Coltrane was only six years younger than Bird, and he lived only seven years longer. He was born in North Carolina in 1926, and died in Long Island, NY in 1967.

He came from a musical family, and his father played assorted instruments. But John Coltrane settled on the saxophone in his early teens. Though only six years younger, it was his fate to come after Charlie Parker in the story of modern jazz. Coltrane's early career can be seen as a struggle to both digest and escape from Bird's influence.

Unlike Bird, who wound up in New York City when he left his version of African Middle America, Coltrane moved from Hamlet, NC to Philadelphia in 1943, when he was 17. He was drafted during the last year of the Second World War, in 1945. But he began to work as a Philadelphia alto saxophone player when he returned to civilian life in 1946. His first big break came when he joined Dizzy Gillespie's big band in 1949.

Coltrane stayed with Dizzy's big band and subsequent small group until 1951. During this period — at the height of Bird's all_too_short live career — Coltrane switched from alto (Bird's horn) to tenor saxophone. This at least looks in retrospect like a willful step away from Parker's giant shadow, and towards Coltrane's own related but somewhat different genius. (Down the road as well, Coltrane would influentially add the soprano saxophone to his act.)

While still on tenor himself, Coltrane worked from 1952 to 1954 for two other gifted alto saxophone players, who were still more remote from Charlie Parker's (and Dizzy Gillespie's) modern jazz — the rhythm and blues master Earl Bostic, and then Johnny Hodges (at the time on a brief sabbatical from his usual position at the head of Duke Ellington's saxophone section).

Coltrane's biggest break came in 1955, when Miles Davis phoned him in Philadelphia, and asked him to join the new Miles Davis Quintet (with Miles as Dizzy, so to speak, and Coltrane as Bird — in a new and more accessible variation on the already classic small bop group of piano, bass, drums, trumpet, and saxophone). John Coltrane's recordings with Miles Davis from 1955 to 1957 finally started to put him on the map, as probably the second_greatest modern jazz saxophone player, just after Bird himself.

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