usic of his later years. Within a year, his father, his uncle, and his minister all died. He lost every important male influence in his life. After graduating from high school in High Point, he moved to Philadelphia in 1943, where he lived in a small one-room apartment and worked as a laborer in a sugar-refinery. For a year, Coltrane attended Ornstein School of Music. Then in 1945, he was drafted into the Navy and sent to Hawaii where he was assigned to play clarinet in a band called the Melody Makers. Upon his return from Hawaii a year later, Coltrane launched his music career. “With all those years of constant practice in High Point behind him, possessing a powerful inner strength from being raised in a deeply religious family, and with a foundation in musical theory and an innate curiosity about life, Coltrane was well prepared to seriously enter a battle.” In the late nineteen forties, Coltrane began playing with several different R&B groups in small bars and clubs around Philadelphia. It became a tradition in many of the clubs at this time for musicians to “walk the bar” (i.e. to walk on top of the bar while playing one’s instrument). Coltrane was ashamed of having to go through this “display” every night. “To any serious musician, it was an incredibly humiliating experience - to someone like Coltrane, who was developing a type of religious fervor for his music, it was devastating.” In addition to the negative self-image this experience engendered, critics criticized his music as being too bizarre. Coltrane became very depressed, and searching for a way out, he turned to heroin. Heroin was a very popular drug among black musicians in the forties. It was a uniting force that, initially, brought them together, but in the end caused lives and careers to disintegrate. In 1949, Dizzy Gillespie invited Coltrane to play in his big band. Gillespie had been a very influential and importa...
