John Coltrane's Love Is Still Supreme at Age 60
Today we're celebrating a very special album
1.
John Coltrane was a busy man in 1964.
He was a jazz star operating at a frantic pace. But the public had no idea how frantic.
“We couldn’t possibly put out all the records we were making,” producer Bob Thiele later boasted. “My contribution with Trane was to let him record whenever he wanted to.”
If the bosses had known what was going down, Thiele might have been fired for insubordination. But here the old rule prevails: Better to ask for forgiveness afterward, than permission beforehand.
Coltrane and Thiele eventually got full absolution. The suits in head office later rejoiced that our hard-working saxophonist had left behind so much unreleased material. As a result, the Impulse label is still putting out new tracks more than a half century after his death.
But when he wasn’t recording, Coltrane was gigging. And when he wasn’t gigging he was practicing.
If I can believe the anecdotes, he practiced more than anybody not suffering from an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Fans sometimes even heard Trane practicing backstage before a performance—as if his exhausting high energy gigs weren’t enough to sate his thirst for music.
A few weeks before Coltrane recorded A Love Supreme, a surprised worker at Boston’s Jazz Workshop nightclub got to hear the main melodic motif from the opening track—because the saxophonist was practicing it in the men’s room.
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It was as if he needed music the way an addict needs a fix. More, always more, never enough….
You might think Trane wouldn’t have time for anything else. Yet, despite these unceasing demands of his vocation, Coltrane was also a spiritual seeker. So much so, that I believe Coltrane would have embraced spirituality as his full-time mission if he had lived longer—much like his spouse Alice Coltrane who became a legit guru and opened an ashram after her husband’s death.
But there were still other dimensions to this visionary saxophonist.
Ivy League theoretical physicist Stephon Alexander will even tell you that John Coltrane has a lot in common with Albert Einstein. People still consult the saxophonist’s mathematical analysis—the so-called Coltrane Circle—as if it were a source of esoteric wisdom.
But in 1964, John Coltrane was also a father. John Coltrane Jr. was born on August 26, 1964—the first of his three children. Ravi Coltrane arrived in 1965, and Oran in 1967.
You wouldn’t think that Coltrane could find time for anything else at the close of the Summer of 1964. But he did.
At that juncture, he disappeared into an upstairs guest room at his home. And spent day after day with just a pen, some paper, and his horn.
He emerged five days later. “It was like Moses coming down from the mountain,” Alice later recalled. “It was so beautiful. He walked down and there was that joy, that peace in his face, tranquility.”
“This is the first time that I have received all of the music for what I want to record,” he told her.
Note that word: Received. He didn’t say composed. He didn’t say created. It was a gift from something larger than himself.
This was the music John Coltrane would perform in the studio three months later. It’s know today as A Love Supreme.
2.
Coltrane said that his music was his gift back to the Divine.
He made that clear in his liner notes, which opened with an invocation in capital letters: DEAR LISTENER: ALL PRAISE BE TO GOD TO WHOM ALL PRAISE IS DUE…
But if there were still any doubt, Coltrane also included a devotional poem—which began:
I will do all I can to be worthy of Thee O Lord.
It all has to do with it.
Thank you God.
Peace….
Needless to say, this was not typical for jazz liner notes in the mid-1960s. Or at any time, for that matter.
And it almost certainly would limit sales—or so the conventional wisdom went back then. A few months later, Capitol Records execs had a meltdown when Brian Wilson wanted to give the name “God Only Knows” to a song. But that was nothing compared to the full-blown ritual that Coltrane was now unleashing on the hip jazz audience.
I use the word ritual advisedly here. I’ve heard other people describe A Love Supreme as a suite, but they’re missing the whole point. I have no doubt that Coltrane intended this ritualistic effect.
He even starts chanting toward the end of the opening track.
This was first time Coltrane’s voice had ever been featured on a studio recording. And he didn’t sing a love song or belt out a blues. Instead he was chanting:
A love supreme
A love supreme
A love supreme
A love supreme
A love supreme…
He chants that phrase nineteen times in a row.
There are other anomalies on this track. Drummer Elvin Jones strikes a Chinese gong to open the proceedings—an unprecedented sound for the Coltrane combo in the studio. Or consider another strange fact: The main motif for the song is also the bassline, and it’s also the rhythmic pulse.
Coltrane was seeking higher unities, and finding a way to convey them in the fourfold incarnation of his quartet. Engineer Rudy Van Gelder also made a surprising choice, dimming the lights inside the studio in another emulation of esoteric ritual. The only things missing were incense and candles.
The second track is named “Resolution”—but it’s anything but that. We aren’t even halfway through A Love Supreme, and Coltrane is ramping up, not winding down. He’s blowing hard over changes. But he’s also pushing against them, developing phrases with a modal logic that finds exit paths through the border patrol of the chords.
He’s bellowing low and shrieking high. And if this were really a shamanic ritual, this would be the moment of ecstatic possession. The anthropological literature teaches me that his usually happens around ten minutes into the shaman’s music. If you put a stopwatch to A Love Supreme you will find the exact same pacing.
The third track is called “Pursuance,” and now the name hits the mark. Coltrane builds from a melodic fragment very similar to the motif from the opening track, but it’s now hotter, faster, looser. If we have now escaped everyday reality and have entered Wonderland, this is truly our Mad Tea Party.
By the way, that’s where Lewis Carroll muses on the hidden meaning of Time. And so do we, in the person of Elvin Jones, who kicks off the track with 90 seconds of percussion rapture, both brain-entraining and pulse-defying.
Now comes the real resolution in “Psalm”—the final track, and recorded in the same take as “Pursuance.” This is the calm after the storm, the moment of homecoming as we pull safely into port.
Coltrane, famous for his virtuosity and musical excess, deserves just as much praise for his simplicity and centeredness, and there’s no better example of that than here. If you wrote this music down on paper, a beginning sax student could play the phrases—but not the way Coltrane does.
They have the authority of a command, and commands are always delivered without any excess baggage, straight and to the point. Dr. Lewis Porter claims that Coltrane is reciting the words of a prayer on his horn. That’s not a sax technique taught at Berklee, or anywhere else for that matter, but it’s exactly the kind of thing I’d expect from this eternal seeker.
The entire album of A Love Supreme is just 33 minutes in duration. For Coltrane, that’s nothing—just a warm-up backstage. But nothing is missing here, and when that final minor drone fades away, there’s nothing left to hear. Unless you want to start all over again at the beginning—which many listeners did when they first heard this musical masterpiece some sixty years ago.
3.
A dozen years after the release of A Love Supreme, I was a teenager on scholarship studying in Italy.
I was far away from home, and I tried to keep tabs on the jazz world, but there was no Internet or email back then. International phone calls were possible, in theory—but I couldn’t afford to make them.
My only connection to the scene was via an Italian magazine called Musica Jazz, which I could purchase for 1,000 lire (roughly $1.25) at a newsstand near the Piazza del Duomo in Firenze.
I bought a copy every month.
The first thing I checked out was the bestseller list in the back of the magazine—this would tell me what the hot new jazz albums were. But I was dumbfounded, because the bestselling album every month was the same.
It was A Love Supreme.
Remember that I’m talking about the late 1970s. Not only was A Love Supreme an old album, but Coltrane had been dead for a decade. But that didn’t matter—at least not to Italian jazz fans. This was their gateway drug for the entire idiom.
I laughed at this back then. It felt like time was standing still—jazz fans should care about the future, not the past. Coltrane himself would have said that.
But I’m not so sure anymore. Sixty years after its release, A Love Supreme feels more foundational and definitive than ever before.
And if I’m correct in viewing this album as a ritual, it makes all the more sense to return again and again to its message. After all, that’s what rituals are for—repetition and deepening.
And I can’t help but wonder why this album is so rarely mentioned alongside Kind of Blue—the Miles Davis record that is typically considered the defining statement of post-bop modern jazz.
Kind of Blue is praised as as the quintessential modal jazz album. But if you listen to jazz improvisers playing modal music today, the links to Coltrane and A Love Supreme are far more obvious than their ties to Kind of Blue.
I love Miles Davis. But for a period of decades, I’d show up at jam sessions and find that every horn player on the bandstand was totally obsessed with mid-1960s John Coltrane. His influence was pervasive, like some chess genius who had figured out all the moves, and it was up to the rest of us to study and memorize them.
To some extent that’s still true today, although the youngsters now learn a lot of their Trane-isms via Brecker or Potter or Turner or some other intermediary. But if you follow those streams back to their source, it’s Coltrane’s maximalism, not Miles’s minimalism that sets them in motion.
What I’m saying is that A Love Supreme isn’t just another classic album from the past. It’s alive and burning right now. And will be tomorrow, and next month. And maybe even in another sixty years, too.
You can learn more about the 60th anniversary edition of A Love Supreme at this link.
"I believe Coltrane would have embraced spirituality as his full-time mission if he had lived longer."
When I lived in San Francisco in the late 80s, there was a small storefront on Divisidero Street that housed the Church of Saint John Coltrane. I used to drop in on Sundays for "mass" on occasion. Someone stood up front, under the painting of John as a Russian orthodox icon, and said a few words about love, compassion, community, and ultimately, music. Then everyone said "amen," and took out their instruments and commenced to worshipful, holy jamming.
“This is the first time that I have received all of the music for what I want to record,” he told her.
Note that word: Received. He didn’t say composed. He didn’t say created. It was a gift from something larger than himself - This is the magic of creativity, a gift from the gods/muse I dare say.