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Proponents of different jazz styles have always argued that their predecessors musical style did not include essential characteristics that define jazz as jazz. Thus, 1940s swing was belittled by beboppers of the 1950s who were themselves attacked by free jazzes of the 1960s. The neoboppers of the 1980s and 1990s attacked almost everybody else. The titanic figure of Black saxophonist John Coltrane has complicated the arguments made by proponents of styles from bebop through neobop because in his own musical journey he drew from all those styles. His influence on all types of jazz was immeasurable. At the height of his popularity, Coltrane largely abandoned playing bebop, the style that had brought him fame, to explore the outer reaches of jazz. Coltrane himself probably believed that the only essential characteristic of jazz was improvisation, the one constant in his journey from bebop to open-ended improvisations on modal, Indian, and African melodies. On the other hand, this dogged student and prodigious technicianwho insisted on spending hours each day practicing scales from theory bookswas never able to jettison completely the influence of bebop, with its fast and elaborate chains of notes and ornaments on melody. Two stylistic characteristics shaped the way Coltrane played the tenor saxophone: he favored playing fast runs of notes built on a melody and depended on heavy, regularly accented beats. The first led Coltrane to sheets of sound where he raced faster and faster, pile-driving notes into each other to suggest stacked harmonies. The second meant that his sense of rhythm was almost as close to rock as to bebop. | 
