Fresh Air - Inside the 'modern slavery' where cyber scammers are victims themselves

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

WIRED’s Andy Greenberg explains how a cybercrime operation in Southeast Asia trapped computer engineers into defrauding victims of billions of dollars. Plus he discusses the scam involving Fresh Air.Also, jazz historian Kevin Whitehead reflects on John Coltrane for the centennial of his birth. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter Follow us on Instagram Subscribe to our YouTube channel Check out the Fresh Air ArchivesSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. Have you ever been targeted by a cyber scam? Maybe through an email or text message that sounds convincing and tries to get you to send money or your bank information. There are so many cyber scams out there now. As you'll hear, our show has been fraudulently represented in one of those. AI is making these scams easier to pull off, making fraudulent schemes even more lucrative. The romance scam is the most lucrative. That's what you're making these scams easier to pull off, making fraudulent schemes even more lucrative. The romance scam is the most lucrative. That's when someone reaches out to you via text or online, who you've never been in person, and eventually you fall in love.

The object of that affection professes to love you and eventually lures you into what they say as a great investment opportunity. You send the money and then more money. Soon all your money's gone, and you never hear from that person again. Some major crime organizations behind scams like this are based in Laos and Cambodia. My guest, Andy Greenberg, wrote about one such organization for Wired magazine, where he's a senior writer. That story involves human trafficking. Greenberg was contacted by a young computer engineer using the pseudonym Red Bull, who was tricked into moving from India to Laos

with the promise of a good IT job. When he got to the compound where his job was supposed to be, his passport was confiscated. He was turned into an indebted. indentured servant and forced to engage victims in cyber romance scams. Living conditions were awful, so was the work. Red Bull managed to leak over three months of internal videos from inside the crime operation, including WhatsApp group chats, revealing details of how this operation actually functioned. This investigation will be included in Greenberg's forthcoming book, The Grayscale, true stories of hackers, outlaws, and vigilantes from the online underground. He's also the author of books about the crime lords of cryptocurrency and about Russian hackers.

Andy Greenberg, welcome back to Fresh Air. Very glad to be here. Thank you, Terry. So I want to start with a scam that has fraudulently used Fresh Air, and you've been targeted by a similar scam. We've heard from authors who have gotten invitations. allegedly from our show in my name, in our co-host Tanya's name, or someone else on the show, one of our producers, saying, you know, we love your work and that therefore the writer is invited to be a guest on fresh air. And the reason why the authors contacted us is that something seems suspicious about the email. And in fact, if the writer contacted the person who sent the email, they would be told, you have to pay, and it's typically about $250 or $350,000, in order to defray the costs of the interview and help support the show.

So they're trying to get money from authors. So this is horrible, because some people actually pay and are defrauded of money. Other people are just let down because they think they're going to be on a national show and they're not. And also, it sullies our name. We would never dream of asking a guest to pay to be on our show. Other NPR shows, other podcasts have been also fraudulently represented in this scam. And tell what your similar scam is. Yes, I've gotten these emails.

I'm an author. So I have gotten emails from, you know, fake agents. from fake publishers. Just yesterday, I got an email from someone describing themselves as an editor at Penguin Random House, praising my last book and wanting to work with me on another project. I don't think that this scammer realized that my last book was published with Penguin Random House, so it was kind of a giveaway. But it was very flattering.

And, you know, I'm sure if I pursued that conversation, it would have led eventually to them demanding a payment before we could go any further, just as the scammers impersonating fresh air are asking for these fake so-called production fees. And yes, this is incredibly common to the degree that I think, like most authors I know, have faced something like it. So I know you haven't written about this.

You haven't done an investigation into it. Are there any insights that you have into how this works or who's behind it? Well, first, I think to talk about why this is happening, it just seems very clear, just almost intuitively, that this is because of AI, Because of large language models, AI chatbots. Just as a kind of experiment, a very basic experiment,

I just asked ChatTPT to generate an email from Terry Gross to me, Andy Greenberg, inviting me onto the show and then, you know, as a kind of afterthought, you know, asking for a production fee of $250. And it happily did that without hesitation. As a follow-up, I said, you know, Greenberg is now resisting paying. Can you persuade him? And it happily, you know, created a follow-up email, sort of arguing that I needed to pay.

And this is just so easy, and it's not even the most advanced kind of scam that AI is capable of today. But to answer your question, too, of who is behind this? You know, I don't know exactly who is impersonating fresh hair, of course. But I did, ahead of this interview, reach out to one of my favorite cybercrime researchers, Gary Warner, one of the founders of a security company called Dark Tower. And he actually has, on behalf of authors, investigated this and found that those phone numbers had, you know, the plus 2, three, four country code prefix. That's Nigeria's country code. He even, in some cases, identified the scammers by name, and they were Nigerian

nationals. So it seems likely that this is kind of the latest flavor of email scam being sent by a kind of older, pretty well-known cabal of, you know, cyber criminal organizations, sometimes known as the Yahoo Boys based in Nigeria, and who have been sending, I mean, we've all heard of the Nigerian prints, you know, I've been sending these email scams. for many years, for decades, in fact. But this is somehow the latest version of it, and it is absolutely being supercharged by AI, the ability to literally instantly create a personalized

and polished, perfect English, zero grammatical errors, email to an author that flatters them specifically, and to do this for hundreds or thousands of targets simultaneously. So let's move on to your big story, because that's a huge story. So you broke a story about human trafficking where there are victims on both sides of the scam. The person making the ask, who's allegedly falling in love with you and then offers you the opportunity for this great investment, they're basically enslaved. And so just like flesh out that scam a little bit before we talk about how it's done. Sure.

So we were just talking a minute ago about, you know, these kinds of Nigerian scammers. who are, you know, voluntarily, they are themselves carrying out this scam and profiting from it. But there's another much more profitable, more contemporary form of actually text message-based scam, known as pig-butchering that is now the most profitable cybercrime in history that is stealing tens of billions of dollars a year from victims. And as you alluded to, is being run out of these scam compounds, mostly across Southeast Asia, where hundreds of thousands of, of another kind of victim

are being enslaved and forced to carry out these scams. So what does pig butchering mean? Well, pig butchering is really the term used by the scammers, and it's this notion that the pig, the victim, is being fattened for slaughter. And they're fattened through a romance scam,

one that sometimes develops over weeks or months or even more than a year as the scammer builds trust with the victim. In fact, sometimes the victim becomes completely emotionally dependent on the scammer. And only at the end of this very, very long, con does the scammer who has been impersonating usually a wealthy, single, attractive woman, you know, bring up this subject of like, well, if you want our relationship to continue, it would be good if you were also wealthy. And I can introduce you, in fact, to an investment firm, an investment platform where just by sending, you know, a few thousand, a few tens of thousands, a few hundred thousand dollars, you can become rich like me.

This is a sure bet, and I can help you do it. Okay, so how are people targeted who would have the money to do something like this? Well, in fact, all of us probably are targeted all the time. I mean, I get these text messages constantly that usually begin something like, you didn't wait for me at the restaurants, or were you the one that I saw on the street today? Just completely random, cold, you know, reachouts. Oh, I guess those too, but I just automatically delete them. Well, if you were a lonely, sometimes elderly man, very often with a lot of retirement savings, you might not.

And you know, you might respond and say, I think you have the wrong person. They find an excuse to begin the conversation. They send a photo of themselves. It's a beautiful woman. They're very, very interested in you personally. And before you know it, you've struck up a friendship and then a kind of romance, flirtation that blossoms into, you know, something just unbelievably rewarding this love affair with a rich person who seems like they're just changing your whole life. And these are not like very often targeted scams.

They're very, very widely cast nets. And sometimes the people that they ensnare are not wealthy. And the scam is only for a few thousand dollars. But sometimes they succeed at finding someone who does have a kind of nest egg that they're eventually tricked into sending over entirely into what they think is this trading platform. Usually they're tricked into converting it into a cryptocurrency. Very often this stable coin, this like cryptocurrency called tether that does not change in value but can be sent across borders very easily.

They think that they're watching their money double and triple on this investment platform. And then eventually they try to take their money out. Sometimes the scammer says, well, to take your money out, you have to send in $10,000 more or $100,000 more. And only after they've sent everything they have do they realize that it was all a lie and that their life is ruined, that this relationship was an illusion and that they're not just broke but in debt. So the people who are communicating with the victims are victims themselves. Tell us the story of how the person who leaked all this information to you became a victim and was forced to tell us. target people and ask them to invest? Well, there's been a lot of focus on, yes, the victims of these scams.

But last summer, I got an email from the encrypted email service proton mail, no subject line, but it said, I am a computer engineer. I am trapped in a scam compound in the Golden Triangle region of Laos. I am unable to get out of here, and I'm still forced to work here, but I want to leak to you, Andy, everything I can. can to expose this place and the crime that is being committed here. And so, you know, I respond to this. I was, of course, wasn't sure if this was real or a scam itself, but I switched over with this source to the encrypted messaging app signal with disappearing messages for his safety and began this conversation that would go on for months. In fact, you know, I'm still

in touch with this person. And he would eventually not only leak all of these secrets to me, as promised. And by the way, he asked me to call him in this first conversation. He asked me to call him Red Bull. He told me his story of how he was a computer engineer who had gotten a diploma from the university in India. He had been offered a job as an IT manager, he thought, in Southeast Asia, but he was told he had to fly to Thailand and then cross the border into the Golden Triangle region of Laos, this kind of special economic zone that is largely controlled by Chinese business interests and I would later learn, you know, largely controlled by Chinese criminal organizations, it turns out. So once he got to the compound where he was basically enslaved, they not only

confiscated his passport, they told him the only way you can get it back is to buy it back and, you know, you will be paid for doing this work. What was the problem with that logic? It's interesting because some of these human trafficking-driven scam compounds are actually, you know, prisons where people are shackled and beaten. But this, as you're getting at, was more of a debt bondage situation. He was told that he owed thousands of dollars to his captors. That's, you know, the cost of getting him there, that his room and board meant that he was in debt to them. And he could only pay that back by scamming victims and earning a commission, which he could eventually use. to pay off his contract, in quotes,

because all of this was an illusion. There was this very deceptive kind of model where the bosses of this compound would tell them that you can get rich here. You can go home with money to the village that you came from, but only if you're motivated enough to carry out really big scams, and you'll be paid a tiny percentage of that

and get wealthy yourself. But in the meantime, he and all of his coworkers who work, enslaved in this building, we're actually just fined constantly for not meeting their quotas of outreach, for not maintaining their fake profiles online sufficiently, for not arriving to work exactly on time. Just truly tragic modern slavery situations, but dressed up as a kind of corporate sales floor where, you know, their bosses sent them these inspirational messages every day saying, reach out to that next customer like you're going to change their life.

Act like you have something of value because you do. We're on a mission here to change lives. Strange Orwellian kind of rhetoric like this when in fact they were all trapped there doing this against their will and carrying out something that was incredibly damaging and criminal. How is AI used in writing the scenarios and coming up with dialogue in creating like fraudulent personas? Well, Red Bull told me that he used chatyp-t and the Chinese AI chatbot deep seek

and that everyone in the compound was trained to do this. And this was just kind of a basic way that they would come up with new topics of conversation and polish their language, sort of never run out of these inviting turns of phrase and even bits of like inspirational poetry and things and kind of like just the perfect phrase to say good night to someone in a way that would resonate and leave them with this good feeling. And so these AI chat pots were just kind of their constant companion

and very helpful for them in terms of their language. But just as importantly, was that they would use video deepfakes as well. This was rare. They were told by their bosses to try to talk the victim. him out of doing a video call. Of course, the person on the other end is always trying to do a video call to see the person that they're in love with, but they were told, like, come up with excuses,

say you don't, you know, you can't do it during your workday, you're too tired, or whatever, something to just delay until once in a while, they could make use of a model who basically worked throughout the day in this one room of the compounds, and was their video deep fake model? they would then have a video chat with this model, but use deep fake software to alter their appearance to match whatever photo they had initially sent to the victim. So that it truly looks to the victim like they're speaking to exactly the person they've seen a photo of and the illusion is complete. Now, you know, video deep fake software can be very sophisticated, like particularly this one piece of Chinese software called Hao Tian that I've seen demonstrations of. But it's not perfect. And I think that what matters here is that the victim, by the time that the video call happened, just wanted to believe that it was real. And so they overlooked the flaws. They see them, maybe just a glitch in the internet or something. And they take the bait. So scams like this cast a really wide net. And the bigger than net, the more the likelihood that someone will bite, right? So I assume that the text phone numbers are just.

generated the same way that all of those robocalls are that we get every single day? That's right. You know, we all get these text messages, but very often the scammers in these compounds, Red Bull 2, was trained to look through Facebook profiles and send Facebook Messenger messages to people who looked like they would be vulnerable as well, to older men, for instance, to wealthy men. And so this was not entirely just a randomized, you know, spray and prey approach to scamming, although, you know, we see that happening all the time, too. There was also sometimes a certain amount of targeting, and the bosses would say things to Red Bull and his forced labor co-workers, like, you know, don't just focus on the big cities in the U.S., like Chicago and New York.

There are wealthy people, you may not understand this, but there are wealthy people in places like, you know, in the South and in the Midwest. So make sure to target them as well. So, no, it's not entirely random. Sometimes it is targeted to a certain degree, but it's still done at a mass scale. And most of what Red Bull did all day, every day, was just these kinds of attempts at reach out. So what do you expect AI might contribute to future scams? Well, for now, AI is this kind of tool that helps human scammers. But I think the next step, and we're already starting to see this, is fully autonomous AI scamming. And in fact, just last week, Anthropic, the AI company, revealed this case study in a report.

where 20 dating apps were created by some Chinese organization that were fully populated with AIs that were just carrying out essentially romance scams where the victim just had to keep paying to continue the conversation. And on this dating app, most of the people in quotes that the victims were talking to were actually fully autonomous AI. And they were entirely deceived and paying into this app to continue the conversation with someone who they thought was real and interested in them, but was actually just a large language model. That does seem to be the future. And I've also recently covered a study that actually showed that for much of the scam process,

AI is actually better than a human being, more responsive, more engaged and attentive than a human being at creating this relationship, which is the vast majority of what these scams are trying to do before they enter this end game where they ask for a payment. My guest is Andy Greenberg, a senior writer for Wired Magazine. We're talking about his investigation into a cyber crime group in Laos behind lucrative romance scams. We'll be right back. I'm Terry Gross, and this is fresh air. This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Andy Greenberg, a senior writer for Wired Magazine.

He covers hacking, cybersecurity, and surveillance. We're talking about cyber scams. When we left off, he was telling us that one of the most lucrative scams, the romance scam, is often carried out by people who are being held against their will by crime organizations in Southeast Asia. Greenberg was contacted by a young computer engineer using the pseudonym Red Bull, who was tricked into moving from India to Laos with the promise of a good IT job. When he got there, his passport was confiscated. He was told the only way to get free was to earn commissions from the money he scanned.

from victims. So what would you estimate as the percentage of people who actually fall for the scam and give away thousands, tens of thousands, or their life savings of money? This entire group of around, I believe, 30 scammers only earned about $2.2 million over the three-month period that Red Bull recorded and leaked to us. So this is a numbers game, though. So, you know, this is one small group within one compound, and there are dozens of these compounds just, you know, in Laos, then many, many more in Cambodia and Myanmar. So you can see how, you know, this adds up to tens of billions of dollars a year. So your source was discovered, not for talking to you, but for trying to escape. So would you describe the punishment he was subjected to?

So after about a month of Red Bull leaking materials to me, we at Wired said, you know, this is very risky. In fact, it felt like security was increasing in the compound. Red Bull told me that he had seen new surveillance cameras installed like in his office, one of which was above his desk. So we at Wired said, we need to call this quits. Our reporting is ended for now. And we'll talk when you get out of the compound. And we won't run the story, of course, until then either.

So Red Bull at that point surprised me by saying, well, I need to leave now then. I can't live here. He was a very ineffective scammer, among other things. So he was completely broke and subsisting only on the food given to them in the compound cafeteria, which was basically just rice and these vegetables

that he said tasted of strange chemicals, and he felt like he was sick all the time and hated what he was doing and told me that he was going to try to escape. And the way that he was going to try to escape. And the way that he tried to do that was by forging a document from the Indian police, from his hometown, a fake Indian police letter, saying that he was under investigation. And he wanted to show this to his bosses and say, I need to go home to deal with this or you'll get in trouble too. I'll come back as soon as I've convinced the police that everything is okay.

I tried to talk him out of this, but he went forward with this plan and the forgery was detected immediately. and his bosses put him in a room and beat him and kicked him and starved him and interrogated him and at one point even drugged him, gave him this white powder in a cup of water and told him to drink it and I think it must have been a stimulant of some kind and made him feel more talkative but actually made his skin break out in hives. I think they wanted to get the truth out of him of what his real intentions were when in fact all he wanted to do was go home. They did not ever learn that he was speaking to me.

And if they had, I'm quite sure that he would have been killed. How did he finally get out? It happened that during this period when Red Bull was being treated almost like a stray dog in this compound, just horribly abused, he learned that the compound had to relocate, that the bosses, it seemed, had gotten a tip about an impending police raid by the Laotian Golden Triangle Police. It would turn out that this was kind of a performative raid that didn't actually shut anything down, but the bosses didn't seem to know that. So they did have to move. Initially, they moved the office into their dormitory,

and everyone had to just try to work out of the very overcrowded dorms. And so this actually allowed Red Bull amazingly. He took this opportunity to get even more secrets from his work phone, sending them to his personal phone. And he also saw an opportunity to say to his bosses, you know, I'm clearly just dead weight to you. During this time when you're already having a lot of trouble carrying out your work, just let me go.

And I'll just get out of your hair if you can just release me. And surprisingly, to me, anyway, they agreed and they essentially kicked him out. So in the initial contact with you, he used a pseudonym, Red Bull, but he eventually revealed his real name, which is? Mohamed Muzahir. And in fact, I visited Muhammad in India after his return from the compound before. we published our article and interviewed him there and talked with him at length about whether he wanted to reveal this name publicly. And he very clearly decided that he did, that he wanted to show his face. He actually appeared in a video we made as well.

And that's because he wants to inspire people to fight these criminal organizations to stand up for themselves as he did. And he wants to do that with his own name and face. That was his choice. It, of course, came with risks that haunt me even now. But, you know, it was, I think, a very brave thing to do. And he is, in fact, a remarkable person, one of the most incredible sources I've ever had the opportunity to work with. Well, let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Andy Greenberg, a senior writer for Wired Magazine.

The article that he wrote about the scam we've been discussing is titled, He leaked the secrets of a Southeast Asia scam compound. Then he had to get out alive. We'll be right back after a short break. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. Let's get back to my interview with Andy Greenberg, a senior writer for Wired Magazine. He covers hacking, cybersecurity, and surveillance.

So I want to talk with you about cybersecurity and the ability of countries to hack into our infrastructure, when the U.S. started bombing Iran and it was clear we're at war. One of my first thoughts was there goes our water, there goes our electric grid, because we know those are hackable. We know that Iran has already done some hacking. We know that their allies like North Korea, Russia, they have the capacity to hack us. And you wrote an incredible story. story about a cyber war game involving China. So let me just ask you first.

What do you think Iran's capabilities of hacking our infrastructure are right now? And have they already made inroads into that? So in May of this year, the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, the kind of federal cyber defense agency warned that Iranian hackers in the midst of this war begun by the U.S. we're retaliating by targeting American critical infrastructure. And specifically these industrial control systems, which is a kind of technology that bridges the gap between kind of like digital computers and physical equipment,

including in places like power grids and manufacturing and water utilities as well. And then in August, we began to see that a handful of water utilities in Minnesota were being attacked. And it wasn't clear who was behind it. But then the attacks began to spread, eventually to 11 other states. The New York Times was the first to report that, yes, indeed, like it was Iranian hackers who officials suspected were carrying this out.

We had wired, obtained a water utility industry memo that linked those attacks to the earlier warning from the cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, confirming that, yes, this was Iran carrying out this unprecedented wave of cyber attacks against American water utilities. I mean, we've never seen anything quite like this, and it has now hit more than a hundred U.S. water utilities. In fact, the Center for Strategic and International Studies did an analysis of all of these cyber attacks on U.S. water and found that only one utility in Georgia had really been affected to what it described as a medium degree, and that meant that it had lost water pressure, and it had to tell its customers that they needed to boil their

water because there was a risk of contamination. In other cases, most of these utilities actually just lost the ability to send commands to their equipment. They lost control temporarily. They were shut out. There was an outage. They recovered from it without any real risk to human beings. So in August, you wrote a very alarming story about how China has already positioned itself inside American infrastructure.

What do we know about what China has already done? Well, to back up a bit. So in 2023, Microsoft and a group of U.S. federal agencies, including the National Security Agency, revealed that this Chinese hacker group called Volt Typhoon had broken into electric grade and telecommunications computer networks, mostly around military facilities in the continental U.S. and Guam. Now, this was very alarming because it seemed like, according to these government agencies and Microsoft, these Chinese hackers were prepositioning, as they put it, planting malicious code,

malware that they could use at a time of their choosing to disrupt the electricity to military bases. And, you know, the theory that developed was that perhaps they were preparing for something like the Chinese invasion of Taiwan and wanted to be able to delay or disrupt a U.S. response to that invasion. And in fact, over the next year, it started to become clear that Voltaifoon, this group of Chinese hackers, had actually broken into tons of civilian information as well. I spoke to the chief security officer of a utility in Littleton, Massachusetts, this town of like 10,000 people. And he had no idea why these Chinese military hackers would want to gain the ability to disrupt electric and water flow to his town. But the theory within the cybersecurity community has now adapted to become that China is trying to gain the ability to distract and disrupt, not just the U.S. military, but U.S. society as a whole. That this could be a kind of preparation for a kind of catastrophic. hacking of civilian infrastructure in the U.S. that would cause societal chaos, as many government officials and cyber security experts have described it to me. So the people invited to participate in this

war game were leaders of insurance companies, which struck you as a kind of strange group to be invited and also made you think that this might be pretty boring, which it was not. But there was also a good reason for inviting insurance companies, which I'd like you to briefly explain. Well, it turns out very often the victim of a cyber attack, their first call is to their insurance company, which then is, you know, through that cyber insurance that they pay for, that unlocks the money that they then use to hire defenders and lawyers and incident responders. And so actually cyber insurance firms are incredibly important in the response to these kinds of attacks. So the war game raised the question of who do you tell? Like, if you're an insurance company

and you have found out that 5,000 water systems have been shut down. Who do you tell? And how does that reflect your values? Well, I would say the real crux of this whole game was when the role players, these insurance executives, were asked, where are you going to send your money first? Who do you prioritize? Like, do you want to first remediate, you know, hospital towns to try to save human lives? Do you focus on your biggest customers because you have contracts with them and you're just legally obliged and through your business model obliged to help them first?

In this game, actually, military officials were telling the insurance executives, you actually have to help military bases first for our national security interests. To the credit of everyone in the room, all of these executives did say, at least initially, that they would focus on saving human lives. But then one guy, one executive did raise his hand and kind of say, I don't know if that's realistic. Like we do have legal obligations to our customers, and I don't know if we can ignore the demands of the government and the military as they talk about our national strategic interest. That meant perhaps sacrificing lives, American lives, to fulfill those other priorities.

So it was a very sobering moment in this room. It seems to me and to so many people that were at a very frightening point in the development of AI and in hacking. where we're feeling increasingly vulnerable as individuals and as a country. What are you feeling now? I think that, you know, having covered the cyber war in Ukraine, having written a book about catastrophic cyber attacks carried out by a Russian hacker group called Sandworm, I've just learned to live with this fear of cyber war, among the many other catastrophes looming over American society.

And it was only in a war game like the one that I attended with these insurance executives, that it suddenly becomes real. And it is absolutely chilling to imagine the cascading effects of this and the ways that it would have very real victims, and that it's something that we are simply not prepared for. Andy Greenberg, thank you so much. Thank you, Terry. I appreciate the conversation.

Andy Greenberg is a senior writer for Wired Magazine, an author of the forthcoming book, The Gray Scale, True Stories of Hackers, Outlaws, and Vigilantees from the Online Underground. After we take a short break, Kevin Whitehead, our jazz historian, celebrates the centennial of John Coltrane's birth. This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. Tomorrow marks the 100th anniversary of John Coltrane's birth.

He was one of the great jazz musicians of all time. Coltrane, the composer and bandleader, has been hugely influential right down to the revival of spiritual jazz in recent years. Jazz historian Kevin Whitehead says John Coltrane's greatest influence is as a virtuoso saxophonist whose every move has been transcribed, copied, and analyzed. For today's tribute, Kevin zeroes in on Coltrane, the saxophone improviser. John Coltrane, 196. on his blues Mr. Day. It's filled with typical Coltrane gestures,

the optimistic upward-leaping phrases, the built-in repetitions, the way he balances long notes and fast phrases. Coltrane was one of jazz's all-time great practicers, which gave him a hard, majestic tone, consistent all over the tenor saxophones range, and clean articulation at supersonic speed. He was a late bloomer,

apprenticing in his 20s with Dizzy Gillespie and Master's saxophone. technician Earl Bostic. We hear early glimmerings of Coltrane's mature tenor in 1954 when he backed his early sax idol Johnny Hodges, who taught him by example the value of a dramatic entrance. Here's Coltrane the side man on Through for the Night. In 1955, John Coltrane got his big break when Miles Davis hired him. The saxophone has played a lot of notes while trumpeter Miles played famously few, and they tugged the music in opposite directions. Coltrane's next boss, pianist Thelonious Monk, played even fewer notes than Miles,

but in this case, opposites attract. Monk and Coltrane sound like they approach the same musical problems from opposite directions. This is Monk's 1957, Trinkle Tinkle. Monk also indulged Coltrane's penchant for long solos, which Miles discouraged. In this period, Coltrane would punctuate his improvisations with rapid up-and-down runs based on various scales. Critic Ira Gittler called those outbursts, Sheets of Sound, one of the enduring jazz metaphors. In the late 50s, Coltrane practiced out of exercise books for the harp, an instrument where fast scalar runs are easy. Keep that in

mind as John Coltrane plays, Come Rain or Come Shine. Again, you hear him mix long tones and very short ones. Now Coltrane became even more preoccupied with fast-moving chords. On his famous test piece, giant steps, the chords change on every beat while bouncing around three distantly related keys. Coltrane had practiced it thoroughly, but not with his band. In the studio, the great pianist Tommy Flanagan could barely keep up. Miles Davis then advised Coltrane, when you squeeze in a whole bunch of chords like that, don't make the rhythm section track your every move. Keep their part simpler. That was good advice. Coltrane had already been thinking about Indie in classical music with fast-scale-oriented improvisations over slowly undulating backdrops.

In the early 1960s, Coltrane formed a new quartet featuring McCoy Tyner's billowing piano and drummer Elvin Jones's wide, shambling beat. He took up the small, straight soprano saxophone whose higher range and piercing tone helped him rise above the fray. And he underwent a spiritual awakening. You can hear all of that on Coltrane's tune Spiritual, based on a truce traditional melody. On soprano, he can sound both like he's hollering the blues and issuing a call to prayer. Spiritual, recorded at the Village Vanguard in 1961, looks ahead to Coltrane's meditative sweets like a love supreme. Playing high notes on soprano made Coltrane rethink the tenor's upward limits. On one down, one up from 1965, he volleys high and low phrases back and forth

in dialogue with himself, sounding less like a singer than an impassioned preacher. In John Coltrane's ecstatic final two years, he took LSD and took inspiration from his younger colleague Albert Eiler's heavier tone and vibrato. He formed a new quartet with his wife Alice Coltrane on piano. Live and on record, he surrounded them with extra players of uneven quality. But five months before his death from liver cancer in 1967, he recorded an ear-grabbing album of duets with drummer Rashida Lee called Interstellar Space. Coltrane cast down

his thunderbolts faster than ever. Since John Coltrane's death at 40, folks have speculated whereas music might have gone next. He had discussed various possibilities with his wife, and the wildly orchestrated records Alice Coltrane made a few years later may offer some clues.

For me, it's enough to marvel at how steadily and quickly Coltrane advanced, constantly refining his saxophone style, and technique alongside his composing and bandleading and spiritual life and advocacy for younger colleagues. Amazing

to me that he made all the varied records under his own name in just ten years. He was a comet who lit up the sky. Jazzister and Kevin Whitehead is the author of New Dutch Swing, Why Jazz, and Play the Way You Feel. Tomorrow marks the 100th anniversary

of John Coltrane's birth. Tomorrow on Fresh share, cybersecurity and AI safety concerns will likely be addressed at this week's meeting between President Trump and China's President Xi in Washington, D.C. We'll talk with Rush Doshi. He helped arrange summits between President Biden and Xi and just co-authored a report on China's cyber threat to America's critical networks. I hope you'll join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham.

Our engineer today is Adam Stanishefsky. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne Reboldinato, Lauren Crenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yucundi, Anna Baumann and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nespera. Roberta Shorok directs the show. Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross. Thank you.