Like Parker, Ellington, Davis and Armstrong, Coltrane is a name that requires no forename prefix to identify its owner as one of the greatest of all jazz icons. It's also a names that instantly conjures a sound: spearing, questing, earnest, deep and intense, that of a man who, in a recorded career of around a dozen years transformed not only his own music but much of the jazz landscape around him.

His death, aged 41 in 1967, left an aching chasm at the heart of an art form and nearly fifty years after his passing his legacy continues to inform much of what is thought of as innovative within contemporary jazz. Even more unbelievably, a staggering nine decades have passed since the birth of this still controversial figure, a man whose music continues to generate passionate debate both for and against.

Was Coltrane really the last true jazz innovator? Or did he, as some maintain, unhinge a Pandora's Box that has since proved impossible to close, resulting in a fragmentary collapse of the idiom?

REVIEWS

While impossible to compile a Coltrane "best of" Trane 90, brilliantly functions as close to one as possible. - Michael Simmons (Mojo)

An ambitious project and a complete primer in the music of John Coltrane. Lavishly illustrated with an essay from Simon Spillett. Outstanding. - Ron Simpson (The Jazz Rag)

Well-organised look at the middle decade of Coltrane's career. - Brian Priestley (Jazzwise)