John Coltrane's Love Supreme - Page 3

The first track on A Love Supreme, "Acknowledgement" is what many people think of when mentioned the album title, just as "So What" is Kind of Blue for many Miles fans. "Acknowledgement" sets the tone, and introduces the main themes of the album. It sounds like a cross between a fervent preacher leading a church service and exorcist, as Coltrane just burns on sax, following Elvin Jones' then unusual gong introduction. Coltrane's soloing is followed by the album's equally unusual--almost Gregorian sounding--repeated chanting of "A Love Supreme".

As was typical of many jazz recordings of the day, the tracks that came to make up the original album was recorded almost entirely live, on a single day, December 9, 1964. Most intriguingly, Kahn also writes about the next day's sessions, long considered lost by most jazz fans, when Coltrane brought in a second sax player, Archie Shepp, to collaborate on the album. It's only been very recently that this recording was released, as part of a two CD set containing both versions of A Love Supreme.

It's not surprising that a whole host of mostly white rock musicians would adopt the original album as their own, as Coltrane's instrumental introduction alone foreshadows the overdriven guitar pyrotechnics that would come in a couple of years from such rockers as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, and Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, who Kahn quotes as describing Coltrane's music as "assertive, it was strong, and it did have an anger to it, and so did rock and roll":

My initial reaction [to A Love Supreme] was one of physical pain. It sounded like he was going, "I'm not going to take this anymore. I'm just going to do what I want to do, and that's it"…Obviously, he had gone through a spiritual change and was praising God…and I was going through a similar kind of thing at the time, so I could relate to it.

For Coltrane, God Was Very Much Alive

A year and a half after the release of A Love Supreme, Time magazine would feature a blurting cover story titled "Is God Dead". For Coltrane, and many of his listeners, the answer was a definitive "NO". But how God was perceived would be changing, as many youths sought to find Him through eastern religions, and other non-traditional methods (Tom Wolfe's brilliant mid-1970s essay, "The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening" would brilliantly place all of that searching in context). As Kahn notes, A Love Supreme was right at home:

Saxophonist David Murray--later to record with the Grateful Dead--agrees [with McGuinn] that Coltrane "had pierced into the whole 'flower-child' hippie bass. They might not have even known about any other jazz album, but they knew about A Love Supreme." Like McGuinn, Murray credits the palatability of Coltrane's message. "They connected to spirituality in music, and I don't necessarily mean religion--he was taking the whole religious thing into pure spirituality, and that's where he plugged in, big time."

Coltrane would die in 1967, only a couple of years after releasing A Love Supreme, and as Murray's quote foreshadows, he would quickly be canonized as some kind of secular jazz saint by some of his more fervent listeners. (The artsy Bravo cable network occasionally runs a British-produced special devoted to some of the more--one strains for the right word--extreme examples of this process, including a "Church of John Coltrane".)

Article Author: Ed Driscoll

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