The mode of improvisation, which Coltrane developed in the late 1950’s for a short period with his own band into the early 1960s, comprised a particular technique where scales are played very fast, over rapid chord changes and advanced substitutions, so that it appears as if entire scales, all possible combinations and variations, are played simultaneously, in a ferocious tempo, rupturing, opening up, both harmonic and rhythmic lines and patterns to a wider field of potential.

This proposed paper takes this mode of improvisation – what Ira Girtler once referred to as Coltrane’s ‘sheets of sound’ – as its point of departure and attempts to explore it in terms of the actualization of virtual potentials within the context both of Coltrane’s later developments in modal and free form jazz, and the historical and socio-political situation in the USA at the time, which saw the emergence of more radical and militant forms of left-wing and civil rights activism. Drawing upon the writing of Spinoza, in particular the relation between the two notions of substantiaand potentia, and some of the ideas around virtuality and actualization put forth by Deleuze and Guattari, the paper attempts to link Coltrane’s music to this socio-political terrain not by means of interpretation or historical determination, but by delineating the site of an expanded aesthetics, operating through the virtual, throughthe actualization of virtual potentials, which is inexorably, albeit at times not obviously, linked also to a radical ethical and political program.