A Love Supreme and all that jazz
By Steve Beard
“I’m never sure of what I’m looking for,” John Coltrane once told noted jazz critic Nat Hentoff, “except that it’ll be something that hasn’t ever been played before; I know I’ll have that feeling when I get it.”
Within jazz, Coltrane was Ponce de Leon with a saxophone tirelessly searching for a mystical fountain of rhythms and harmonies. He practiced relentlessly, stretching every conceivable note to conform to his will.
Throughout his illustrative life (1926-1967), Coltrane shared the stage with jazz masters such as Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Theolonious Monk, and Dizzy Gillespie. In 1997, Coltrane received a posthumous Special Citation from the Pulitzer Prize Board for his “masterful improvisation, supreme musicianship, and iconic centrality to the history of jazz.”
Those packed into the gritty jazz clubs such as Birdland, the Village Vanguard, or the Half Note would all testify that Coltrane could light the joint ablaze—sometimes logging 45 minute solos. Saxophonist Dave Liebman described one scene: “En masse, cats started to put their hands up to the ceiling and the whole place stood up. It was like those holy-roller meetings. It was unbelievable.”
Liebman’s comparison is fascinating. Of course, a notable difference between a church service and a Coltrane gig would be the use of words. For most mortals, worship is solely expressed through prayers, creeds, and hymns. For Coltrane, it was expressed through sweat, overlapping chord progression, bulging neck veins, blasts, and wails. For him, to play was to pray.
The potency of his musical genius was not always so easy to recognize. Miles Davis had to kick Coltrane out of his band in 1957—for the second time—because of intense addiction to alcohol and heroin. Coltrane was nodding off on the bandstand, appearing disheveled, always running late or never showing up at all.
Coltrane retreated for a two-week stay at his mother’s house in Philadelphia where he locked himself in a room to kick the addiction. Trane is said to have heard the voice of heaven during his withdrawls.
“During the year 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life,” Coltrane wrote many years later in the liner note of his masterpiece, A Love Supreme. “At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music.” His recovery was jaw-dropping.
Even those around him who were uncertain about the existence of God knew Coltrane had met Him. He began playing in Thelonious Monk’s band and recorded Blue Train. Shortly thereafter, Miles Davis asked him to rejoin his group.
Seven years after his battle with heroin, Coltrane recorded A Love Supreme. He had been sequestered to a section of his Long Island home for four or five days. “It was like Moses coming down from the mountain, it was so beautiful,” Alice Coltrane recalls. “He walked down and there was the joy, that peace in his face, tranquility.” She asked him to tell her what he was experiencing. “This is the first time that I have received all of the music for what I want to record, in a suite,” he told her. “This is the first time I have everything, everything ready.”
A Love Supreme is introduced with a Chinese gong and then the listener is ushered into a mosaic of sound and energy. This is not elevator jazz; this is jazz as an exclamation point—tortured souls finding liberation, exorcism, and deliverance. Within the confines and liberties of jazz, it is Jacob wrestling with an angel, the parting of the Red Sea, the kiss of betrayal from Judas, and the empty tomb.
In the liner notes, Coltrane writes: “God breathes through us so completely … so gently we hardly feel it … yet it is our everything. Thank you God. Elation—Elegance—Exaltation—All from God.”
A few years ago, Rolling Stone ranked A Love Supreme #47 of the 500 greatest albums of all time. “For all its thunder you can hear yourself think when you listen to it,” commented The Village Voice, “primarily because Trane achieved the unthinkable: creating a secular form of God-loving music for the godless universe of Western modernity.”
You often hear about the blind having a stronger awareness of their other senses, particularly hearing and smell. Coltrane had the accentuated senses of a blind man who had been healed—eyes wide open and soaking up a dazzling vision from a heavenly realm.
“My goal is to live the truly religious life, and express it in my music,” said Coltrane. “If you live it, when you play there’s no problem because the music is part of the whole thing. To be a musician is really something. It goes very, very deep. My music is the spiritual expression of what I am—my faith, my knowledge, my being.”
A love supreme, indeed.
Steve Beard is the editor of Good News.