If there’s any such thing as a perfect man, I think John Coltrane was one. And I think that kind of perfection has to come from a greater force than there is here on earth.

John Coltrane, born this day in 1926, was an American jazz saxophonist, bandleader, and composer who exerted as strong an influence on jazz in the 1960s and ’70s as Charlie Parker did in the 1940s and ’50s.