One way of working through his underconfidence—in performance, not on recording sessions—was to use his solos as explorations, blowing for chorus after chorus as he tried to figure out how to play what he really wanted to say. The method wasn’t always popular with his fellow players—or with the bandleader. “Miles would say to him, ‘Can’t you play 27 choruses instead of 28?’” the drummer Jimmy Cobb recalled. When Coltrane explained that he couldn’t figure out how to stop, Miles dryly offered, “You might try taking the horn out of your mouth.” But this was just Miles being Miles: in those early days he seemed to understand, Cobb said “that [Coltrane] was working on something.”
In hiring John Coltrane, Miles knew exactly what he was doing. “In Coltrane’s defense, vertical style, gritty sound, and emotional ferocity, Miles had found the perfect foil for his own sound and style,” Dan Morgenstern writes. “It was a bit like the contrast between himself and Parker—only this time it was the trumpeter who played lead.”
And this time, the leader was a minimalist rather than a maximalist. As for Coltrane, like Charlie Parker, he played a lot of notes. Only unlike Parker, whose improvisations traveled through the chord structure of a blues, standard, or bebop original, searching for harmonies that related to the melody, Coltrane ran all conceivable harmonies of a tune as an end in itself, searching for notes no one had ever thought of using before.
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