In a San Francisco church, a mid-century saxophonist gazes down from a Byzantine-style icon with a golden halo, venerated by a congregation that uses his music as liturgy. This episode explains how John Coltrane got there. Raised in North Carolina with two grandfathers who were AME Zion ministers, he lost his father, an aunt and both grandfathers within months in the late 1930s, a loss the hosts treat as the earthquake behind his lifelong belief that the right sounds could alter reality. In Philadelphia he heard Charlie Parker in 1945, enlisted in the Navy, and performed as an unofficial guest with an all-white band at Pearl Harbor while scrubbing pots by day.

The episode confronts the paradox of superhuman practice, scales until his lips bled, alongside a heroin addiction that got him fired by Miles Davis, framing the drug as a way to turn ...