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50 free John Coltrane trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
John Coltrane trivia covers the saxophonist who went from a Navy swing band in Hawaii to sainthood in a San Francisco church in the space of a 40-year life. He was Miles Davis's tenor player on Kind of Blue, wrote the hardest chord changes in jazz on Giant Steps, made the soprano saxophone fashionable again with My Favorite Things, and recorded A Love Supreme in a single evening in December 1964. This quiz follows the whole arc: North Carolina and Philadelphia, hearing Charlie Parker for the first time, the Miles Davis quintets and the Monk quartet at the Five Spot, Blue Train, the Atlantic years and the Coltrane changes, the Classic Quartet of Tyner, Garrison and Jones, the poem hidden in 'Psalm', Ascension and the free-jazz turn, Alice Coltrane and the second quartet, the album lost when Impulse! wiped the tape, and the posthumous honours from a Grammy to a special Pulitzer. Easy questions suit anyone who owns A Love Supreme; the expert tier is for the sessionography obsessives. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Coltrane and his albums, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which North Carolina town was John Coltrane born in 1926?
Hamlet
He grew up in High Point, where he played clarinet and alto horn in a community band before switching to saxophone.
Q 02Which instrument is Coltrane chiefly associated with?
The saxophone
He started on alto, switched to tenor in 1947 with Eddie Vinson, and later added the soprano.
Q 03Which musician did Coltrane see perform on 5 June 1945, later saying 'it hit me right between the eyes'?
Charlie Parker
Parker became his idol, and the two occasionally played together in the late 1940s.
Q 04Coltrane enlisted in the US Navy on 6 August 1945, the day of what event?
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima
He joined to avoid the Army draft and ended up playing in the Melody Masters swing band at Pearl Harbor.
Q 05Why was Coltrane treated as a 'guest performer' with the Navy's Melody Masters in Hawaii?
They were an all-white outfit
He continued kitchen and security duties when not playing, and his first recording was an informal 1946 session with Navy musicians.
Q 06Coltrane studied theory at Philadelphia's Granoff School with which guitarist-composer?
Dennis Sandole
He kept studying with Sandole into the early 1950s, and was freelancing under him when Miles Davis called in 1955.
Q 07Which trumpeter hired Coltrane in 1955 for the band later called the 'First Great Quintet'?
Miles Davis
The band with Red Garland, Paul Chambers and Philly Joe Jones recorded Cookin', Relaxin', Workin' and Steamin' in two marathon 1956 sessions.
Q 08Why did the First Great Quintet break up in 1957?
In part because of Coltrane's heroin addiction
He rejoined Davis in December 1957 after recovering.
Q 09At which New York club did Coltrane play in Thelonious Monk's quartet in 1957?
The Five Spot Café
A tape of the group at Carnegie Hall that November was rediscovered and issued by Blue Note in 2005.
Q 10The 1958 album with 'Moment's Notice' and 'Lazy Bird' was Coltrane's only date as leader for which label?
Blue Note
Lee Morgan and Curtis Fuller played on it, and four of its five tracks were Coltrane originals.
Q 11Which critic coined the phrase 'sheets of sound' in 1958 to describe Coltrane's rapid cascading style?
Ira Gitler
Coltrane said he had to group notes in fives and sevens to fit all the chord progressions in.
Q 12Coltrane played on which landmark 1959 album by his trumpeter boss?
Kind of Blue
Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb completed the sextet at Columbia's 30th Street Studio.
Q 13Giant Steps (1960) was Coltrane's first album for which label?
Atlantic
It was also his first album consisting entirely of his own compositions.
Q 21Which bassist replaced Reggie Workman in 1962 to complete the Classic Quartet?
Jimmy Garrison
He stayed on into the second quartet with Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Rashied Ali.
Q 22Which label bought out Coltrane's recording contract in May 1961?
Impulse!
He recorded most of his Impulse! albums at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.
Q 23Which multi-instrumentalist joined Coltrane in 1961 and drew a DownBeat charge of 'anti-jazz'?
Eric Dolphy
After Dolphy died in 1964, his mother gave Coltrane his flute and bass clarinet.
Q 14The 'Coltrane changes' are noted for root movement by which unusual interval?
Major thirds
Moving through three keys a major third apart outlines an augmented triad; jazz normally moves around the circle of fifths.
Q 15The Giant Steps ballad 'Naima' is named after whom?
His wife at the time
'Syeeda's Song Flute' honours her daughter, whom he adopted, and 'Mr. P.C.' honours bassist Paul Chambers.
Q 16'Countdown' on Giant Steps is a reharmonised version of which Eddie Vinson number?
'Tune Up'
Coltrane had studied Slonimsky's Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns; Ravel's 'Ondine' has similar changes.
Q 17Which instrument did Coltrane play for the first time on record on My Favorite Things (1961)?
Soprano saxophone
Miles Davis bought him one on a European tour in 1960; the horn was then associated mostly with earlier jazz.
Q 18The title track of My Favorite Things comes from which musical?
The Sound of Music
Coltrane and Tyner soloed over vamps on E minor and E major instead of the written changes; he called it his favourite recording.
Q 19Who played piano in Coltrane's Classic Quartet?
McCoy Tyner
A fellow Philadelphian, he had an understanding with Coltrane that he would join when he felt ready.
Q 20Who was the drummer in the Classic Quartet?
Elvin Jones
He left in early 1966 after Coltrane added a second drummer, saying of the new music that 'only poets can understand it'.
Q 24Coltrane's 'Chasin' the Trane', recorded at the Village Vanguard in 1961, was inspired by which Sun Ra saxophonist?
John Gilmore
'He's got it! Gilmore's got the concept!' Coltrane is said to have exclaimed after hearing him.
Q 25With which baritone singer did Coltrane record a celebrated 1963 album of ballads?
Johnny Hartman
The session came the day after the 'lost album' was recorded, in March 1963.
Q 26How many parts make up the suite A Love Supreme?
Four
'Acknowledgement', 'Resolution', 'Pursuance' and 'Psalm'; Coltrane plays tenor throughout.
Q 27On which date was A Love Supreme recorded, in a single session?
9 December 1964
The album was composed at his home in Dix Hills, Long Island, and released by Impulse! the following month.
Q 28What is unusual about the tenor line in 'Psalm', the final part of A Love Supreme?
It plays one note per syllable of a poem in the liner notes
The poem is Coltrane's own address to God, and his phrasing follows the words.
Q 29How many times did the Classic Quartet perform A Love Supreme live?
Three
Two were recorded: Antibes in July 1965 and Seattle in October 1965, the latter released only in 2021.
Q 30Roughly how many copies had A Love Supreme sold by 1970, against Coltrane's usual 30,000?
About 500,000
It never charted on the Billboard 200 but was later certified gold in both Japan and the United States.