In 1964, photographer Chuck Stewart joined John Coltrane as he recorded the album “A Love Supreme” at the Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, N.J. With a Rolleiflex camera, he photographed the rehearsal as Coltrane, with his saxophone, led the pianist McCoy Tyner, the drummer Elvin Jones and the bassist Jimmy Garrison through his four-movement composition.
Seventy-two pictures from that session went undeveloped for 50 years. Looking at a sheet of the rediscovered work with a reporter for Smithsonian magazine in 2014, Mr. Stewart singled out one that showed Coltrane sitting at a piano, lost in thought.
“I was looking for a decisive moment,” he said.
He was seeking not only decisive moments in studios and nightclubs, but also images that were undeniably his.
From Stewart’s obituary in the New York Times by Richard Sandomir; Photo by Chuck Stewart
