John Coltrane was on familiar turf when he took the stage at Mitten Hall.
Only a few blocks away from that Temple University auditorium, around the intersection of North 12th and Jefferson Streets, stood the house he’d occupied when he first moved to Philadelphia from High Point, N.C., straight out of high school. There were family members and old friends in attendance, including a few onstage.
But that concert 60 years ago — on Nov. 11, 1966 — would not be remembered as a comfortable return to a well-worn musical path. For Coltrane and the others who played that night, it was more of a cosmic event, charged with expeditionary valor and spiritual fervor. “By 1966, John had pushed so far past the mainstream that even longtime fans, followers, and musicians struggled to keep up,” writes his son Ravi Coltrane in the foreword to Coltrane: The Definitive Visual Celebration of the Legend. “The music performed that night was unlike any music jazz audiences were used to hearing.”
That music was broadcast live by WRTI, and circulated as a storied bootleg for decades before finally seeing release a dozen years ago, as Offering: Live at Temple University. Next Thursday at 8 p.m., Ravi will lead an anniversary tribute at the Temple Performing Arts Center with partners like his fellow saxophonist Tomoki Sanders, whose father, Pharoah Sanders, also played on the original concert. This momentous program, titled John Coltrane’s Offering Revisited, is presented by Ars Nova Workshop with the Coltrane estate. WRTI, a co-sponsor, will once again carry it live on the air.
A culminating gesture in John Coltrane’s centennial celebration, this also provides a welcome opportunity to reconsider the seismic impact of his original concert. The critic Francis Davis, who experienced it as a Temple undergraduate, recalled an atmosphere like a political convention, with a jostling array of constituencies. He also said that the walkouts started just 15 minutes into the first song, a tempestuous elaboration on “Naima,” the ballad Coltrane had composed for his first wife. This version featured a rolling, resplendent piano solo by his second wife, Alice Coltrane, who incorporated glissandi reminiscent of her developing interest in the harp.
The saxophonist Michael Brecker, then a student at Cheltenham High School, was among the listeners who stayed, glued to his seat. “The whole concert was incredible,” he recalled decades later, in an interview for Michael Segell’s book The Devil's Horn: The Story of the Saxophone, from Noisy Novelty to King of Cool. “It was at a time when there was a lot of searching going on, people looking for ways to be free. There was a lot of urgent crying out, and unfortunately that was mischaracterized in Coltrane as anger.”
“His tone was unique — mysterious, dark, hard, yet lushly beautiful,” Brecker added. “To the uninitiated listener it sounded harsh, but for me, with continued listening, it began to sound just incredibly beautiful. Every note of a Coltrane tune had weight and meaning. From a technical standpoint it was outrageous; from an intellectual view it was deep, full of exciting, innovative ideas that hadn’t been done before.”
At Temple, some of those ideas tested the limits of musical expression.
Even by the intrepid standard of Coltrane’s avant-garde style in 1966 — as heard on the bracing studio albums Ascension, released on Impulse! Records that February, and Meditations, which arrived in September — this performance has always held a singular fascination because of how he gave voice to experimental urges, as in literally singing. “At times,” writes music journalist Ashley Kahn in his liner notes to Offering, which won a 2015 Grammy award, “he also beat his chest as he vocalized — a spontaneous act that added to the inscrutability of the performance and, for many in attendance that evening, attached the experience to the social upheavals, deepening spirituality, and burgeoning Afro-centrism of that era.”
Rashied Ali, the Philadelphia-born drummer who had recently succeeded Elvin Jones in Coltrane’s working band, would later suggest that he turned to vocalizing in this instance because he had run out of sonic possibilities of the saxophone. Ravi gave Kahn a different explanation, arguing that “the Temple recording is an affirmation that, no, he didn’t exhaust the saxophone. The saxophone was just a tool — one over which he had a master’s command. His voice was an extension of the saxophone, as the saxophone was an extension of his voice. When you hear that transition on ‘Leo,’ it’s totally seamless in energy, vibe and intention.”
The critic Ben Ratliff delves further into that moment in Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, describing a metaphysical handoff. “Ali solos alone for a while, with drumsticks, beating rapidly on snare and toms,” he writes. “Coltrane enters, first tapping bells, then singing while beating his chest; at first it is the I-II-V pattern, the same melodic cell that you hear at the beginning of the melody of ‘Wise One,’ and the ‘Acknowledgement’ section of A Love Supreme, and then it builds methodically on that. The drumming on his chest mimics Ali’s patterns. He is singing, not screaming. It couldn’t be more logical. After forty-five seconds of this, he picks up his tenor and resumes where he had left off.”
Ratliff’s invocation of A Love Supreme is instructive, because Coltrane had famously chanted the title phrase on “Acknowledgement,” a musical choice born out of spiritual devotion, and generally understood on those terms. But there is also an undeniable charge to the chest-thumping vocal gesture in this performance.
One month before the Temple concert, the Black Panther Party was officially established in Oakland, reflecting a cultural movement that Coltrane would have been following with interest. Earlier in 1966, Stokely Carmichael had become chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, turning the phrase “Black Power” into a rallying cry. As Francis Davis recalled, there were members of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), “a radical organization that then boasted a larger Philadelphia membership than the Panthers,” in the audience at Mitten Hall.
John Coltrane was not a natural firebrand. There’s a famous interview from Nov. 1966, within days of the concert at Temple University, conducted by the historian and critic Frank Kofsky, who approached his subject from a Marxist and Black Nationalist point of view. Noting Coltrane’s interest in Malcolm X, Kofsky prods the saxophonist to tease out that connection in the music. “Well, I think that music, being an expression of the human heart or the human being itself, does express just what is happening,” Coltrane replies, redirecting the question. “The whole of human experience at that particular time is being expressed. In any situation that we find in our lives, when there’s something we feel should be better, we must exert effort to try and make it better.”
A moment later, Coltrane elaborates on this idea, with a statement that would take on the resonance of scripture. “I want to be a force for real good,” he says. “In other words, I know that there are bad forces. I know that there are forces out here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good.”
Goodness and greatness: in this era, Coltrane was committed to both.
He had achieved musical greatness through an obsessive dedication to craft and an inexhaustible appetite for new frontiers. His drive toward goodness, at this stage in his career, was closely tied to a beneficent form of radical inclusion. Inspired by an emerging avant-garde, variously known as “free jazz” or “the new thing,” he had become a presiding captain — supporting younger explorers like Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders, all of whom he helped onto the roster of Impulse! Records, and onto various stages. There was a teeming energy on this scene at the time: Sanders rolled up to Temple just hours after a recording session for Don Cherry’s album Where is Brooklyn? for the Blue Note label.
But Coltrane’s magnanimity on the bandstand extended even further. In May of 1966, Rashied Ali was working with the quintet at The Village Vanguard when Coltrane asked what he thought about the aspiring free-jazz saxophonist Frank Wright, who had asked to sit in. Ali gruffly dismissed Wright’s skills, thinking that was that. But as soon as the band went on, Coltrane invited the younger tenor up onstage.
Forty years later — on a Jazz at Lincoln Center panel discussion titled “Did John Coltrane Lose His Way?” — Ali recalled what happened next. “In the dressing room, after it was over, he said something I never forgot. He said, ‘I don’t care what a cat plays. If you’re into music, there’ll be something you hear [in their playing] that you might like. One note, one sound, that you might like.’”
The Temple University concert was emblematic of this mindset. In addition to Sanders, Ali, Alice Coltrane and the bassist Sonny Johnson, Coltrane welcomed a coterie of hand percussionists to the bandstand — marshalled by Robert Kenyatta on batá drums. Kenyatta led a drum circle that met twice a week in a North Philadelphia church, and Coltrane had been joining them in the weeks leading up to the concert. “By about the third week,” Kenyatta told Kahn, “he was playing some stuff I had never heard anybody else play on a horn, just like he was a drummer but in the melodic sense.”
The concert also featured two additional saxophonists, whose participation was unplanned. One of these, alto saxophonist Arnold Joyner, was a childhood friend of Ali’s who had jammed with Coltrane at Pep’s Musical Bar; he hopped on for an extended solo on “Crescent.” The other was an 18-year old college student named Steve Knoblauch, then a few months into his freshman year at Penn.
Knoblauch recalled this moment in a 2014 interview with the Pennsylvania Gazette. “I knew that [Coltrane] had been doing these concerts with large ensembles and often inviting young musicians up to play, so I brought my horn. I had no idea what was going to happen.” Together with a classmate, Knoblauch sat at stage right. “Over an hour later, in the middle of the concert, Coltrane came up to me and asked me if I wanted to take a solo,” he said. “I knew what he was about and I felt this was my opportunity to show what I could do. I took out my horn and he stood on the side while his wife, Alice, finished her piano solo. As he went back on stage, he gestured for me to follow, played a little interlude signal, and then gestured for me to step forward and solo.”
Dr. Steven Knoblauch, now a prominent psychologist, will join Robert Kenyatta in a conversation about the concert in Mitten Hall in the afternoon on Wednesday, Nov. 11. I’ll moderate this discussion, part of the 2026 Jazz Philadelphia Summit, which will also include a keynote address and a John Coltrane exhibition curated by the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University.
The following evening will bring Offering Revisited, with Ravi Coltrane leading an ensemble featuring Tomoki Sanders on saxophone, Kris Davis on piano, Robert Hurst on bass, Terri Lyne Carrington on drums, and Melvis Santa on batá drums. It seems more than likely that the ranks will expand to welcome other members of an extended community, exploring the furthest reaches of musical expression.
For Ravi, it will literally be the fulfillment of a dream. Many years ago, as he recalls in Coltrane: The Definitive Visual Celebration of the Legend, he dreamed that he was on campus at Temple University, that day in 1966 — about to hear and meet the father he never got to know. It was only eight months after the Mitten Hall concert that John Coltrane died of liver cancer, at age 40; Ravi was not yet two years old.
“When I reached the wings, I was at stage left,” Ravi writes in the foreword. “I looked to the floor and saw my father’s open saxophone cases. A great sense of joy and accomplishment washed over me. I’d made it to the bandstand without waking up! A nervous anticipation washed over me as well. As I peered around tall stage curtains to see my father onstage, now flooded with more emotion than I could sustain, a new brightness began to emerge and I felt myself slowly rising up and out of this wondrous lucid dream into waking consciousness.”
In this sense, when he steps onstage at Temple, Ravi will not only be honoring a legacy but also inhabiting a vision. For all who care about John Coltrane’s music and message, the emotional and spiritual resonance should carry loud and clear.
John Coltrane's Offering Revisited: Live at Temple University takes place on Nov. 12 at 8 p.m., Temple Performing Arts Center, 1837 N. Broad Street; purchase tickets.
