John Coltrane, called Trane, was already a legend in his lifetime. He changed jazz like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker before him. He also seemed to share fate with the latter. Born on September 23, 1926, he was anything but a whiz kid. He grew up in the age of the great tenor saxophonists. Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young had shown the way, and the big labels of jazz like Prestige and Blue Note tried to get the instrumentalists from each other. Coltrane has released records on both labels, but on many of these recordings, which today run under his name, he was only led posthumously as a bandleader, because actually he was only involved in it as a sideman.