John William Coltrane was born September 23, 1926, in Hamlet, North Carolina, and raised in nearby High Point in a household anchored by the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church, where both of his grandfathers served as ministers. Between December 1938 and early 1939 his father, his aunt, and both grandparents all passed away within a few months, and his mother Alice was left to hold the family together. He played clarinet and alto horn at William Penn High School, absorbing Lester Young and Johnny Hodges from records, then moved to Philadelphia in June 1943 and received his first alto saxophone that September as a seventeenth-birthday present. He studied with Mike Guerra at the Ornstein School of Music in 1944 and 1945, heard Charlie Parker in person for the first time on June 5, 1945 (he later said that hearing Bird "hit me right between the eyes"), and enlisted in the U.S. Navy that August. Stationed in Hawaii, he played with the base swing band the Melody Masters and made his first recordings, an informal alto-saxophone session with fellow Navy musicians on July 13, 1946, a month before his discharge.

Back in Philadelphia, Coltrane used the G.I. Bill to study theory with Dennis Sandole at the Granoff School of Music, work that shaped his lifelong habit of treating harmony as a set of problems to be practiced through. He toured with King Kolax, played in Jimmy Heath's band, and in 1947, while working with Eddie Vinson, switched permanently from alto to tenor saxophone. The early 1950s took him through Dizzy Gillespie's big band and then Gillespie's smaller group, Earl Bostic's rhythm-and-blues unit in 1952, and Johnny Hodges's band in 1953 and 1954. Heroin addiction, which began in the late 1940s, cost him work repeatedly through this period.

In October 1955 Miles Davis hired the still relatively obscure Coltrane into a new quintet with Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones, the group later known as the first great quintet. Two marathon Prestige sessions on May 11 and October 26, 1956, produced Cookin', Relaxin', Workin', and Steamin', alongside the Columbia album 'Round About Midnight, but Coltrane's addiction and unreliability led Davis to fire him in April 1957. What followed was the pivotal year of his life. On April 20, 1957, at Van Gelder Studio in Hackensack, New Jersey, he played tenor on a Prestige date led by baritone saxophonists Cecil Payne and Pepper Adams with Mal Waldron on piano, material first issued in 1958 on the 16 2/3 rpm sampler Baritones and French Horns and reissued in November 1963 under Coltrane's own name as Dakar. On May 31 he cut his first album as a leader, Coltrane (Prestige PRLP 7105). That spring he also quit heroin and alcohol, crediting what he later described in the liner notes to A Love Supreme as "a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life." From July through December 1957 he held the tenor chair in Thelonious Monk's quartet during the celebrated Five Spot Café residency, an apprenticeship that reshaped his harmonic thinking but which competing record contracts left almost entirely undocumented in the studio at the time. On September 15, 1957, he recorded Blue Train for Blue Note with Lee Morgan and Curtis Fuller, his only leader date for that label and the first album built substantially on his own compositions.

Coltrane rejoined Davis in December 1957, this time in an expanded sextet with Cannonball Adderley, and stayed until April 1960. That run produced Milestones (1958) and Kind of Blue, recorded March 2 and April 22, 1959, the album that put modal improvisation at the center of jazz. Writing the liner notes for Coltrane's own 1958 Prestige album Soultrane, critic Ira Gitler coined the phrase "sheets of sound" for the dense cascades of notes Coltrane was then pouring through chord changes. Prestige kept issuing the backlog of leader dates he had cut in 1957 and 1958, among them Traneing In, Lush Life, and Black Pearls, while Coltrane also recorded Bags & Trane with Milt Jackson in January 1959 and a quintet date with guitarist Kenny Burrell in March 1958.

Signed to Atlantic, Coltrane recorded Giant Steps across sessions in May and December 1959, released in February 1960 with Tommy Flanagan on piano for most of the album. Every tune was his own, and the title track's cycle of key centers a major third apart became known as "Coltrane changes," still one of the hardest progressions in the repertoire. My Favorite Things, recorded that October and released in March 1961, introduced his soprano saxophone and turned a Rodgers and Hammerstein waltz into a modal vehicle that became his signature performance. He built a working quartet in 1960 around pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Steve Davis, and drummer Elvin Jones, and closed out his Atlantic contract in May 1961 with Olé Coltrane, on which Eric Dolphy appeared under the contractual pseudonym "George Lane" alongside trumpeter Freddie Hubbard. His contract passed to Impulse! that same month, reuniting him with engineer Rudy Van Gelder, who recorded nearly everything that followed at his studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

The Impulse! years divide cleanly. The first stretch brought the brass-and-reeds experiment Africa/Brass (1961), a November 1961 Village Vanguard residency with Dolphy and bassist Reggie Workman that yielded the fifteen-minute "Chasin' the Trane" and prompted a DownBeat review labeling the music "anti-jazz," and then, once Jimmy Garrison took over the bass chair in 1962, the settled classic quartet of Coltrane, Tyner, Garrison, and Jones. That group alternated deliberately accessible records, among them Ballads, Duke Ellington & John Coltrane (recorded September 26, 1962), and John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman (March 7, 1963), with the searching live playing of Impressions and Live at Birdland. It peaked on Crescent (1964) and on A Love Supreme, a four-part suite recorded in a single session on December 9, 1964, and released the following month. Coltrane wrote it at his home in Dix Hills, Long Island, set his own poem as the melody of the closing "Psalm," and performed the complete suite in public only three times.

From mid-1965 Coltrane moved past the quartet's language altogether. On June 28, 1965, he recorded Ascension, a thirty-eight-minute collective improvisation for eleven players including Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, John Tchicai, and Hubbard. Sanders joined the working band that September and Rashied Ali came in as a second drummer soon after. Tyner left following the November 23, 1965, Meditations session, saying he could no longer hear himself; Jones followed in early 1966. Coltrane rebuilt the group around pianist Alice McLeod, whom he married in 1966 after separating from his first wife Naima in 1963, with Sanders, Garrison, and Ali, a band documented on Live at the Village Vanguard Again! (1966) and on the July 1966 Japanese tour. His last studio work included Expression, Stellar Regions, and Interstellar Space, six saxophone-and-drums duets with Ali recorded February 22, 1967. He played in public for the last time on April 23, 1967, at a benefit for the Olatunji Center of African Culture in Harlem, and died of liver cancer on July 17, 1967, at Huntington Hospital on Long Island, aged 40. His funeral at St. Peter's Lutheran Church in Manhattan opened with the Albert Ayler Quartet and closed with the Ornette Coleman Quartet.

Coltrane worked through three distinct musical languages in twelve recording years, and each one changed what saxophonists after him believed was possible. The hard-bop Coltrane of the Miles Davis quintet and Blue Train built the "sheets of sound," packing notes into uneven groups of fives and sevens to run every available substitution through a chord, an approach he pushed to its logical endpoint on Giant Steps. From 1960 he inverted the problem, using the static modal harmony of My Favorite Things and Impressions to let rhythm, motif, and sheer duration carry the improvisation, and taking up the soprano saxophone, which he played with a reedy, keening tone that had no real precedent in bebop. The final phase brought multiphonics, altissimo shrieks, unmeasured free rhythm, and an explicitly devotional purpose, drawing on Indian raga, African drumming, and a reading list that ran from the Bhagavad Gita to Krishnamurti. Critics split hard over it: DownBeat ran the "anti-jazz" charge in 1961, and French audiences booed during the 1960 Davis tour. His influence on later players is close to universal, with Wayne Shorter and Pharoah Sanders among the first generation and Kenny Garrett, whose 1996 album Pursuance: The Music of John Coltrane is one of hundreds of tributes, among the later ones. Coltrane won an Edison Award in Amsterdam in 1961 for Giant Steps, entered the DownBeat Jazz Hall of Fame in 1965, received a posthumous Grammy in 1982 and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997, and was given a special Pulitzer Prize citation in 2007 for "masterful improvisation, supreme musicianship and iconic centrality to the history of jazz." In 1982 the African Orthodox Church in San Francisco canonized him.