"Engaging . . . clear-sighted . . . Ratliff suggests, intelligently and persuasively, that Coltrane had, among other attributes, a 'mystic's sensitivity for the sublime, which runs like a secret river under American culture.'? Ratliff patiently explicates Coltrane's legend, writing in short, aphoristic bursts, often as elliptically as his subject played tenor saxophone, but never less than lucidly."-Pankaj Mishra, The New York Times Book Review

"Coltrane: The Story of a Sound is not a biography but an extended, deeply informed analysis of the qualities that make Coltrane and his music so meaningful to people today, four decades after his death."-Matt Schudel, The Washington Post Book World

"Ratliff, a New York Times jazz critic, has written a book that's neither a biography nor a critical study, although it has elements of both. It is, rather, a kind of cultural history . . . Ratliff writes extremely well, with terse, assured brio, as when he refers to Coltrane's 'serene intensity' or the 'incantational tumult' of his vast, cathedral solos."-Mark Feeney, The Boston Globe

"Ratliff has turned me on to more music over the last few years than any other writer . . . The listening skills of a great critic and the ability to convey what he hears are what he brings here."-R. J. Smith, Los Angeles Times

"Brilliant, economical . . . sharp . . . [Ratliff] skillfully and convincingly places Coltrane as something of a man apart from most other musicians-a cultural comet, as much as a musical one."-Henry C. Jackson, San Francisco Chronicle

"In his astute and unorthodox biography, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, New York Times critic Ben Ratliff pays as much attention to Coltrane's haunting absence over the last forty years as he does to his brief decade of renown . . . As attentive a reader as he is a listener, Ratliff charts the rapid expansion of the mythology in various, often contradictory tropes: the humble music student and theorist who never stopped practicing and learning, the Christian into Eastern religious for whom pride was a far graver sin than wrong notes, the wordless spokesman for black civil rights and revolution, the unbound thinker who tripped across inner and outer space."-Richard B. Woodward, Bookforum

"Ratliff condenses the biography proper into the first part of the book in order to devote himself in part two to a lengthy consideration of the saxophonist's influence since his death. Even more important, the book is less about music than it is about sound-as jazz musicians understand it . . . Ratliff's book is intelligent and compelling. The text and its sources reveal how seriously he took his task. In addition to working with biographies and interviews, some of which must have been difficult to locate, Ratliff also draws on obscure radio programs, various unpublished materials, thirty-nine interviews he conducted with musicians and countless conversations with people knowledgeable about jazz, American culture and New York City. Throughout he tackles topics that might seem the province of academics-such as the merits of Theodor Adorno's and Edward Said's ideas about 'late style'-with considerable skill and clarity . . . While Ratliff avers in his introduction that he is a writer rather than a musician, his discussions of the sound of Coltrane and Coltrane's compatriots in performance are informative and compelling, especially when his own writing captures the spirit and feel of a recording in ways that a transcription never could . . . Most important, Ratliff focuses his observational eye again and again on the power and perils of repetition, both for Coltrane and the jazz musicians who have emerged since his death . . . Indeed, Ratliff's reconsideration of a musician who has already been the subject of countless books, poems, and documentaries is perhaps a subtle reminder of how much joy there is in repetition. Like the best writing on music, his book not only provides food for thought but also creates an insatiable desire to go back to the recordings, in hopes that we too might discover some elusive truth."-Travis A. Jackson, The Nation

"Were it not for the power and breadth of saxophonist John Coltrane's legacy and the lithe prose of New York Times critic Ben Ratliff, Coltrane would be a scholarly