It doesn’t matter whether it’s Miles Davis, the style-defining talent for improvisation on the trumpet, his pupil on the saxophone, John Coltrane or the dramatically fallen Billie Holiday: Jazz produced gifted musicians, especially in the middle of the last century, whose albums are now the absolute classics of the genre belong.
The special aura of “A Love Supreme” can best be described in John Coltrane’s own words. In capital letters he emphasizes “elevation, elegance, enthusiasm” from the prayer poem he commissioned to print on the album cover, the litany of which he reproduces instrumentally in the latter part of the album.
In fact, there is probably no other jazz piece that reports on spiritual feelings as comprehensibly, intensively and attractively as this suite in four movements, which is just 33 minutes long – two quieter, open, introductory and concluding parts and two sometimes quite exalted middle pieces that are tighter and have a bluesy texture. As the opening figure, Coltrane blows a simple four-note fanfare that ebbs away in repeats as both an echo and a prelude to the rest.
Groovy intensity
They determine the entire first movement with the Afrolatin bass riff and its sweeping, circling solo and finally lead to the solemn rumble of its mantra, duplicated in overdubs – a material concentration and clarity on which the special effect of the piece as a whole is based.
Even in the ecstatic and dissonant moments, the light-handedly ascending and descending melody and repetitive solos hardly sound like the so-called “sheets of sound”, the modally flowing, chordically shimmering cascades that Coltrane first used in Thelonious Monk after withdrawing from heroin in 1957 and then Miles Davis opened the harmonic and rhythmic ties from beat to pulse.
Coltrane’s interest in textural research dates back to 1960, when he formed his own quartet, which is also heard on A Love Supreme in its classic line-up of Jimmy Garrison on bass, Elvin Jones on drums and McCoy Tyner on piano shifted to the melody, while at the same time becoming increasingly involved with African and oriental music. Perhaps the melodiousness did not only have music-theoretical motives.
Of course, the vaguely exotic atmosphere and spirituality also happily met the zeitgeist of the dawning hippie twilight. In fact, “A Love Supreme” shows perfectly how Coltrane had perfectly transferred his technically virtuoso experiments with harmony and rhythm into a free and abstract, at the same time melodic and grooving intensity – all that remained was the ascent into the cosmic freedom of his last years up to 1967. Apart from an appearance at the Antibes Jazz Festival, Coltrane has never performed 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.