By Steve Yip:
It occurred to me that John Coltrane’s influential album
A Love Supreme is celebrating its 60th anniversary! This realization came through the music promotion platform Crossover Media, which reprinted an article from
Black Enterprise on its website.
Widely considered as Coltrane’s masterwork, the 33-minute album is structured in four movements: "Acknowledgement," "Resolution," "Pursuance," and "Psalm." It has a powerful bearing on music enthusiasts who are spiritualists, agnostics, and atheists alike. From the
Black Enterprise article, “Coltrane and his band members recorded the renowned album in one afternoon. Coltrane’s quartet included bassist Jimmy Garrison, drummer Elvin Jones, and pianist McCoy Tyner.“ The album was recorded on December 9, 1964, and released in 1965.
A Love Supreme elevated into every element of the cultural galaxy.
A Love Supreme has been celebrated by so many jazz and rock music and beyond. Coltrane was already on the scene creating important musical works after he left the Miles Davis band in 1957. To mark this, I thought sharing various commentaries about Coltrane’s monumental and powerful contribution to music was best. Below are some selected commentary.
WBGO.org | Nate Chinen, August 26, 2021
“John Coltrane's
A Love Supreme ... inhabits an exalted plane beyond the realm of most other albums, in any musical genre. Easily one of the most celebrated jazz recordings ever made, it radiates a deep, devotional gravitas — a palpably focused ardor that has long inspired actual worship... For Coltrane ...
A Love Supreme also stood as a pinpoint moment in a changing picture. The mid-'60s were a period of hurtling evolution for him, as he pushed ever further into musical catharsis and away from the familiar moorings of jazz performance... [and] would set the standard for a cadre of improvisers coming up behind him, like fellow tenor heralds Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp...”
Black Enterprise | Jameelah Mullen, December 12, 2024
“
A Love Supreme still profoundly impacts Black culture. Director Spike Lee pays homage to Coltrane in his 1990 film
Mo’ Better Blues, initially called
A Love Supreme. Lee at the request of Coltrane’s widow, Alice Coltrane... ‘I wanted to call it
Love Supreme, but the movie is associated with so much profanity that Mrs. Coltrane did not like the idea of using her husband’s best song,’ Lee told
The Oklahoman.”
Pitchfork | Mark Richardson, November 25, 2015
“
A Love Supreme is also one of the most popular albums in the last 60 years of jazz, selling the kind of numbers usually reserved for pop (it quickly sold more than 100,000 copies, and has almost certainly sold more than a million since). If Miles Davis'
Kind of Blue is the most frequently bought first jazz album for those curious about the genre,
A Love Supreme is easily number two.”
Carlos Santana | Renowned guitarist and band leader
“The first time I heard
A Love Supreme, it really was an assault... the music didn’t fit into the patterns of my brain at that point.” Since then Carlos Santana’s celebratory tributes came by way of his collaboration with jazz guitarist John McLaughlin when they recorded "Acknowledgement" from
A Love Supreme on their 1973 tribute to Coltrane
Love Devotion Surrender". [From
A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album ]
Elvin Jones | Renowned jazz drummer who performed on A Love Supreme.
“We didn’t know how
A Love Supreme was going to be received beforehand, but I’m not surprised it has reached so many people... In a sense, it's not even jazz. It broadened the concept of what music was.” [From
A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album ]
Stan Nishimura | visual artist, musician (trombone)
“When John Coltrane’s
A Love Supreme was released in 1965 I was excited to get this latest recording of his work since I became aware, enjoyed/inspired, and studied his musical journey from when I was in high school in the late 1950’s. He was at the time; a member of the Miles Davis group(s) and in particular played on the
Kind of Blue album. For me I felt that Coltrane was a major force in these Miles Davis groups which at the time in my early life was drawn into the power of his personal energy, his exploring of musical concepts, and his ability to convey very personal feelings while at the same time pushing his playing into areas that provoked the highest levels of imagination, curiosity, and amazement.”
-
Afterwords- An in-depth recounting of the story of
A Love Supreme is found in Ashley Kahn’s
A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album (Viking/Penguin Group 2002) A live recording of
A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle (1965 and re-released in 2024) is also available on Impulse! Records. There are many renditions of
A Love Supreme, including by other artists. On YouTube.com you can find Carlos Santana and John McLaughlin performing "Acknowledgement" from
A Love Supreme live at the 2011 Festival de Jazz de Montreux.
Alert! Impulse! Records is releasing
A Love Supreme: 60th Anniversary Edition. This limited edition diamond vinyl record is scheduled to drop on Feb. 7, 2025 -- and is available for pre-ordering.
By Stan Nishimura
A Personal Reflection on John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme”,
His Body of Musical Explorations and His Influence.
When John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” was released in 1965 I was excited to get this latest recording of his work since I became aware, enjoyed/inspired, and studied his musical journey from when I was in high school in the late 1950’s. He was at the time; a member of the Miles Davis groups and in particular played on the “Kind of Blue” album. For me, I felt that Coltrane was a major force in these Miles Davis groups which at the time in my early life was drawn into the power of his personal energy, his exploring of musical concepts, and his ability to convey very personal feelings while at the same time pushing his playing into areas that provoked the highest levels of imagination, curiosity, and amazement.
Over the years I maintained a close relationship with the musical developments and artistic pursuits of John Coltrane realizing that he would delve into some realm of expression and create a plateau that he really went through all the various and intricate aspects of what he was focusing on in his musical expression. And when he went deeply on this plateau his openness and creative energy caused him to reach to a higher plateau. This can be heard and enjoyed in his first albums after leaving the Miles Davis group; the albums of “My Favorite Things” and “Giant Steps” are two powerful examples of his deep craving to define his broad sense of imagination and curiosity.
Coltrane’s continued development in being at one plateau and then pushing the boundaries to get to a higher plateau was/is a focus of “A Love Supreme” with its creative energy and personal pursuits and pushed his musical expression to the more open and freedom expressions with not being bound by the conventional structures of musical expression but to explore and define other ways that musical ideas can be created and expressed.
With “A Love Supreme” Coltrane not only defined where he was at but it was a pivot and a means for his reaching towards another level of a new and challenging plateau.
John Coltrane died at the age of 40 on July 17, 1967, two years after the release of “A Love Supreme”. We can only speculate on what kinds and aspects of musical expression he would have pursued but “A Love Supreme” sits on one of the plateaus and is an inspiration, joy, and amazement for all people from one of the most important and influential artists of the 20th century.
