Ben Ratliff on John Coltrane:
His Stockholm solos are long and searching, making surging blues figures out of split-tones, turning what were once harmonic convolutions into a sensuous new way of phrase-smearing. It
sounded, absolutely, like a new way of speaking an established language. (Not long before this, the saxophonist Wayne Shorter reported, Coltrane had mentioned — apparently in earnest — that he wanted to learn how to speak English backward.)