John Coltrane tenor saxophone
McCoy Tyner piano
Jimmy Garrison bass
Elvin Jones drums
Recorded December 9, 1964, at Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey
Engineer: Rudy Van Gelder
Cover photo: Bob Thiele
Produced by Bob Thiele
Release date: January 1965
Of all the words John Coltrane put inside the gatefold of A Love Supreme, the one my ear keeps returning to is our. He wanted to thank God “through our work,” and in that little possessive the other musicians enter a story that began in the spring of 1957, when Miles Davis fired the saxophonist amid his struggles with heroin and alcohol. After quitting the hard stuff, Coltrane spent part of the year with Thelonious Monk at New York’s Five Spot. He returned to Davis the following January and played on Kind of Blue in 1959. Writing about 1957, Coltrane remembered a “spiritual awakening” and asking God to let him make other people happy through music. He also wrote of “a period of irresolution” in which he strayed from his pledge. The letter has room for that difficult tension on which all self-professions rest, and the long interval required to keep them.
In High Point, North Carolina, Coltrane was twelve when his father and the Reverend William Blair, his maternal grandfather, died within months of each other. Blair preached in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, so a voice the boy knew from the house also belonged to Sunday. It was a painful reminder that a child’s sense of time can reside in knowing when a particular person will next be heard. The Christian language Coltrane grew up with remained available to him as his reading took him farther afield. He had encountered Islam as a young man, and his first wife, Naima, was Muslim. By the time he spoke to Nat Hentoff for Meditations, he could say, “I believe in all religions.” In the gatefold poem he speaks to God with the intimacy of someone alone in a room and imagines that everybody has a way there. He names his dependence on God in the same letter that thanks the band, and I hear an unusual peace in someone willing to say publicly how much of his life is in other hands.
Steve Kuhn, who spent about eight weeks in Coltrane’s first working quartet in 1960, took up “Crescent” on Mostly Coltrane, the 2009 album with Joe Lovano that I reviewed here. There’s an odd continuity in Kuhn’s choosing a piece Coltrane recorded with the band that came together after he left. McCoy Tyner took the piano chair that year and was on the October session for “My Favorite Things” with Elvin Jones. Jimmy Garrison played with them at the Village Vanguard the following year, on his way to becoming the regular bassist. By March 1963 the four were at Van Gelder’s with Johnny Hartman, who could keep a vowel in Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” open all the way to closing time. The tenor answers in the spaces Hartman has left between phrases, and that particular courtesy returns in “Psalm,” where the voice the quartet attends to has its language inside the horn.
Alice Coltrane remembered John coming downstairs after days of work in their Dix Hills house and thought of Moses descending the mountain. What she recalled of his face was the joy and peace in it. I think of the rest of that descent ending under the dimmed lights at Van Gelder’s, where Tyner remembered how little had to be said as the band took up music it had begun to explore in clubs. When Jones strikes the tam-tam at the start of “Acknowledgement,” there’s an instant when the color of the tenor seems to be already in the metal. The fanfare is in E major, and it gives way to Garrison’s bass in F minor. He plays F, A-flat, F, and B-flat, drawing breath at the same place in each circuit while Jones puts an Afro-Cuban lilt into the pulse. Tyner’s chords, built in fourths, occupy the edge of our attention the way movement can register in peripheral vision while the eyes stay fixed.
The longer Coltrane ranges over that figure, the more I hear an affinity with what he admired in Ravi Shankar’s music, the freedom to travel melodically with so little change in the harmony. At the end of the solo he moves the figure through all twelve keys, then meets Garrison back in F. Lewis Porter hears a declaration of divine omnipresence in that passage and reads the four movements as the course of Coltrane’s search for the Divine. The sound that has stuck with me for years comes when Coltrane chants the title along with the bass, overdubbed so that he’s there twice. What I took for four notes had been four syllables all along, and the record makes my ear remember words it has yet to hear. I recognize the order in which a difficult admission comes, with the body several minutes ahead of the man who has to give it words.
Garrison lets two strings ring together at the opening of “Resolution,” feeling his way into E-flat minor. The full quartet enters hard, and the tenor has the breadth of a hymn against the blunt attack of those downbeats. In Tyner’s solo I keep attending to his left hand, which puts chords into the spaces his right hand has just opened. There’s the urgency of call and response within a single body. Coltrane comes in with a sound that keeps finding a rougher edge, until the tenor and the drums seem close to acquiring the same grain. I think of the irresolution he admitted to in his letter, and how a decision can be perfectly clear on the day it’s made and have to be made again in a body that remembers an older form of relief. When the head returns, I can still hear in its long notes what the tenor has been through since first stating it.
The pause for turning the original LP is long enough to imagine what another player might have heard in that small figure. Coltrane was back at Van Gelder’s the day after the quartet session with tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp and a second bassist, Art Davis. All six sextet takes of “Acknowledgement,” down to a false start, can be heard on 2015’s A Love Supreme: The Complete Masters. The quartet brought the suite to the Antibes festival in July 1965, and three months later a larger band that included Pharoah Sanders played it at Seattle’s Penthouse. The performance Joe Brazil taped that night, released in 2021, runs about seventy-five minutes.
Jones opens “Pursuance” alone, and in the intervals between his blows I begin to count in a time he keeps finding ways to displace. He lets a roll gather, then drives an accent through it at an angle to the beat I’ve supplied. The quartet comes in on a fast twelve-bar blues in B-flat minor, and the tempo suddenly has a frame. Tyner can push a pentatonic figure far enough outside the changes to make the home key strange, then hit an answering chord with his left hand that tells us how securely he has the form under him. Coltrane takes over with a hoarseness that survives even at his highest speed, and some of his runs seem to come out of one held note the reed has split open. Pursuance has the duration of an activity that outlasts the feeling that first set it in motion. Every time the blues comes around, Coltrane is already in the middle of another attempt. After Jones has another brief say, Garrison is left with the woody sound of his strings and all the time the tenor seemed to be using up. He lets a string ring long enough for its decay to become part of the phrase, and by then I’m listening for the moment when wood goes quiet.
The timpani under “Psalm” have an enormous softness, and it takes me a moment to hear Tyner’s low tremolo sustaining C minor through the sound. Garrison moves quietly beneath the tenor while Coltrane lets the cadence of his poem set the measure for this song of praise. Follow the gatefold with a finger and the printed syllables fall under the notes, with the recurring “Thank you God” coming to rest on C. He raises his pitch with preacherly emphasis, and at the crest of a phrase there is a rasp that belongs equally to the reed and to the man asking it to speak.
In his handwritten outline, now at the Smithsonian, Coltrane asks for the final chord to recall “Alabama.” He recorded that piece two months after the Ku Klux Klan bombed Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. His son Ravi made his ECM debut on Jack DeJohnette’s In Movement in 2016 and returned to the label for Ralph Alessi’s Imaginary Friends three years later. “Alabama” opens the former, with the electric bass of Jimmy Garrison’s son Matthew rolling under Ravi’s tenor. DeJohnette had sat in with both fathers, and his cymbals now move around two sons whose surnames already share the sleeve of A Love Supreme. When I wrote about the trio, their reading struck me as a prayer. The C-minor drone John used in both pieces lets me follow a single interval from the lament into said prayer, where grief takes its place in the sound of thanks.
Just above that note in the sketch Coltrane crossed out his instruction for the bass to say the final “Amen.” The tenor stretches the word over an extra note, and Coltrane’s overdubbed horn rises out of the ensuing flourish with Garrison’s bass still underneath. I keep looking at the word under the stroke he drew through it. Coltrane could imagine coming all that way toward God and leaving the last word to a man with four strings.
