normal. Musicians rarely give identical accounts of their creative process across different contexts. If you're approaching this from a performance angle, pair the reading with active listening. Play along with the recordings he's discussing while you read his descriptions of what he was trying to do. The interview becomes much more useful that way than reading it passively.
