John Coltrane - A Love Supreme: The Complete Masters

Pitchfork 100

John Coltrane was a late bloomer. Born in 1926, the same year as Miles Davis, he spent his twenties in and out of small-time bands, a promising journeyman moving between playing jazz and the more bar-friendly music that was starting to be called R&B. During these early years he had problems with narcotics and alcohol, alternating stretches of heroin use with periods of binge drinking. Charlie Parker—every sax player's hero when Coltrane was coming up in the 1940s and '50s—had given the junkie life a romantic aura for some naive souls, connecting drug use with creativity. But the underachieving Coltrane was a run-of-the-mill addict, someone broke and in ill health whose habit clearly kept him stuck in place. He was fired from Miles Davis' band in 1957 for showing up on the bandstand dressed in shabby clothes and visibly drunk—by some accounts he took a punch from the trumpeter before being given his walking papers. And if Coltrane had spiraled and his career had ended there, he'd be remembered now as a musician who flamed out just as he was discovering his voice.

But that's not what happened. Everything changed for Coltrane in 1957 when, as he wrote in the liner notes to his defining album, A Love Supreme, he "experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life." During that year, Coltrane stopped drinking and kicked heroin, and from that point forward, his career would unfold with an almost frightening amount of focus and intensity. These final 10 years are when Coltrane made his mark on the world of jazz as a leader, and he was then seemingly always on the move, in transition, each moment glimpsed as a blur on a continuum rather than a fixed point in space. He wasn't just covering ground, he was accelerating, and every phase of his later career has the attendant feeling of stomach-dropping free-fall, of being pushed forcefully into new places.

A Love Supreme, recorded with what was later called his classic quartet, is Coltrane's musical expression of his 1957 epiphany. It's the sound of a man laying his soul bare. Structured as a suite and delivered in praise of God, everything about the record is designed for maximum emotional impact, from Elvin Jones' opening gong crash to the soft rain of McCoy Tyner's piano clusters to Coltrane's stately fanfare to Jimmy Garrison's iconic four-note bassline to the spoken chant by Coltrane—"a-LOVE-su-PREME, a-LOVE-su-PREME"—that carries out the opening movement, "Acknowledgement". By the time the record gets to the closing "Psalm", which finds Coltrane interpreting on his saxophone the syllables of a poem he'd written to the Creator, A Love Supreme has wrung its concept dry, extracting every drop of feeling from Coltrane's initial vision. It's as complete a statement as exists in recorded jazz. Hearing it now as part of this exhaustive 3xCD set, which gathers every scrap of material recorded during the sessions as well as a live performance of the suite from later the same year, you get a clearer sense than ever before of the different forms A Love Supreme might have taken, and how Coltrane's desire to communicate something specific and profound led to its final shape.

A Love Supreme is also one of the most popular albums in the last 60 years of jazz, selling the kind of numbers usually reserved for pop (it quickly sold more than 100,000 copies, and has almost certainly sold more than a million since). If Miles Davis' Kind of Blue is the most frequently bought first jazz album for those curious about the genre, A Love Supreme is easily number two. But though they were released just seven years apart, there's a world of difference between the two records, and the success of A Love Supreme is trickier to explain. For all its structural daring, Kind of Blue also functions as an ambient record, with slower tempos and late-night ambiance. A Love Supreme is harder to get a handle on. If you can think of Coltrane's work on a continuum, from the gorgeous melodicism of "My Favorite Things" or Ballads or his album with Duke Ellington on one end and the brutal noise assault of the 1966 concerts collected on Concert in Japan on the other, A Love Supreme sits perfectly at the fulcrum, challenging enough to continually reveal new aspects but accessible enough to inspire newcomers.

Coltrane may have structured the record for just this effect. He had already been further "out" than the music heard on A Love Supreme, including some of the knotty extended jams like "Chasin' the Trane" recorded at his 1961 sessions at the Village Vanguard. He was fascinated with the innovations of Ornette Coleman from the minute he heard them in the late '50s, and though he never completely abandoned chord changes, he regularly flirted with atonality, improvising outside of a fixed key. With A Love Supreme, it was almost as though Coltrane knew he had to dial things back a little in order to share his message of spiritual rebirth with a wider audience. Though conventionally beautiful in many ways, A Love Supreme is, for many, the exact point beyond which jazz becomes too experimental.

It's possible to hear on this set how the album might have gone even further. At a time when a single track might have a dozen collaborators working on it over the course of weeks, it's a little mind-boggling to consider that the music on A Love Supreme was recorded on a single day, December 9, 1964. This wasn't uncommon for jazz records of the time. But though they had the music in the can from that first day, Coltrane wanted to try something else. So on December 10, he called the young tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp, and a second bassist, Art Davis to play with his quartet. The six musicians then ran through two versions of A Love Supreme's opening "Acknowledgment", so that Coltrane could explore what the music might sound like with another horn and additional low-end rhythm. Shepp was an up-and-comer deeply influenced by Coltrane; the two takes of "Acknowledgment" featuring Shepp find him serving as a kind of textural counterpoint, his more brittle and biting tone commenting on the melody from an oblique angle and hinting at possibilities existing outside of the version recorded the day before. You sense a more abrasive road not taken, one that almost certainly would have found a smaller audience.

We hear a different perspective on the fantastic live version of the suite recorded in France five months after the album's release. Five months in '60s Coltrane time was like a decade in the career of other jazz musicians, and he was already imbuing the A Love Supreme material with an extra intensity. Tyner's clanging chords on "Resolution" have a harsher edge, and Coltrane's attendant soloing is much rougher and more pointed, his notes seeming to attack the structure of the composition from several directions rather than floating along above it. This is the hard-blowing sound that Coltrane would show on Meditations, another spiritually focused album-length suite recorded later in 1965 that never had a chance at A Love Supreme's level of mainstream acceptance.

In the same year, Coltrane would also record Om and Ascension, two harsh and challenging pieces of music that strain against the boundaries of what most people would even consider music. Given what surrounds it, and how sweet and gentle it so often is, A Love Supreme was an expression of a very specific time and place, a conscious attempt by Coltrane to communicate something to his audience that was broad enough to be understood but rich and complex enough to honor both where he was as a musician and the depth of the subject matter. A Love Supreme sounds like nothing else in John Coltrane's discography, and indeed like little else in recorded jazz, sitting at the nexus of so many competing musical ideas.

The final piece of the A Love Supreme equation concerns the civil rights movement and black liberation, and how those swirling ideas were inextricably tangled up with the jazz avant-garde. Coltrane was never overtly political, but he did allow his thoughts and feelings to bleed into his music. Coltrane met Malcolm X, wrote a piece for Martin Luther King Jr., and his 1963 dirge "Alabama", a piece with a close tonal connection to A Love Supreme's "Psalm", was written to commemorate the four girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing that year. As the '60s wore on, politically conscious "fire jazz" grew in currency, much of it directly inspired by Coltrane's music, but during his life he never quite felt the need to connect his music to specific social currents, even as others drew inspiration from it in that context. Coltrane was seeking something broader, communing with God as he understood it.

For Coltrane, that spiritual journey led him to A Love Supreme, which became the base he'd explore from during his short time left on Earth. Coltrane occupies a unique position in jazz history. He was famous, especially in the jazz world, but he wasn't really a personality. He was not inclined toward interviews and he wasn't very good at them, preferring to let the music speak for itself. He didn't have the mystery of a Thelonious Monk, the tragic genius of a Charlie Parker, the cool comfort with celebrity or flamboyance of a Miles Davis, the combative verbal dexterity of Charles Mingus, the theoretical underpinnings of Ornette Coleman, the comfort with the mainstream of Louis Armstrong, or the symbolic stature of Duke Ellington. He led a quiet life, putting everything into his music.

His chaotic years mostly came when he was an unknown; by the time he was a major jazz figure, almost his entire life was music. If he wasn't on stage or in a recording studio, he was practicing or studying records. Seemingly every other story of an encounter with Coltrane in the 1960s involved him in a room with a saxophone in his hand, playing scales. In his mind, God had saved him, and he was going to give back. A Love Supreme was his expression of gratitude, a hopeful prayer for a better world.