I didn't know that, but here's an excerpt from an interview with Giddins:
JJM You quote Coltrane as saying, "The main thing a musician would like to do, is to give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows of and senses in the universe." Where do you believe Coltrane was headed with his music?
GG Isn't that the $64,000 question? When he died, it was like reading a mystery thriller and the last chapter had been torn out. Where in the hell was he going? Clearly, there was a greater and greater accent on a kind of religious, cosmic, thematic undercurrent. This, I confess, loses me, maybe because I am not particularly religious. Whereas I don't believe you could ever say of Coltrane that he made a political work at the expense of the music, I think there were implications in Alice Coltrane's work that music is secondary to some kind of religious notion. One of the few Coltrane performances that I find very difficult to listen to was Om. I just don't believe it. That may be where he was going. We don't really know. We do know that he was planning a trip to Africa, so he might have been on the very first wave, along with Ellington and the pianist Randy Weston, of a kind of world music synthesis. I don't think he would have gone toward fusion. I find that unbelievable, but that could be my own prejudice. I think he would have made a kind of truce with his past as most musicians have done, and we would have seen him playing a lot of ballads as he did in '62 and '63. I don't think you can have an entire lifetime of Ascension. I do think that Coltrane was running on borrowed time. I don't think he had any doubt that his days were numbered. I think he was trying to make the loudest sound he could make in those last moments.
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