Coltrane: A Love Supreme, Part 1—Background Information, and My Personal Memories

THIS IS the first of what will be a series of many detailed essays exploring the beloved album A Love Supreme. This recording is very important to me personally. My book John Coltrane: His Life and Music began with A Love Supreme. One day in 1978, re-listening to the album after hearing it a number of times, I “heard” Coltrane reciting the poem in Part IV, “Psalm,” and it blew my mind. That was the day that I decided that I had to write about Coltrane. 

At the time I was directing the jazz band at Tufts University, and applying to doctoral programs in musicology at the urging of my mentor, the music chairperson, composer T.J. Anderson (b. August 17, 1928—he’s 95!). So I knew that I wanted to do my dissertation on Coltrane. Up to that time I loved his music, but not as much as I loved Sonny Rollins, Lester Young (about whom I’d already written a master’s thesis under Dr. Anderson), Bud Powell, Paul Bley, Earl Hines and others.

But once you get into the world of Coltrane, it becomes all-encompassing. I started writing the chapter about A Love Supreme first, in the late summer of 1979. I had been accepted at several universities, and I decided to go to Brandeis because there my advisor would be Professor Joshua Rifkin. Rifkin is renowned for his performances of Scott Joplin, but he is also an expert on early jazz (he was called “Little Jelly” by Clarence Williams!) — not to mention Bach, Schubert, and so on. He became another key mentor for me and gave me valuable feedback as I pushed to finish that chapter in time to present it at a musicology conference in late September 1979.

The audience at the conference — consisting of music professors from all the major New England colleges — was enthusiastic, and I was urged to send it for consideration to the Journal of the American Musicological Society (JAMS). But I couldn’t believe that any of the scholarly journals, which at the time were overwhelmingly classical in orientation, would be interested. (Even the field of ethnomusicology at the time was not open to jazz.) So I didn’t submit it, and kind of forgot about that idea. Meanwhile, I finished my coursework, and in 1982 and 1983 I wrote the rest of the dissertation. In June 1983 I graduated from Brandeis with my Ph.D. But I thought of that JAMS invitation again in January 1985, and when I finally sent the article to them, it was as though they’d been waiting for it. I think they had been!: It was published that fall, which is unusually quick for them.

The chapter on A Love Supreme in my Coltrane biography is updated from that 1985 JAMS article. Most of the book was entirely new, so I always urge people not to seek out the dissertation; anything that was worth saving from it appeared, in improved form, in the book. But, since then, I also assembled a great team of researchers who completed The John Coltrane Reference, a big day-by-day chronology and discography. (Updates to that volume can be found here. We’re working on a new edition for publication in late 2024 or early 2025.) And of course, I am publishing my recent research on Coltrane, and others, right here. (Click on Coltrane in the Index to this site for the many previous essays I’ve already posted.)

The Bottom Line is that what you will read here beginning today is my latest research and thinking about A Love Supreme.

A Love Supreme marked the only time that Coltrane wrote album notes. It was also the only time that he selected the artwork for the album, inside and out (it was a fold-open album cover). He selected the cover photo. (It wasn’t new—it had been published in Impulse! ads in advance, and also used inside Crescent.) He chose the drawing of himself for the insert. And he presented a poem.

Clearly, this album was very important to him. This was his spiritual manifesto, his most personal statement. He consciously designed it to be ”interfaith,” and avoided mention of Jesus or any religious figure other than God. I talked more about the spiritual aspect in my book, and for an NPR piece in 2000, on All Things Considered. But when Coltrane said at a Japanese press conference, “I would like to be a saint,” he did not want to be taken literally, as some have done. He was making an “inside joke,” as I have demonstrated in a previous essay.

I was recently listening again to A Love Supreme: The Complete Masters, a 2015 set that includes all the alternate takes. This time I noticed a number of interesting things happening in the music. (It’s available on all the streaming services. There was also a 3-CD version, the extra CD being the concert in France that has been issued elsewhere.)

I also thought about all the revealing items that have come out since my book was published in 1998, primarily in Ashley Kahn’s A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album — and in his later book, The House that Trane Built: The Story of Impulse Records. These items include Coltrane’s handwritten notes for the suite. And finally, a “live” version of A Love Supreme, recorded in a Seattle nightclub, was released in 2021. (I wrote one of the essays for the booklet.)

As a result of all this new material, it’s time for an update on A Love Supreme, focusing on musical details and foregrounding information not included in my book.

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First of all, it seems the suite almost didn’t get recorded. The late record producer George Avakian recounted in The House That Trane Built that in early June of 1964, he took a phone call from Coltrane. John said that he wanted to record “some long compositions,” but Impulse producer Bob Thiele wanted him to continue with standards (well-known pop songs) and shorter originals, as John had been doing on the Ballads album and with guests Johnny Hartman and Duke Ellington. (Thiele maintained that he never pressured Coltrane, but there is plenty of evidence that he did. I’ll review that in a separate post.) Significantly, this was just after Coltrane finished recording five long pieces for the album Crescent on June 1. (It was a few months after the sessions that yielded Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album, which I will also write about separately.)

Probably, Coltrane and Thiele had had a discussion afterward as to the “non-commercial” nature of that material for Crescent. So Coltrane asked Avakian if it might be possible to record his longer works for another label, as a one-off guest artist, with the permission of Impulse. And Avakian actually made some inquiries with other labels, but he was unable to come up with anything.

There is a lot of fantasy in writings on jazz about how much control artists have had over their work. I see a lot of statements about what the artist “chose” to do, and questions about why the artist “decided” to do something. But in the old days, many decisions were made by the producer, and artists such as Coltrane were perfectly happy that they didn’t have to handle such details. Before Coltrane, in the days of 78s, artists were not even always consulted as to which take would be released. Coltrane himself did not always have input into the sequence of the tunes on an LP — which one would be first and so on. Nor was he always consulted before “left over” tracks were released. For example, Coltrane Plays the Blues was not planned by Coltrane. He probably didn’t even know that Atlantic would assemble his unissued blues-based recordings and release them in July 1962, about a year after he left Atlantic for Impulse.

Even Crescent, often cited by musicians as their favorite Coltrane album, was assembled by Thiele from two different recording sessions. To my ear, it’s made up of isolated tracks rather than comprising a coherent album, especially because the entire second side does not feature Coltrane’s sax very much. It consists of a low-key feature for bass and piano (“Lonnie’s Lament”) and then drums (“Drum Thing”). And the short “Bessie’s Blues” that was added to fill out Side One doesn’t really fit with the “dreamy” mood of the other pieces. (Still, it’s all beautiful material, for sure.)

In contrast, A Love Supreme was Coltrane’s most planned album ever. As I explained in my earlier writings, some of the key features of the suite include:

·      The opening fanfare in E leading to the bass riff/ostinato starting on the note F. The same riff is chanted by voices later in the first movement, to the words “A Love Supreme.” Let’s call this the Main Motif.

·      The notes of the Main Motif are a “cell” that permeates all four movements of the piece. It keeps returning melodically in many ways.

·      At the end of “Acknowledgement,” Coltrane plays the Main Motif in all 12 keys, but not in a specific sequence.

·      The last movement is a recitation of the poem, syllable by syllable.

Now, by using Coltrane’s handwritten notes, and by comparing the outtakes with each other and with the released album, we can get a clear idea of what he planned out. It turns out to be all that I just listed, and more. In Essay 2 of this series, we will begin to take a close look at the notes that Coltrane made before he recorded the album.

All the best,
Lewis

P.S. An earlier version of some of this material was published in 2020 on the website of jazz radio WBGO.org, and I thank the station and my editor there, Nate Chinen, for helping me with those. But this and the following essays are new, greatly expanded, and include information that i only uncovered in recent weeks.