Classics, Appreciated: John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme

I don’t know much about jazz, but I know that ‘Trane’s 1964 “four-part suite” can alter molecular structures and DNA at 50 paces.

JOHN COLTRANE – A Love Supreme (Deluxe Edition) (Impulse!) 2xCD 

“I know that there are bad forces, forces that bring suffering to others and misery to the world. I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good.” — John Coltrane, 1966

There were 10 mass shootings in America across the first 72 hours of this week. Cheeto Mussolini called for violence from his followers. (Even crazier: Cheeto has the #1 song on Billboard’s Digital Sales charts!  Does this make him history’s first pop star to hit the top spot just as he is indicted?!) SPOT is gone. Dix Denney from The Weirdos is gone. The most beautiful dog I was privileged to have known is gone. This world feels chaotic and unhinged. It's a good thing the deluxe edition of the greatest jazz record ever recorded arrived today. If John Coltrane's A Love Supreme can't cast out the evil spirits, we’re all well and truly fucked. 

Full disclosure: I know jackshit about jazz. Asking me about jazz is a bit like asking Marjorie Taylor Greene advice on how to be a decent human being. I just know what I like in jazz. But saying I “like” A Love Supreme is honestly damning this extraordinary work, in which all human potential is displayed at maximum efficacy, not just with faint praise, but with verbiage which can’t hope to come close to its excellence.

But enough hype. What about the music? Well, it certainly kills “Justice For All” by Donald Trump and The J6 Prison Choir on contact, but anything would. My farts set to slammin’ 808 beats would murder that crap!

But I digress….

A Love Supreme arrived fully formed to Coltrane in 1964, in an upstairs area of the Dix Hills, Long Island house he and his family – wife Alice, newborn son John Jr., and Alice’s four-year-old from her previous marriage, Michelle – had just moved into. He’d been up there several days, looking beatific when he emerged.

“It was like Moses coming down from the mountain, it was so beautiful,” says Alice in the liner notes. “So I said, ‘Tell me everything, we didn’t see you really for four or five days.’

“He said, ‘This is the first time that I have received all of the music for what I want to record, in a suite. This is the first time I have everything, everything ready.’”

Three months later, Trane, his tenor saxophone and his quartet – pianist McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and drummer Elvin Jones – assembled at Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey’s Van Gelder Recording Studio, under the loose supervision of producer Bob Thiele and studio owner/engineer Rudy Van Gelder.

“One reason I enjoyed working with John [was that] he would usually record only one or two titles per session,” notes Van Gelder in the liner notes. “An unusual thing about the A Love Supreme session is that he had pre-planned all the music. He did the full-suite in one session.”

The liners report the session followed the sequence of the final album, with three interlocking sections of the suite cut in succession. Van Gelder edited Parts 1 (“Acknowledgement”) and 2 (“Resolution”) together as Side One, while Side Two’s Parts 3 (“Pursuance”) and 4 (“Psalm”) were tracked in a solitary take. Coltrane provided his sidemen only the most barebone of instruction before they laid into the suite. Tyner recognized a few of the melodies from club dates preceding the session. What we hear in the finished product is the first performance of A Love Supreme in whole. The suite was only ever performed in full live once thereafter, for the Quartet’s July 1965 appearance at the Festival Mondial du Jazz Antibes in Juan-les-Pins, France. The complete performance is on the second disc of this Deluxe Edition.

For all its spontaneity and one-take splendor, A Love Supreme is perfect. You can’t improve on it. Which is how it should be, when the artist designs the work as his gift to God.

According to two separate sets of liner notes Coltrane composed for the album, one in the form of a lyric or maybe a poem, A Love Supreme was all about the master musician’s spirituality. It is a four-movement tone poem, as an offering to his supreme being. Perhaps this is the key to its beauty and elegance? Just as the Black gospel quartet records of the ‘50s or Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s recordings sound like R&B or early rock ‘n’ roll, but with a whole lot more fervor, perhaps this the key to A Love Supreme’s transcendence? You factor belief into any work of art, the passion and emotional content are gonna go through the roof.

Coltrane only outlived A Love Supreme by a few years. He produced other works, and they are fine. But no other Coltrane record can alter molecular structures and DNA at  50 paces the way A Love Supreme can. This is John Coltrane at the absolute pinnacle of his compositional and instrumental chops. This is Tyner, Garrison and Jones at the absolute peak of their collective powers. This is America at its absolute best. A Love Supreme has healing powers “Justice For All” could never hope to have. Coltrane should have received a Nobel Peace Prize for this album. Maybe one day, he will. 

I don’t know much about jazz.  I’ve no idea if I have actually said anything about this record, aside from testifying to how in awe of it I am. But I know this: A Love Supreme is a monument to what the human spirit can achieve, when it’s allowed to perform at its maximum potential. It is as close to perfection as anything can be. It is divinity incarnate.

“If you want to know who John Coltrane was,” said Elvin Jones, “you have to know A Love Supreme.” The man would know.

I dedicate this record to all that's good in this world, and to love.

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