[Finnucane]

I think the thing you could say about Coltrane was the he was the last musician who could change the shape of the whole genre, the way Armstrong and Parker did. After Coltrane it was fractured, and it was Coltrane who did the fracturing.

[UncleMeat]

That's crazy. People weren't exclusively playing bebop before Trane and he certainly wasn't the only person who influenced the growth of free and free-ish jazz. Likely not even the most influential.

We also wouldn't expect any genre to stay in stasis forever. Fracturing isn't even a bad thing.

[emodendroket]

> We also wouldn't expect any genre to stay in stasis forever. Fracturing isn't even a bad thing.

This is a good point. Country music is the most popular radio format in the country. Yet Carrie Underwood doesn't sound much like Loretta Lynn and one could easily like one but not the other. Yet the "real country is dead" narrative gets little airing compared to the way the analogous complaint about jazz does.

If this author wants to say "free jazz is not to my taste" or even "free jazz is too dissonant," you know, he's well within his rights to say so. But "John Coltrane singlehandedly killed jazz with A Love Supreme" seems like a thesis impossible to justify.