When John Coltrane passed away in 1967, he left behind a family, an increasing circle of followers, and a golden trove of recordings that still helps pay the bills for the company with the good fortune to own the Impulse catalog. His musical influence is pervasive and easy to mark, inside the jazz circle and beyond.



To Bob Thiele and many who crossed Coltrane’s path, he was a catalyst who opened up a door where none had been before. “He carried me on into jazz music. I think I would have just faded away — I was a swing cat, you know,” Thiele stated in his final years. “Even to this day I thank Coltrane for being.”



The Impulse story survives well beyond recording dates and catalog numbers, and the Thiele-Coltrane relationship had implications that outlasted them both. In the context of the music business, it represents that occasional, magical occurrence: one man setting aside preconceptions, listening with fresh ears, and growing from the experience.



“I just became more and more excited about making records — all kinds of records,” Thiele said in the mid-Eighties “I listen to Coltrane, and I still listen to Bix Beiderbecke, and I listen to Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, I listen to everything. Coltrane just opened it up.”



Coltrane was one who led by example and suggestion, never by directive. His way was not to show the way ahead, but one possibility, inspiring all to their own paths. “Seek not to follow in the footsteps of men of old,” wrote the Japanese poet Matsuo Basho in the seventeenth century. “Seek what they sought.”



I hold to a feeling: Had Coltrane been able to appreciate all the sounds Impulse eventually housed, he would have 1) been pleased to have been part of that singular, variegated spectrum, and 2) agreed with the poet and shrugged any credit. “I don't think people are necessarily copying me,” he said with typical humility in 1964, the year he created music that earned him two Grammy nominations and gained him induction into Down Beat’s Hall of Fame. “People reach the same end by making a similar discovery at the same time.”



That same year, Coltrane claimed on the cover of A Love Supreme that “one thought can produce millions of vibrations.” Time has proven him correct: His ideas and recordings have vibrated in that very quantity. The House That Trane Built — as a record label, a musical approach, and a more inclusive way of hearing the world — continues to stand.



--Ashley Kahn

February 2006