From dirt to the divine: 50 years of 'A Love Supreme'

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Fifty years ago this month, John Coltrane released A Love Supreme to the world. It is one of those rare albums that exists in the realms of the physical, the cerebral, and the spiritual. On the ground level, A Love Supreme is the stunning centerpiece of Coltrane's career, a mystifyingly simple work propelled by a sparse, four-note motif. The record's influence is difficult to quantify, but countless artists have sung its praises. Bono name-dropped it in U2's 1988 song, “Angel of Harlem.” Guitarists Carlos Santana and John McLaughlin have both cited A Love Supreme as a prominent influence. Lupe Fiasco even had a song titled “Life, Death & Love From San Francisco,” which is basically Fiasco rapping over a generous sample from Coltrane's opening number, “Acknowledgment.”

Across countless critics picks for greatest jazz albums, even greatest albums of all time, A Love Supreme often claims a top spot. Last year, the Smithsonian celebrated the album's anniversary with an exhibit at the National Museum of American History displaying the album's score and one of Coltrane's three tenor saxophones.

In San Francisco there is even the Saint John Coltrane Orthodox Church where every Sunday a mass is held that integrates communal jam sessions and the Coltrane Liturgy, which, according to its website, combines the Divine Liturgy of the African Orthodox Church, and the Twenty-third Psalm, with the melodies, harmonies and rhythms of Saint John Coltrane's masterpiece: A Love Supreme.”

A Love Supreme marks the apex of Coltrane's spiritual quest after his transformation in 1957 when he ceased using alcohol, cigarettes, and heroin (which he attributes to God's strength in the album's liner notes). Even before abstaining from his vices, Coltrane was a force in jazz. He was a key player in Miles Davis' First Great Quintet from 1955 to 1957, a period that produced staples of Davis' repertoire including Cookin', Relaxin', Workin', and Steamin'.

Following his transformation, Coltrane began playing with pianist Thelonious Monk, famous for his idiosyncratic style and head-scratching chord changes. It was with Monk that Coltrane began honing the technique that he perfects in A Love Supreme. Music critic Ira Gilter described his style as “sheets of sound,” referring to the torrent of notes Coltrane employed during his sets, playing with rapid-fire scale patterns that could produce hundreds of notes in a short span of time.

On paper, A Love Supreme is a jazz classic, the perfect middle ground between the deconstructed wails of Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz and the progressive melodies explored by Miles Davis and his contemporaries. The record also owes its brilliance to one of the greatest rhythm sections of all time, featuring drummer Elvin Jones, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and pianist McCoy Tyner. But zoom out just a little bit — look beyond the expert musicianship — and the record becomes an attempt to reconcile the horrors and promises of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. It is call for unification amid the divisions.

Coltrane never made any direct statements regarding the Civil Rights crisis, save for the song “Alabama” from of his 1963 album, Live at Birdland. The song was written as a response to the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing in Birmingham, Ala. Four girls were killed in the attack, orchestrated by the Ku Klux Klan. Interestingly enough, Coltrane's sound became entrenched in black poetry. In her essay, “Late Coltrane: A Re-Membering of Orpheus,” Dr. Kimberly W. Benston notes that the “Coltrane poem has, in fact, become an unmistakeable genre in black poetry.”

His influence in 1960s black poetry could be traced to the fact that above all, A Love Supreme is a poem. Even though the only spoken words on the album are Coltrane's hypnotic chant of “A love supreme,” he lays out a poem in the record's liner notes. The entire record is his attempt at translating that poem using the bleets, wails, and bellows of his saxophone.

Zoom out higher still, and A Love Supreme is an album reaching to the divine, created by a man roughly two years away from death. On July, 17, 1967, Coltrane died from liver cancer. Many in his circle were shocked, mainly because few knew of his illness. Maybe A Love Supreme was his own acknowledgement of death, a musical conversation expressing gratitude for the opportunities God provided him while he was still alive.

What is crucial to note, is that Coltrane's “God,” the one he references directly throughout his poem, is faceless. Though Coltrane had forays into Christianity, Islam, and Indian philosophy, his God was universal. In the liner notes to his 1965 album Meditation, Coltrane states that he “believes in all religions.”

For me, A Love Supreme is so important because it is one of the few pieces of music I would classify as “spiritual.” The sort of music created with the same aim as shamans singing their Icaros, or medicine music, to summon positive spirits and ward away the evil ones. The kind of blurring between the spiritual and corporeal that many 18th Century composers feared would be evoked by using the tritone, an interval so dissonant they associated it with the devil.

The most telling quality of A Love Supreme' relevance comes from its staying power. NPR recently compiled a piece where viewers called in to share their first experiences listening to the record. Marcus Apitz of Yorba Linda, Calif., who had just listened to the album for the first time, had this to share: “I have the pleasure of being guided through my late-in-life discovery of jazz by my 16-year-old tenor saxophonist son. I dipped into his growing vinyl collection to listen to John Coltrane's masterful work. How cool is that?”

A half century later, the love goes on.