‘A Love Supreme’ at 60: Musicians celebrate the timeless work of jazz genius
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On Dec. 9, 1964, saxophonist John Coltrane, bassist Jimmy Garrison, pianist McCoy Tyner and drummer Elvin Jones assembled at Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey’s Van Gelder Studio. That one-day session became a seminal piece of music history, “A Love Supreme,” which six decades later is widely regarded as one of the most important albums ever recorded. “A Love Supreme” has all the accolades — constant mentions on countdowns of the greatest albums, preservation in both the Smithsonian and National Recording Registry, platinum sales in the U.S. However, the true impact of the album — which is considered along with Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue” one of the two most essential jazz works — is felt the most when talking about it with musicians.
Often described as spiritual, meditative, raw, yearning, divine, longing, beautiful, transcendent and profound, the four-part “A Love Supreme” — broken down into “Acknowledgment,” “Resolution,” “Pursuance” and “Psalm” — is as much a rite of passage for musicians as “The Catcher in the Rye” or “The Great Gatsby” are for young writers or Pablo Picasso is for young artists. In decades of talking to the greatest musicians from all walks of life and all genres, Coltrane’s masterpiece is cited as much as any album as being an influence. In fact, you can argue “A Love Supreme” has shaped popular music as much as any single album.
Testament to that is the group of musicians who lined up to talk about what this works means to them in honor of the 60th anniversary. Among the Coltrane fans we spoke to were Flea, Q-Tip, Rakim, Kamasi Washington, St. Vincent, Common, Greg Dulli, Robert Glasper and Theo Croker as well as Grammy-winning producer Larry Klein and Jamie Krents, president of Verve Records, which will be reissuing a special anniversary edition this Friday. All spoke about their introduction to the record and then in honor of the album’s four parts about its musicianship, meaning, influence and legacy.
A calling to God, from God, a testament to the unyielding will to love, to all the beauty in this insane world, “A Love Supreme” is, represents the highest level music can reach. “It’s a touchstone for sanity, it’s a touchstone for beauty, for human possibilities,” Flea said.
Introduction
Flea: I first heard “A Love Supreme” when I was a teenager. I don’t know if I was ready for “A Love Supreme” until I got to be in my late teens, where I could really feel the power of it and even though I was an atheist and not a man of faith or even thinking about believing in God or a divine concept I felt the spirituality of it without knowing it. It’s like one of the things in life that you can’t really articulate or understand but it’s still there for you in whatever language you are able to use to understand it. You hear those first notes and it’ll blow your head off with the sheer power. That record works on so many levels.
Robert Glasper: It’s funny, the first time I heard it I was in seventh grade, I bought the album. My mom was a singer, so she had a band and I think one of her musicians told me to buy it. I was listening to a lot of Kenny G and he’s like, “You need to listen to another saxophone player. You should listen to John Coltrane.” I was like, “Alright.” He said, “Get ‘A Love Supreme.’ ” So, I’ll never forget it. I put it on, I got in the shower, everything was fine, then when the chanting came on it scared the living hell out of me. I didn’t know there was any singing.
Greg Dulli: I worked at Tower Records on the Sunset Strip in 1984. And every shift you got to run the information booth. That meant you were the DJ for the entire hour. I was in there on a Friday night and one of my favorite actors would come in every Friday and one time he came up to me and said, “Do you ever play jazz?” I didn’t know much about jazz; I was 19 from Ohio. So, the first record he played for me was “Kind of Blue” by Miles Davis and the second record was “A Love Supreme.” That person was Peter Falk, so Peter Falk turned me on to jazz music and helped educate me. Then flash forward to the Twilight Singers, probably around 2003. I’ve always thrown covers into my shows and sometimes I just grab them out of the ether and throw them in, not even knowing how they got in there. But we started riffing “A Love Supreme” and I even wrote lyrics for it and I changed them every night.
Larry Klein: For young musicians who were listening, when a record of John Coltrane’s came out, you went down to the record store and you bought it right away. “A Love Supreme” was a dramatic departure from what he had done before and amazing, but every record, they were all just huge leaps forward. By the time I was actually playing with my jazz heroes, he had passed away, but they were all, whether it was Freddie Hubbard or Wayne Shorter, all these guys were profoundly influenced by him. I was always grilling them and what it was like to be around him. Freddie and Wayne would go over to his house and practice with him. They said that it was always very inspiring because he had tremendous focus and was wide open with regard to how he approached developing his musical language.
Rakim: When I first heard it, I was so young. I didn’t really know what know what to feel. Everybody else was raving about it. But I didn’t really know what was going on. Again, I didn’t know the name of the record was until maybe it could have been months later. But it was a moment for the people in the house listening to it. It was a moment for them and me as a little kid. I had to be no more than 10. I was the youngest in the household. So there was always good music being played. There was always jazz being played. And the furthest one from understanding it was me. I’m a little kid. You play some Michael Jackson or something like that, then I know exactly what it is. But I’m growing up and everybody’s playing jazz, so I’m trying to understand it. I’m watching everybody’s facial expressions. I’m listening to what they saying about the music and things of that nature. So when jazz came on in my house, it was a learning experience for me. At first, I heard the song, and not too much later I heard the title of the song. But I didn’t really put one and two together, just “A Love Supreme,” but then later as you get to know more about Coltrane you understood what the title of the song meant to him and what his passion was for that song and then when you listen to it of course and you hear it differently now. You understand where he was coming from. You understand where he was trying to take it and what he wanted you to experience in the song.
Musicianship
Kamasi Washington: From a musician’s standpoint, there’s so much in there. So, I find that my experience of “A Love Supreme” has taken on almost like a life of the record. I grew up on that album, but by the time I really was attaching to it as my own, not my dad’s record, “Pursuance” was the part of the record that I grabbed first. Then I spent years holding on to that. There’s a lifetime worth of music in that one song. Then as I got older, “Resolution” was the next part that when I turned that record on, I would go straight to that track first and then listen to the rest after that. Then “Acknowledgement.” It’s one of those records that for me personally fills me up. Every time I listen to that record, it’s like a creative musical recharge. Cause there is so much spirit in the music. It’s hard to put into words.
Q-Tip: It’s just his horn, the construction of the songs, his ability to pull something deep and throw it up in the sky and then watch it float or land on the track. It’s courageous, it’s rock and roll too, as much as it is spiritual, if you think about it. Rock and roll not in the sense of white boys with long hair and Stratocasters, but rock and roll in the sense of the just unbridled, uncompromising sound that’s hard, it’s harsh, it’s dynamic, but it’s really talking without words. He’s just taking you to the edge. He knows when he has you, you just go into the edge and when you drop into the music, it can’t escape you. Whether you like jazz or not, you could put that on somewhere and ... somebody will say, “Who’s this?” Because that’s how unique of a sound it is. It’s avant-garde without trying, It’s gospel without preaching, it’s primal, it’s subdued, it’s beautiful, it’s just a robust sound. The recording of it sounded like waves crashing to, a lake getting a stone thrown across it and you’re looking at a ripple. It just ropes you in, man. It’s a magnet.
Glasper: A lot of times when you’re young it’s just based on the technical part out of it. “Oh, that sounds cool. Let me learn this lick, let me learn the vocabulary.” As you get older it becomes something you really feel and it becomes spiritual. For me, as I got older that’s what it was. I didn’t feel Trane the same back then. When I was younger it was about McCoy [Tyner]. It was the licks and how fast he was playing, the technical thing. As a grown person now I understand what people put on Trane. He was going through things, you could hear it. He was the voice of an era, he was the voice of so many things that grown people go through. Now I can hear it and I can totally understand that perspective of it, why he was playing that way.
Flea: Jimmy Garrison might be the most underrated jazz bass player of them all. He is so amazing in everything that he did. He is so incredible with Trane, but he has this droning depth of this like voodoo trance that he gets into on the bass. The warmest thing I’ve ever heard in my life and “A Love Supreme” doesn’t happen without Jimmy Garrison. He makes the bed for Coltrane in a way that is just a bottomless pit of grooves and greatness.
Theo Croker: Well, for me, over the years, the simplicity of it has become more apparent, which has only gone to enhance the spirituality of it. From a performance aspect, the level of vibe and spirit that are on this record and these takes become more and more masterful to me as time goes on. When you first hear it, you feel powerful, you feel impactful, it feels very spiritual. As I grow as a musician and get better at playing music and understand more the things I hear before, “A Love Supreme” to me is almost like a blues record. So the simplicity of it really shines through to remind me as a musician and creator that it’s all in the feeling, it’s all in the power behind the notes and the music. The technical aspect of it or the chord changes or how wild it is or advanced is really not anywhere near as impactful or important as the spirituality behind playing it.
Meaning
St. Vincent: You hear somebody, the most honest reckoning with what it is to be a human and also for musicians, the knowledge that this thing, music, is so much bigger than you and you’re lucky if you get to catch a lightning bolt for, an hour, or three minutes, or whatever, but it’s just clawing its way into divinity. And it’s a painful listen, it’s ecstatic, it’s the most beautiful. It just goes so deep.
Common: “A Love Supreme” for me, speaks to my spirit in different ways in accordance to the way that I grow too. It’s one of those pieces of art that continues to evolve as I grow. I see the love in it, the spirituality in it. I see God in it, and I see the unity in it. I see calmness in it. I see that music; I’ve played it at times when I’m stressed out and dealing with some of the most difficult situations. I played it when I’m sitting with a beautiful woman just wanting to put on some music that feels amazing and we can just chill and sip wine and have a good time. I’ve played it at times when I’m zoning out and I need to write. ... I played it in so many spaces like on my rides up to going up the [Pacific Coast Highway], just keeping myself calm and meditative.
Rakim: It taught me how to be passionate about things. For him to keep repeating [“A love supreme”] like that, he’s trying to get you to feel the same way he feels. That could be toward anything. It’s the passion. And I think like we were saying earlier, a lot of people may have interpreted it in different ways. Some people listened to it and said, “Yeah, I love my spouse more.” Some people listen to it and say, “Yeah that too but that your love has to be pure.” It just gave people so many ways to interpret that and every one of them was good.
Washington: I always took it more as a love is supreme. That was always my take, love is the most supreme part of love. It’s just that to have love is supreme. And God is love. And I feel like that was part of his message in life. It’s just the whole idea of being a force for good and that notion that love is like the ultimate good. That it is supreme and has the power to encompass everything.
Influence
St. Vincent: There are moments on, say, a song from my last record called “Broken Man,” where at the end, there’s these saxes coming in and they’re doing these stabs and the stabs are violent, but then also there’s just kind of a wild sax solo. I didn’t say, “Hey, cop Coltrane or anything like that.” Maybe the modality like, “Boom, boom.” That bassline is the proto hip-hop. So maybe you draw a line to my kind of modal baselines that kind of harken back to “A Love Supreme.”
Common: I got a song called “Love Is...” [and it] definitely has “A Love Supreme” in it. Even the spirit or mentality of having my father talk on some of my album and having him do a spoken word was the inspiration of what “A Love Supreme” brings to my heart and to my soul. It could be an instrumental with a spoken word on it to me that comes from me loving writing over “Love Supreme” and then I would think certain songs subconsciously have been influenced by it. But one thing I’ll tell you, I’ve tried several times to use it for my books.
Klein: The jazz musicians that I came up apprenticing with were profoundly affected by that record and also other records of his but certainly that record because it was so dramatically different from anything else that was coming out in the jazz world. So many jazz artists were still stuck in the neo-bop kind of model of things. On one hand I think he took a lot of heat for that record because it was so free and so much of a prayer and so much of a meditation that the jazz musicians who were preoccupied with virtuosity thought it was very disappointing. But for me though I respected virtuosity and aspired to it to a certain degree, that part of jazz was never the heart of it. For me, the heart of jazz was always lyricism and getting at something that changed you as a listener. As a listener, “A Love Supreme” was so exciting. The forward-thinking musicians saw it as a major step forward in breaking things open in jazz.
Rakim: When I first started picking my style out, I didn’t know what was going on, I was listening to a Coltrane record in my mother and father’s basement. And I remember seeing he didn’t play the same melody twice. After I listened to that John Coltrane record, I came up with the style to never repeat the same bar or the same rhythm in my bars. So my first records, I never repeated a rhythm or the rhyme. I always changed the rhyme flow. I never used the same rhyme flow because of John Coltrane. It was so energetic and so moving, I incorporated that into the way I rhyme.
Legacy
Flea: There’s a reason why a John Coltrane comes around once and never happens again. It’s like Bach. It’s these people that transcend to a higher place because they get beyond the form. That’s when it becomes timeless and for everybody. It’s beautiful. It’s been one of the go-to’s. I got married six years ago; we played “A Love Supreme” when we walked down the aisle. When my kids were born, I’m sitting there with the boombox and “A Love Supreme” on for as soon as they come out of the birth canal. On it goes, “Boom, welcome to the world, there are beautiful things here. You are going to suffer, you are going to be betrayed, you are going to hurt, you are, worse than that, probably going to betray other people consciously or not, you’re going to feel a lot of pain. But there are things that are so beautiful beyond our comprehension, and this is it right here. This is the thing. This is what human beings are capable of at their very, very best.”
St. Vincent: This record there’s agony in there. There’s clawing at the heavens. There’s righteousness, like this idea that it’s so powerful you simply must bow before it. I mean, it’s God, right? It’s the closest I get to seeing, feeling God, God writ large, God capital G, all the complications and ecstasy you see therein. Yeah, that was my first experience with it. And that remains my experience with it. But my conception of God and that which is divine has obviously changed and shifted as I’ve grown. So that which is sacred.
Common: It would be “A Love Supreme.” That would be the most played. If I looked in my life and thought about which album I played the most throughout my life now, especially in adulthood, because I wasn’t up on John Coltrane when I was really young. But as an adult, it has been “A Love Supreme.” It’s one of the wonders of the world, it’s something that will always be on the planet and moving people. So the same way we look at “The Godfather” as a film, like it’ll always be here. “A Love Supreme” is that, like it’s one of the greatest creations that God has ever given an artist.
Washington: John Coltrane put so much meaning behind everything he played. Beyond his technical and musical abilities, which were at the highest level, there was always so much spirit. His essence and whatever he was trying to speak to beyond music was always so pronounced in his music. And it’s right there, this love, it’s supreme and it’s universal and it’s something that every person, every musician, every artist, every human being, can relate to that idea. I think that it’s so pronounced in the music that anyone who gives it chance to speak to them will feel that ideal and will feel love and that’s what grabs you. As soon as you let go to it, then you feel that sensation, you feel that feeling, and all of its facets. And when you go on the whole journey of the whole record, you can’t help but to feel like this witness to something profound, witness to something from God.
Q-Tip: I guess music is like the connectivity to life’s evolution. And in a spiritual way. Because, when life first arrives, say it’s just a baby, you see the cute little eyes, the cheeks, the drooling, the crying, the laughing, then as it evolves, you see that same little face, then you see a tooth, then they start uttering words, then they just become a whole thing. And I think “A Love Supreme” is kind of like that because, on face value, I remember when I first heard it, it’s just like, “Wow.” But then it grows and evolves. Or the old adages, you hear something different every time you hear a good song or a certain song, they always have these reveals within the song that you may not have noticed five years prior and there’s a certain maturity you gain when you hear something. With this album, it’s like an infant that’s just morphing.
Dulli: I consider myself a spiritual but not religious person. So what I take from it is what I take from any great music, it moves inside me and it takes me somewhere. That song for me to be in a rock and roll band and grab that out of the ether, it means it had a spiritual import for me. It came to me onstage in the middle of another song and I was able to weave it in. Then when you’re touring, after you weave something in you begin to hone it, and pretty soon I was covering the song. So clearly, to me, it had a power that resided in me probably since I was 19 years old.
Glasper: My mother passed away in 2004 and I think that turned something on in me. Life started happening after that, I started getting real relationships with people, started losing other people, started losing family members, you see family members on drugs, you see what drugs do to people, you see what racism does in America, you see people get killed by the police, you see all these things and now I’m going through my own version of some of what Trane was dealing with in his life. Growing up in the church as well, “A Love Supreme” you can really hear he found spirituality, you can hear it in the music. The music was spiritual. That was around when he was coming out of drugs and found his new footing in life and found God. I can totally understand that now because in my own way I’ve done the same.
Croker: I feel like John Coltrane in this situation is like Martin Luther King Jr. giving the “I Have a Dream” speech. That concept is so simple, but it’s so impactful. John Coltrane is like a master minister on this album and his band is like his choir. It contains all those elements of what is commonplace in jazz now. A spiritual aspect of a drone, an eight-bar form and playing the blues and some kind of rebuttal thing. That’s like part of the standard repertoire now.
Jamie Krents: Part of the reason “A Love Supreme” is so important is that it defies categorization. It’s easy to call it a spiritual jazz record but just listening to the diversity of the musicians you’ve spoken to about it, it’s had just as big an impact on people we associate with punk rock as it does with the most diligent jazz musicians and nonmusicians too. I think that that’s one reason why it survived, and it is amazing to think that we’re celebrating the 60th anniversary and yet it sounds as fresh as anything I’ve heard this year. I don’t say that lightly.
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