I don't know much about jazz, and until this film, I knew even less about saxophone master John Coltrane, but watching Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary is like being transported to a land that is elegant, exciting and peaceful.
The film draws a portrait of Coltrane out of interviews, hundreds of photographs and home movies. At the heart of the documentary is an hour and a half of Coltrane's music that never seems to stop, and it’s enchanting from start to finish. The movie even begins with images that feel like traveling at a deliberate pace through the Milky Way.
At times, you forget what people in the film say about Coltrane because the seductive rhythms of Coltrane’s music and the play of images on screen take you away from words. The speakers are good -- musicians Wynton Marsalis, Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, Benny Golson, along with Coltrane's second wife and several of his children. Maybe the most articulate of all is former President Bill Clinton, who brings a serious depth of knowledge and understanding to his comments on the work of Coltrane.
Coltrane died in 1966 when he was just 40. He blended tremendous intelligence with a powerful moral sense and deep-seated humanity. Plus, a level of musical genius equal to anyone ever. People outside the jazz world still don’t always understand the profound sophistication of jazz. When the artists and historians in the movie compare Coltrane to Picasso, Shakespeare and Beethoven, they’re not exaggerating and they know what they’re talking about. They describe how Coltrane’s music, like all great art, addresses the basic human questions about existence.
When Coltrane visited Nagasaki, a Japanese friend found him sitting alone playing a flute. Coltrane said he was searching for the sound of that place where nuclear destruction hit in World War II. He eventually composed a piece called “Peace on Earth.” Coltrane answered the horrific attack on the 16th St. Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four girls, with a composition called “Alabama,” a musical reaction shaped by Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech. These compositions break your heart at the same time that they are filled with love for human beings of all kinds. As the scholar Cornel West points out, Coltrane's music was saturated with the black experience in America, with all its struggle -- but also speaks to the lives of all human beings.
Chasing Trane shows Coltrane to be a thorough genius and a striking human being. Many stories of musicians wind up in the despair of addictions and personal horror. Coltrane did have personal problems and he was a drug addict, but early on, and with no help, he went cold turkey and apparently stayed clean the rest of his life. He learned that drugs did not make his music better, and as drummer Reggie Workman says, when Coltrane cleaned up, his work opened up also.
Besides using as much Coltrane music as possible, director John Scheinfeld handles photographs and home movies exceptionally well. Instead of the horribly overused and badly-named Ken Burns effect with constant dreary panning over vintage photographs, Scheinfeld moves the photos around the screen, arranges them in revealing combinations, multiplies them and tints them various colors to show change and nuance. The home movies give another dimension to Coltrane's life and music. He's there in front of his suburban brick home on Long Island. He's in the yard playing with his kids. He's a family man in a thoroughly typical way.
A film biography of Coltrane could easily have fallen into the clichés of a musician suffering poverty, segregation, drug abuse and early failure. But Chasing Trane sees through them and shows how John Coltrane found his way through them as well to a life of dignity and stability which allowed his incredible genius to express itself.
