[Harp-L] A love supreme



I subscribe to a email newsletter called the Daily OM and through that service they send out the Daily CD and today's discussion is on John Coltrane's A Love Supreme.

Cut and Paste from the Daily CD.

May 1, 2006
A Love Supreme
John Coltrane
1964A Love Supreme found saxophonist John Coltrane at a turning point in his career. After years spent playing as a sideman for Miles Davis and a short stint with the Thelonious Monk Quartet, Coltrane had finally reached the very top echelon of jazz with a group of his own. He was at an exciting artistic crossroads, interweaving his roots in hard-charging bop with a bold harmonic freedom, and with this album his burgeoning spirituality emerged as an important focus for his music. A Love Supreme follows Coltrane on a devotional journey, capturing moments of bliss and contemplation, fear and awe. Throughout its four sections, Coltrane and his telepathic quartet play with an intensity that transcends the realms of both head and heart-A Love Supreme is music for awakening the spirit.

The four-note bass motif that opens "Acknowledgement" sounds like an incantation, throbbing and hypnotic, quietly beckoning the listener into its private sound-world. As pianist McCoy Tyner lays down an ever-shifting foundation of oblique chord clusters, Coltrane's extended leads dance around the melody, probing curiously in the lower registers then spiraling into blaring peals up high as if crying out in ecstasy. Elvin Jones' cymbals rain down in polyrhythmic droplets, draping the music in a curtain of shimmering, Eastern-tinged mysticism. Every moment radiates a flickering fervor, burning with a passion that's alternately serene and searing but impossible to extinguish. When Coltrane repeatedly intones the words "a love supreme" in a break between his solos, he transforms the main theme into a mantra of devotion.

If "Acknowledgement" marks the beginning of Coltrane's spiritual journey, "Resolution" is the soundtrack to getting there. Over Jimmy Garrison's walking bass line and Jones' propulsive, swinging drums, Coltrane summons a brassy swagger that's almost sinister in its cool confidence. It's a perfect foil for the frantic, burbling exuberance of "Pursuance," which finds the musicians racing after each other for seven straight minutes before the piece is blown wide open by an erupting volcano of drum rolls. The lava cools during the rhythmically free coda of "Psalm," offering a rapturous, intimate end to A Love Supreme. As a sobbing saxophone and thrumming bass dissolve into afterglow, it's clear that Coltrane's spiritual quest is complete.






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