This is not another biography. It is a book about a sound, and about what that sound did to everyone who heard it. Ben Ratliff, for years the jazz critic of the New York Times, splits the book in two: the first half follows the development of Coltrane's music, the second — and this is where the book becomes its own thing — follows the legacy. The underlying question is not "who was Coltrane" but "why does Coltrane weigh so heavily on jazz's idea of itself".
It is a different approach from Lewis Porter's, also shelved here. Where Porter transcribes and analyses, Ratliff reasons and listens: less notation, more essay, more accessible. The two books do not compete; they complete each other. If Porter is the reference volume, Ratliff is the one you read in a sitting and that changes how you hear.
The second half — on influence, on the reactions of musicians and critics, on how the sound kept reverberating for decades — is the natural bridge to the chapters on the contemporary revival: it explains why, sixty years on, Kamasi Washington and Shabaka still return to that source.
Published in 2007 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and later in Picador paperback, it is written with the nervy elegance of the best American critical journalism: sentences that look simple and weigh every word.
Coltrane left a sound, not a method. Ratliff is the book that listens for the echo.