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Classic Recordings: “A Love Supreme” by John Coltrane

Four movements, thirty-three minutes, recorded in a single day in December 1964. This is not background music and it was never meant to be.

A Love Supreme

John Coltrane recorded A Love Supreme on 9 December 1964 at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, with the quartet that had been together for three years: McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums.

It is a devotional work. Coltrane had overcome heroin addiction in 1957 and described the experience as a spiritual awakening; this album is the offering he made in response. The liner notes, which he wrote himself, open with the words "Dear Listener: All Praise Be To God To Whom All Praise Is Due," and the fourth movement is a wordless setting of a poem he included in the sleeve — Coltrane plays the syllables of the text on the saxophone.

It sold in numbers almost no jazz record of its ambition has matched, and it has become a genuine sacred text; an African Orthodox church in San Francisco venerates Coltrane as a saint.

What to listen for

Part I – Acknowledgement is built on the four-note bass figure Garrison states at the opening. Coltrane plays it in every key across the movement — a deliberate demonstration that the phrase, and what it stands for, is everywhere — before he and the band chant the words "a love supreme" nineteen times.

Part II – Resolution is the most straightforwardly thrilling, driven by Elvin Jones, whose polyrhythmic drumming is one of the great individual contributions in the music.

Part III – Pursuance opens with an extended Jones solo and is the most technically demanding, with McCoy Tyner's quartal voicings underneath — a harmonic approach that changed how jazz pianists comp.

Part IV – Psalm is the prayer. Read the poem from the liner notes while it plays; the correspondence between the words and the phrasing is exact.

Go deeper

Giant Steps (1960) is the technical landmark, My Favorite Things (1961) the popular one, and Ascension (1966) the free-jazz leap.

Alice Coltrane's devotional recordings continue the project he began.

Ashley Kahn's book A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album is excellent, and the complete recordings release includes a rarely-heard sextet version.

Coltrane died of liver cancer in July 1967. He was forty.

Listening note: resist the urge to shuffle this one. The four movements are an argument with a beginning and an end, and hearing them out of order is like reading a letter's paragraphs at random — every line is still beautiful, and none of it means what it should.

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