Nothing that came after Meditations approached it in structural complexity and subtlety. These may be the missing ingredients in the music of Coltrane's final period. The results remain virtually indescribable, and they forestall criticism with the furious directness of their energy. Yet their effect depends more on the abandonment of rationality, which most listeners achieve only intermittently if at all. In fact, it may be the listener himself who is abandoned, for it seems clear that Coltrane is no longer primarily concerned with a human audience.
All songs become virtually interchangeable, and there is really no point any longer in requests.
The only favorite thing he is playing about now is salvation. The last album that Coltrane recorded was Expression , in February and March of 1967. The most striking characteristic of the album is its sense of consummation, which is clear in the abandonment of developmental structure and often bar divisions, and in the phantasmal rather than propulsive lines that pervade the work. There had always been in Coltrane a profound tension between the pure virtuosity of his elongated phrases and the high sustained cries or eloquent rests that followed. Pater said that all art aspires to the condition of music.