It All Has To Do With It

On my birthday I bought myself a new CD (with my parents' money, it should be admitted) of tenor saxophonist John Coltrane's suite A Love Supreme. I have heard from numerous sources that this is one of the best jazz albums there is, and I figured it would be a good place to jump into Coltrane's oeuvre (as it is considered his masterpiece) and into the area of modern jazz in general (a field which I am not terribly well acquainted with). The album is in four parts, features four musicians, and is a little over half an hour long. In the first 24 hours after I purchased it, I listened to it three times. Now I try to keep my music reviews objective, to be informative about the qualities of the music rather than just give a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down," because other people with different musical sensibilities than mine may like music that I dislike and vice versa. In the case of A Love Supreme, however, I am pretty much inclined to say that anyone who dislikes this music is a complete philistine. I'm not even sure how or where to begin to talk about something this phenomenal.

According to Coltrane's own liner notes, he had a profound religious experience in 1957 which finally manifested itself seven years later in the highly spiritual and swiftly written music for A Love Supreme (the album was in fact dedicated to God). In 1965, with McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums, at one of the definitive sessions in jazz history, the suite was put on record. It is a work of undeniable genius and the session was intangibly magical. Brilliant improvisation from all four participants becomes practically an expectation as you listen.

At various points, A Love Supreme is deceptively accessible or stupefyingly complex, so powerfully swung that you want to dance or so multirhythmic that the room spins, based on straightforward scales or on bizarrely uprooted chromatic scales. An incredible variety of textures is present throughout: solo bass, solo drums, lilting accompaniment supporting a careening Coltrane solo, all-out no-holds-barred polyphonic chaos from all musicians, delicate interweaving between two or more musicians, even a brief multi-tracked septet at the very climax.

It is the most thematic piece of non-classical music I have ever heard--so thematic, in fact, that I question labeling it as non-classical. Part 1, "Acknowledgment," opens with a forceful and distinctive bass line (covered by disjointed, atonal piano chords) that is utilized everywhere: first intermingled to brilliant effect in Coltrane's opening solo, then sequenced obviously and almost randomly on the sax through what seems like every key, then appearing in Coltrane's brief, weird chant of "a love su-preme, a love su-preme." This theme and others from the acidic Part 1 reappear in the more frenetic and thrashing Part 3, "Pursuance" (aptly titled for what amounts to a musical chase), which appears after the well-juxtaposed, more relaxed, and more "traditional" (if that's possible) Part 2, "Resolution," which sounds more like a jam tune but is also incredibly thematic, featuring a "head" which falls through various strange chords but resolves logically. After the agony of Part 3 comes the gentle, seemingly pulseless, minor pentatonic Part 4, "Psalm," in which Coltrane "reads" a religious poem he wrote (included in the liner notes) by playing its ebb and flow on his saxophone, with its recurring, plangent "Thank you God" theme.

This album is fabulous and deserves many repeated listenings. I am chomping at the bit to hear more Coltrane as well as the Turtle Island String Quartet's recent Grammy-winning cover of this album.