The special aura of “A Love Supreme” can best be described in John Coltrane’s own words. In capital letters he highlights “Elevation, Elegance, Enthusiasm” from his prayer poem, which he had printed on the album cover and whose litany he recreates instrumentally in the last part of the album.
In fact, there is probably no jazz piece that speaks of the spiritual feeling in such a comprehensible, intense and attractive way as this just 33-minute suite in four movements – two quieter, open, opening and closing parts and two middle pieces that are sometimes quite exalted and tighter and are structured like blues. As the opening figure, Coltrane lets a simple fanfare of four notes waft, which fade away in repetition as both an echo and a prelude to the rest.
They determine the entire first movement with the Afrolatin bass riff and his wandering, circling solo and finally lead to the solemn rumbling of his mantra, reproduced in overdubs – a material concentration and clarity on which the special effect of the piece as a whole rests.
John Coltrane perfectly captured the zeitgeist
Even in the ecstatic and dissonant moments, the light-handed rising and falling melodies and repetitive solos hardly sound like the so-called “sheets of sound”, the modally flowing, chordally shimmering cascades that Coltrane first used with Thelonious Monk after his heroin withdrawal in 1957 and then Miles Davis opened the harmonic and rhythmic bonds from beat to pulse.
Coltrane had been interested in textural research since 1960, when he founded his own quartet, which can also be heard on “A Love Supreme” in its classic line-up with Jimmy Garrison on bass, Elvin Jones on drums and McCoy Tyner on piano shifted to melody, while at the same time increasingly focusing on African and oriental music. The melodiousness perhaps had more than just music-theoretical motives.
The vaguely exotic atmosphere and spirituality naturally also happily captured the zeitgeist of the emerging hippie twilight. In fact, “A Love Supreme” perfectly shows how Coltrane had perfectly translated his technically virtuosic experiments with harmony and rhythm into a free and abstract, yet melodic and grooving intensity – all that was left was to ascend into the cosmic freedom of his last years up to 1967. Aside from an appearance at the Antibes Jazz Festival, Coltrane never played his biggest hit live.
Apparently he thought the recording was so definitive that he didn’t want to add anything to it. He’s probably right about that too.