Columbia Records – the most prestigious and financially generous record company around – was looking over his shoulder, checking on him. He was preparing for his first national tour arranged by a high-powered booking agent. September, 1955: the trumpeter was desperate. Miles’ 1959 classic album Miles Davis – Kind of Blue marking the apex of their collaborative years – stands as the most popular jazz album of all time, loved by a vast, non-partisan spectrum of music consumers. Their absence has only succeeded – like Sinatra, like Presley, like a rarefied few – in intensifying their recognition and elevating their legend. The music they created together during an almost five-year union still resonates, entrances, influences and sells, sells, sells. Their names now command reverence, and rarely induce less than eulogy. When Miles Davis raised his trumpet, he played the sensitive introvert, blowing brief, hushed tones, exuding vulnerability. John Coltrane, with saxophone in hand, became the unbridled one: long-winded, garrulous. But on the bandstand and on record, they reversed roles. The other was cocksure, demanding running with friends rather than running scales.
Offstage, one was quiet, pensive, self-critical to a fault, practising obsessively. Ice and fire they were: a two-horned paradox.