What goes on in your head when you are improvising or creating new music? It looks something remarkably like this.
Coltrane's amazing not only for building and rebuilding these complex cerebral musical structures, but for navigating within them at an inhuman pace.
Even his simplest themes go through ten or twenty progressions in the span of seconds, and continue to deconstruct themselves as they go along.
Forty years later, and he's still ten steps ahead.