Love Supreme by John Coltrane

Love Supreme by John Coltrane

By 1965, John Coltrane's legacy was already secure. The tenor saxophonist who cut his teeth with Dizzy Gillespie and gained fame with the Miles Davis Quintet on legendary sessions in the early 1950s would elevate the scholarly discourse in jazz with such focused bop jazz accomplishments as 1957's Blue Train and 1959's Giant Steps. But it was a Love Supreme, the record recorded in a single session on December 9th, 1964, that would penetrate a mainstream commercial audience while verging on a yet more challenging moment in jazz history. (Ruhlman, 1)(Samuelson, 1)

With its release in 1965 through the upstart Impulse! label, the record would generate both aggressive controversy and effusive praise. Along with Ornette Coleman's the Shape of Things to Come (1959) and Free Jazz (1960), a Love Supreme would mark an artistic high point in the 'free' or 'avant garde' period that would follow hard bop. John Coltrane was a musician who figured heavily into this transition, with a Love Supreme producing a convergence of the two. Backed by the three musicians with whom Coltrane had recorded a number of greatest hard bop records, the saxophonist channeled his deep sense of spiritualism into a piece in four movements.

With Elvin Jones on drums, Jimmy Garrison on bass and McCoy Tyner on piano, the band achieves a stately elegance that underlies Coltrane's tempestuous modal variations. Of particular importance to the atmosphere of the recording is Tyner's dazzling ivory-work, which provides an icy texture for Coltrane's searing licks. Indeed, Coltrane's hard and unpredictable improvisations were often alienating to jazz purists and traditionalists, who perceived free jazz as purely cerebral and unintelligible. To a point, many free jazz recordings reflect this sort of pomposity and academic preponderance. However, it is the validity of this very criticism in the general discussion on free jazz which marks a Love Supreme as so important in this regard.

Coltrane's stratospheric flights remain grounded in a concept executed perhaps more perfectly than any since the height of classical recording. Quite to the point, a great many of the progressive, avant garde and psychedelic musicians of the rock era which so greatly proliferated in its creativity during the late 1960s, would cite their aspiration to approach the unity, continuity, focus and cohesiveness of a Love Supreme. Divided into movements called Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance, and Psalm, the work was intended as an expression of the divinity to which Coltrane attributed his musical abilities, his particular insights and the impossible-to-replicate tonality that is his signature.