Coltrane, A Love Supreme, 6—The Last of His Note Pages

(Please use the Index to find the previous essays in this series. Just click on the word Playback at the top to get to the home page, then click on Index and look for Coltrane.)

Now let’s turn to his drafts of the poem: As before, in case you don’t have the album or CD handy to compare, here is a photo of the album’s inside with good resolution, so that you can enlarge it. Below is another of Coltrane’s handwritten pages, this one labeled Ac07v2 by the auction house. It contains a doodle and some lines from the poem that he later published in the notes to A Love Supreme. On the left, he writes “I’ve seen God and I’ve seen devils,” then he crosses off the last word and writes instead “unGodly,” which is how it appears on the album. The other lines here are also in the final poem:

The page labeled Ac07v4, below, contains a draft of the first third of the poem, in just about its final form. It reads from the top left (“I will do all I can”), down across to the right side. Up to “No matter what..it is God,” this exactly matches his final handwritten version (we’ll look at that soon), except that he writes at one point, in the middle of the right side, “Thank God!” instead of “Thank you God.” Also, he has added this in the right margin, which is not in the finished poem: “We are nothing without you O God, [but] everything with you.”

Next, the line “He is gracious & merciful,” is omitted, but from there on it again matches the finished poem. After the words “I know thee,” on the bottom right, he starts to run out of space, so he writes from left to right all across the bottom, from “Words, sounds,” ending with “Thank you God.”

As you can see, this page also has a sketch with the following annotations, expressing some of his philosophical beliefs:

Avenues of awareness

God’s index file

Dimensions

Containing All

He writes “Words” on one side of the sketch, and “Man” on the other.

Finally, he uses this page for two practical notes: a phone number near the bottom, and, near the top, a note to himself to “Buy reeds in SF” for his saxophone! He performed in San Francisco from October 6 to 18, 1964, so it’s safe to say that he was making these notes shortly before that.

His handwritten version of the final poem has been published in Kahn’s book (on the inside cover pages of the hardcover edition) and in the booklet for the 3-CD edition. From the latter, here is the complete poem:

I love that on the third page, labeled 3, instead of writing out the recurring refrain “Thank you God,” he just writes T.Y.L. for “Thank you, Lord.”

Finally, to complete our survey of Coltrane’s drafts, there is the page labeled AC07v5, below. We already looked at the bottom, where he wrote out the end of his introductory liner note. But at the top, this sheet presents three sketches of music, none of which seems familiar. On the top three lines, apparently in pencil, are some chord names and whole notes that do not comprise a familiar theme. Perhaps he was working on a new idea for the second movement before he decided on “Resolution”? We don’t know.  Under that, in pen, is another chord progression, with no melody. Again, it doesn’t match any piece that I can think of. Below that he's written this outline: Bm: 16 bars, Bb7+9: 8 bars, Bm: 8 bars. It's a simple outline for a modal AABA piece, but not a known one.

It occurred to me that maybe these weren’t all written by Coltrane, but the handwriting does appear to be consistently his. I wonder if he was writing these out for somebody else? They almost look like suggestions for a student to try out. Or, for that matter, suggestions to John from his own teacher, the late Dennis Sandole, a Philadelphia legend.

OK, we’re ready now to start listening. In the next essays in this series, we will listen to all the surviving takes and performances of A Love Supreme.

All the best,
Lewis