Om: How John Coltrane found India while searching beyond jazz

Among John Coltrane’s papers sits a page headed “Scales of India.” He worked through ascending and descending patterns, jotting notes on mood and time, trying to crack a system built on different logic than his own. This wasn’t a passing curiosity. By the early sixties, India had become part of the questions driving his music and his faith.

He’d been listening to Ravi Shankar for years, buying up his records one by one. In 1961 he told critic Nat Hentoff that the music moved him. He wanted to record with Shankar, sure it would open doors he couldn’t reach on his own. They finally met in 1964, and Shankar walked him through the basics of ragas and talas. Coltrane sat, took notes, kept asking questions. Shankar remembered him wanting to set concerts aside entirely and study the music properly, like a student rather than a star. The following year Coltrane named his second son Ravi.

That pull toward India sat inside a spiritual life that started long before Shankar entered the picture. He grew up in North Carolina, both grandfathers ministers, religion woven through the household from the start. After breaking free of heroin and alcohol in 1957, he described an awakening that reshaped how he heard music entirely. Playing became devotion rather than performance, and he read widely across traditions instead of settling on one faith.

You can hear all of it in the records. “India.” “Om.” Private study of Indian scales tucked into his notebooks. Meditations. Then A Love Supreme in December 1964, four parts offered to God, still his clearest statement of what he believed and where he stood. He passed in 1967 at 40, the deeper study of Indian music still just a plan on paper he never got to open.

Fifteen years later, his listeners carried that search somewhere he never could have seen coming. In 1982 the congregation that became San Francisco’s Saint John Coltrane Church joined the African Orthodox Church, and Coltrane was named a saint. Sunday service still opens with a conch shell before A Love Supreme enters the room.

A man who spent his last years chasing the sacred across traditions and continents is now worshipped through the very music that chase created.