He begins “Chasing Trane” by hooking the viewer on some potent narrative. Instead of a slog through The Early Years, the documentary begins in medias res. It’s 1957, and Coltrane is riding high as the sax player in a quintet led by Miles Davis, the closest thing jazz has to a superstar now that Charlie Parker is two years gone. A series of stills of Miles and Trane, zoomed-in with a Ken Burns style, conveys how sweet it is to be in this band. And then, boom. Miles fires his tenor man for unreliability caused by drug abuse. A big blow. Which leaves a big question.

It’s then that we get the origin story, but since it’s been so well-contextualized, Scheinfeld can build it for speed. We learn about two crucial things: Coltrane’s roots in the American Jim Crow South and his pedestrian sax playing when he was in a Navy bebop band. The jazz critic Ben Ratliff observes that this isn’t the kind of playing in which you hear the roots of greatness. You hear nothing of the sort. But Coltrane’s desire for greatness drove him to practice like a fiend.

The movie has a great array of interviewees, and they all contribute something special. Coltrane’s children and stepchildren speak warmly of a generous, gentle man. Friends and fellow musicians—true jazz greats and legends—Jimmy Heath, Benny Golson, Reggie Workman, Sonny Rollins, and McCoy Tyner, the last being the only surviving member of Coltrane’s revolutionary quartet—express equal amounts of love and awe. Contemporary luminaries like Cornel West, Wynton Marsalis, and even President Bill Clinton weigh in on his importance. All that they say is correct and true.

And it is confirmed within the events of Coltrane’s story itself. Describing his and Coltrane’s path to junkiedom, Jimmy Heath says, “You’re in the club with the pimps and hustlers, and they tell you, here, take some of this, you’ll feel good. And you go for it and then you’re stuck.” Simple as that. But when Coltrane came to the cold realization that staying stuck was going to take his music away, he went through the agony of withdrawal and came out a changed man. The movie is full of Coltrane’s own words, read by Denzel Washington. They’re a good match. Describing his post-junkie state, Coltrane says simply, “I think better. I play better.” His thinking and his playing would compel him to push his music ever forward from the late '50s into the '60s, up until his death from liver cancer in 1967, at the ridiculous age of 40.

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