(recording, 1964)
Louis Armstrong once remarked of those who wanted to play jazz, the musical style he himself had birthed: “If ya ain’t got it in ya, ya can’t blow it out.” John Coltrane definitely had it in him—the passion, the desire, the skill, and the concentration. In the liner notes to his classic album A Love Supreme, Coltrane wrote: “God breathes through us so completely . . . so gently we hardly feel it . . . yet, it is our everything.” John Coltrane took his God-given breath and used it to create some of the most challenging, passionate, and emotionally resonant music ever created.
On December 9, 1964, Coltrane gathered his quartet in the studio to record a suite he had written to praise and honor God for the part he had played in his life. With Coltrane on tenor sax, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums, they knocked out one of the classic albums in the history of jazz in just a few magical hours. His most unified album to date, Coltrane called this suite of four movements A Love Supreme.
A famously reticent and humble man, Coltrane rarely gave interviews or offered an explanation of what he sought in his music. For this record, however, for the first and only time he penned liner notes and a poem upon which the final movement of the suite was based. These notes credit God’s supreme love as the cause of his praise, and our dependence upon him as the foundation for life. The album itself, wrote Coltrane, “is a humble offering to him,” a way of saying, “THANK YOU, GOD.” It balances a deep spiritual serenity with a moving emotional outpouring of pure passion.
The first part, “Acknowledgment,” opens with the striking of a gong, alerting us that something important is about to be revealed, and then the musical theme for the work is introduced. It builds and then tapers off when, unexpectedly, Coltrane and his group repeatedly chant the phrase, “a love supreme” in time to the main theme. Part two, “Resolution,” and part three, “Pursuance,” ring changes on this theme and introduce new elements, every member of the quartet getting a chance to solo and each delivering a memorable performance, whether it be Tyner’s resonant piano chords, Garrison’s gentle and sublime work on the bass, or Jones’s turbulent and precise drumming. And the music always returns to the magnificent solo work of John Coltrane expressing the depths of his gratitude and praise through his saxophone.
In the fourth and final section, “Psalm,” Coltrane gives an intensely beautiful musical reading of the poem he wrote to accompany the album. This poem, gorgeously simple and loaded with biblical quotations and phrases he probably first heard from the pulpit of his church, is a gushing hymn of praise to the Creator. But rather than just speaking the words, he allows the saxophone to supplant his voice in expressing his passion and emotions, and the voice of the saxophone rises and falls in patterns somewhat similar to those of the black preachers whom he grew up hearing. He plays the words on his instrument rather than speaking them. To experience the fullness of what Coltrane intended, the listener should take the time to read the poem as the music plays, as line by line he interprets the words and expresses the depths of his soul.
Although followed by many more albums, many spiritually themed and some extremely experimental in style, A Love Supreme is Coltrane’s masterpiece, an example of how an honest exaltation of praise can become art that invites us all into the experience.
Coltrane was searching for the place where music and prayer fuse together and become one. He found his music able to take him places that mere words could not go, capturing the fullness of his spiritual ecstasy. In his later work, this becomes even more apparent. Often the melody is sacrificed in favor of the power of expression. Increasingly, Coltrane saw his art as a form of praying. He once claimed that 90 percent of his playing was prayer.
Coltrane sometimes spoke of his music as “cleansing,” a way of opening up to an inner peace that could transcend the worries and struggles of life. And he exemplified this inner peace in his gentleness, patience, and generosity. Yet when he put his lips to his instrument, what gushed forth was passionate and intense but not always beautiful in the normally accepted sense. The results were often jarring—the primal howl of a soul crying out that sounded to many listeners more like squeaks and shrieks and squawks than music. At times it seemed as though he was more interested in his divine audience than the response of his human one.
Born in 1926 in North Carolina, Coltrane was raised in a churchgoing family, with a heritage of preachers on both sides of his family. His grandfather, who had a profound influence on him, was a community leader and a powerful preacher as well as a highly educated man. Through his influence, Coltrane was introduced to the writing of Langston Hughes and Paul Laurence Dunbar as well as the Bible. But when, as a teenager, he lost a number of his family members (including his father, his maternal grandparents, and his uncle) in the course of a single year, it was to music that he turned for comfort and solace. It was a spiritual lifeline. His countless hours of dedicated practice with the saxophone gave him strength and focus to weather the trauma of loss.
Coltrane’s natural talent was apparent from early on. He played in a variety of jazz and R & B groups, including a stint with the Dizzy Gillespie band, before finally landing his big opportunity in 1955—playing with Miles Davis. By the time he joined Davis’s group, he brought with him both a penchant of drinking too much alcohol and an addiction to heroin, a drug favored by many musicians to get them through the taxing late-night gigs and the traveling that was part of the life of a jazz musician. At first he snorted heroin, then began shooting it, finding that it not only helped him deal with his work but also helped alleviate the pain of his chronic toothaches. Before long, his drug and alcohol use began to have a deleterious effect on his playing. Davis found him increasingly undependable and had no choice but to fire him. Devastated, and knowing he might have blown his one big chance, Coltrane realized that his drug addiction would keep him from his spiritual and musical goals. He determined it was time to make a change. And he did, recommitting himself to his faith and his art.
Coltrane’s renaissance was twofold, both artistic and spiritual. As he described later, in the liner notes to A Love Supreme, “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. At that time, in gratitude, I asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music.” Giving up both alcohol and drugs, he went cold turkey and kicked his bad habits. On the artistic front, he recommitted himself to his playing and to a more strenuous regime of practice. His wife at that time, Naima, reported that he worked twenty-four hours a day and usually fell asleep with horn in hand. She said he was “ninety-percent saxophone.”1
By 1958, Miles Davis was desperate to add a saxophone player to his very successful combo. Despite their past history together, he was willing to give Coltrane another chance. The result of their new partnership was a series of stellar recordings that demonstrated the excellence of their combined styles—Miles muted and intense, creating emotional textures by his combination of sound and silence, Coltrane perfecting the rapid and exuberant style he had developed while playing with jazz legend Thelonious Monk. Jazz critic Ira Gilter coined the phrase “sheets of sound” to describe Coltrane’s wildly imaginative playing. In 1959 Coltrane was a part of two landmark projects in the history of jazz, his solo effort Giant Steps and an album with Miles Davis that is widely considered the greatest recording in the history of jazz, Kind of Blue, where Coltrane’s influence is very much in evidence.
By the time he formed his own group the next year, John Coltrane was one of jazz music’s superstars. His fame increased with each subsequent release. And always, there was a profound spiritual element to the work he created. As fellow saxophonist Archie Shepp remembers, attending his live concerts “was like being in church . . . he created what became for me a new music. Like Bach and Mozart, Coltrane actually raised this music from the secular to an area of serious, religious world music.”2
Long a student of the world’s religions, Coltrane intensified his study in the latter years of his life, exploring Kabbalah, Sufism, Hinduism, African spirituality, and other traditions for the wisdom they could offer in his spiritual journey. Although he seemed to be firmly rooted in the Christian faith, he felt free to explore. He was not so much interested in dogmas and theologies as in spiritual practices. When a Japanese interviewer asked him, “What would you like to be ten years from now?” his simple answer was, “I would like to be a saint.”3