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How John Coltrane is My Bridge Between Two Loves – Jazz and Carnatic Music

by Shruti Rajagopalan

Published 2026-09-23 16:19:30+00:00

Where does a jazz solo go when the chord changes stop and a steady drone begins?

0:00 / 17:35 · Narrator Sulafat

Context

Jazz history usually remembers John Coltrane for pushing his saxophone through punishing, high-speed chord changes. But a 23 September 2026 essay from Scroll approaches his final years from a completely different direction. A writer raised on Indian classical music notices how Coltrane began trading complex Western harmony for the strict mathematical rules of a traditional raag. The question here is what drove that late-career shift. It asks what Coltrane was actually trying to achieve by studying those ancient scales, and what he might have composed if he had lived long enough to master them.

Show notes

An examination of John Coltrane's shift from chord-based jazz to modal improvisation, driven by his study of Indian classical music. His surviving notes on Eastern scales and his correspondence with Ravi Shankar show how he used steady harmonies to generate new sounds. A final section outlines the 72-scale Carnatic melakarta system, proposing how Coltrane might have applied its strict mathematical rules to his own music.

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