All selections composed by John Coltrane.
Mstr. No. & Take
Time
1> Part 1 — Acknowledgement
90243
07:43
2> Part 2 — Resolution
90244-7
07:20
3> Part 3 — Pursuance / 4> Part 4 — Psalm
90245
10:42 / 7:05
John Coltrane (tenor saxophone); McCoy Tyner (piano); Jimmy Garrison (bass); Elvin Jones (drums). Track 1: Add Coltrane (vocal). Recorded December 9, 1964 at Van Gelder Recording Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey Original-LP issue: A Love Supreme Impulse AS-77
Original recordings produced by Bob Thiele Original recordings engineered by Rudy Van Gelder
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Original-LP cover photograph by Bob Thiele Original-LP cover design by George Gray/Viceroy Original-LP liner illustration by Victor Kalin Tracks are in their original-LP sequence. Master numbers show the order in which the tracks were recorded. All previous digital incarnations of A Love Supreme have been derived from a 1971 secondgeneration master tape. While this tape did not suffer from the processing and alterations that noise reduction systems cause, it did add equalization and compression to the original recording and had an inexplicable flaw in the left channel during the first three minutes of “Pursuance.” The tape was not physically flawed, so it must be assumed that the problem was caused in the 1971 transfer process. This situation was a cause of great concern until it occurred to us that A Love Supreme was originally issued in 1965 in territories other than the United States. The hope was that we could find a contemporaneous copy of the original master that would not have had this affliction. A March 1965 master was found at EMI’s London vaults and dispatched to New York. Not only was the problem absent on that tape, but it had no added equalization or compression. A relieved Rudy Van Gelder declared it to be as close to the real thing as one could get in the analog domain without having the original tape: “This tape preserves the sonic details with vivid accuracy: Elvin’s cymbals, the deep intensity of the vocal chant, and the openness of the group sound.”
JOHN COLTRANE A LOVE SUPREME
At the moment of conception, every great human gesture took equal standing among the details and demands of daily life. While creating his most ageless canvases, Picasso stepped back and swept the studio. While developing their masterpieces, Beethoven paid the bills, James Joyce lit out for the bar, and Louis Armstrong took five and grabbed lunch. For John Coltrane in 1964, inspiration coincided with dirty plates and diapers. As Alice Coltrane recalls, they had recently moved into a secluded house in Dix Hills, Long Island, and their first son had just been born. It was late summer or early fall, because the weather was nice at the time in New York. There was an unoccupied area in the house where we hardly ever went; sometimes a family member would visit [and] would stay there. John would go up there, take little portions of food every now and then, spending his time pondering over the music he heard.
Alice remained busy with John Jr. and Michelle, her four-year-old by her first marriage. Eventually reappearing, Coltrane — normally deep in thought, preoccupied with musical matters — was unusually light-hearted. It was like Moses coming down from the mountain, it was so beautiful. He walked down and there was that joy, that peace in his face, tranquillity. So I said, “Tell me everything, we didn’t see you really for four or five days.” . . . He said, “This is the first time that I have received all of the music for what I want to record, in a suite. This is the first time I have everything, everything ready.”
Three months later, Coltrane took his four-part suite into the studio and called it A Love Supreme.
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A LOVE SUPREME TODAY
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Four decades on, Coltrane’s best-known album rides an ever-ascending path of reverence and reach. To jazz cognoscenti, it is the pinnacle of Coltrane’s Classic Quartet, the collective high-water mark of the saxophonist in the company of pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones. To generations of music lovers whose general embrace elbows aside considerations of category, the album resonates with a universal pull. To Coltrane devotees, it proves as self–revealing a statement as any he recorded. “If you want to know who John Coltrane was,” maintains Elvin Jones, “you have to know A Love Supreme.” To the legions who heed the album’s spiritual call — and to those who respond to Coltrane’s confessional notes of redemption and praise — the album remains a seminal gift to God, “a humble offering to Him.” Years before rock stars honored swamis with recordings, decades before hip-hop CDs listed the obligatory shout-out to the Almighty, Coltrane stepped apart from the hip jazz elite and effected a public spiritual disrobing. “I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music,” he wrote, confirming his indebtedness. “I feel this has been granted through His grace.” DECEMBER 9, 1964
It was a Wednesday, the middle of a typically busy week at Rudy Van Gelder’s self-designed reverberant studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Coltrane pulled his Chevy station wagon into the wooded driveway somewhere around 7 p.m. to meet the engineer, his sidemen, and his producer, Impulse Records chief Bob Thiele. Night sessions were the rule rather than the exception for the saxophonist, but one thing about that evening stood out, as Van Gelder recalls.
RUDY VAN GELDER
One reason I enjoyed working with John [was that] he would usually record only one or two titles per session. . . . An unusual thing about the A Love Supreme session is that he had pre-planned all the music. He did the full suite in one session.
Coltrane had carefully arranged the evening to follow the course of the album. Three interlocking segments were to be recorded in succession: Parts 1 and 2 (as Thiele would label them) would be edited together as Side A of the resulting LP; the lengthy final part — intended as Side B — would be tackled in one take. Provided only brief instruction, Coltrane’s sidemen fell into their familiar routine, and recognized a few of the melodies. Says Tyner: On A Love Supreme, actually we had played some of the music in the clubs before we recorded it. . . . I think that’s why John liked to play the songs for a while, to open them up. The more familiar you get with it, the more interesting places you can go with the song.
The session’s first complete take was a keeper. “Acknowledgement” — a loose minor-key vamp — proved the theme of the suite (often reinterpreted and retitled as simply “A Love Supreme”). It opens with a rubato benediction in the unlikely key (for Coltrane) of E major, cued by an unlikely (for jazz) stroke on a Chinese gong, warmly welcoming the listener. It soon unveils the famous four-note bass line that becomes the suite’s mantra as the saxophonist adopts and randomly transposes the melodic phrase, eliciting a variety of interpretations. To some, it denotes the pursuit of a harmonic freedom sprung from Coltrane’s tenure with Miles Davis (the modal experimentation on Kind of Blue is a brilliant example); to others, it seems a preview of the free, atonal
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explorations to come. To Alice Coltrane, it’s evidence of a self-hewn philosophy expressed through his instrument, as she suggested in 1967: He liked to draw an analogy between mankind and his horn, explaining that one group might represent the upper register, another the mid-range, and yet another the deeper notes, but that it took all to make the whole.
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In the suite’s most startling moment, Coltrane removes the saxophone from his lips and leans close to the microphone, intoning the almost doleful signature chant. As an accented piano chord clearly cues the vocal section, one can hear that Coltrane began chanting off-mike; a barely audible “supreme” makes itself known. “Acknowledgement” ends with Garrison taking a loose, tonally shifting solo, one side of a seam to be stitched to the bassist’s double-stopped introduction to Part 2. “Resolution” offers a more familiar, swing-like structure, defined by its urgently played melody. As Coltrane admitted, his explosive entrance derived more from instinct than artful plan: “For me, when I go from a calm moment to a moment of extreme tension, the only factors that push me are emotional factors, to the exclusion of all musical considerations.” Excluding any false starts, “Pursuance ”/ “Psalm” was almost assuredly another one-take wonder. The just-under-eighteen-minute performance that closed the session was an impressive display of compression and emotional balance. “Pursuance” reveals the quartet maneuvering from Jones’s brief rolling introduction (“I had to play something that was simple and clear. So I played half of an Afro-Cuban beat, and it worked out!”) to the finger-snapping theme of “Pursuance” (a cousin to Coltrane’s “Mr. P.C.”) to Tyner’s cascading improvisation, which builds to a definitive example of the quartet’s high-energy solo-to-solo hand-off. Boosted by a crescendo of piano chords, Coltrane
steps in at full throttle. In a relatively small frame — two and a half minutes — he achieves the same raspy-throated transcendence and free-flowing lyricism his legendary twenty-minute live solos reached nightly. Like a spent runner, Coltrane skips into the restatement of the “Pursuance” theme as Jones closes the tune with a fusillade of shots to cymbals and snare. Emphasizing the symmetric structure of Coltrane’s suite, Garrison emerges to take his solo turn, replete with strummed figures and single-note runs, acting as a buffer before the suite’s most introspective movement. “The fourth and last part is a musical narration of the theme, ‘A Love Supreme,’ ” Coltrane wrote in his liner notes. “It is entitled ‘Psalm.’ ” As music educator Lewis Porter outlined in his book John Coltrane: His Life and Music (University of Michigan Press, 1998), the shape and flow of “Psalm” 7 derived directly from the saxophonist’s poem, printed on the album’s inner cover. With Tyner, Garrison, and Jones (on the unusual choice of tympani) providing atmospheric support, Coltrane “reads” the words, following the cadences of the text from the opening phrase, “A love supreme,” to the final “Amen.” The oft-repeated phrase “Thank you God” develops an incantatory ring. Like a whispered prayer, the effect of “Psalm” is hushed and extremely private; the suite’s reflective point of closure stands as one of Coltrane’s most serene, soul-baring performances. However, Coltrane felt a more dramatic denouement was still needed. Van Gelder recalls that he came into the control room with Bob Thiele and asked me if he could add something to the end of the piece, which we did. . . . At that time I was already familiar with the overdubbing process.
ELVIN JONES
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Having inserted saxophone obbligatos on the 1963 John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman album, Coltrane was comfortable with multitracking as well. He asked that the session tape be rewound and stepped back in the studio to accent the swell and fade of the final seconds of “Psalm.” Thus, on opposing tracks, it is possible to hear Garrison’s bowing blend with his strumming, Jones’s cymbal crash accompany the thunder of his mallets, and Coltrane’s wide, upper-register vibrato mix with his own low-end phrasing: a virtual — if momentary — septet. Coltrane’s experimental drive compelled him to return to the studio the next day, with tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp and bassist Art Davis added to the quartet. The results, now featured on A Love Supreme (Deluxe Edition) Impulse 314 589 945-2, were not deemed issue-worthy at the time. Limited to two, chant-less takes of “Acknowledgement,” the second session proved a blueprint for later, more successful quartet-plus essays (“Nature Boy” the following February; Meditations almost a year later); compelled Coltrane to thank Shepp and Davis in his liner notes (triggering decades of speculation about the “lost” A Love Supreme recordings); and was ultimately bypassed as Alice Coltrane recalled. “We talked about that, and he said this is the final — it will be the quartet [version].” THE ALBUM
With unusual rapidity — and the intent of elevating A Love Supreme beyond past Impulse titles (the cover traded the label’s orange-and-black standard for a black-on-white elegance) — the album was readied for market. The saxophonist’s favorite photograph of himself, taken by Thiele two years before at the Duke Ellington & John Coltrane session, was chosen for the cover. The God-praising poem, a letter to the listener, and a portrait by
noted artist and jazz fan Victor Kalin were placed on the interior of the album’s gatefold. By late February 1965, copies of the new album began to carry Coltrane’s music and message to a wider audience than ever before. A Love Supreme benefited from good timing. ABC-Paramount, Impulse’s parent company, was in expansion mode, riding the industry-wide wave of success that followed the British invasion. At sales conventions and in trade journals, Coltrane’s latest effort received equal billing with hit-laden albums from Ray Charles and the Impressions. The label exhibited its confidence with full-page ads in Down Beat and Jazz magazine. Some critics confessed reservation with the album’s heart-on-sleeve religiosity, but most nonetheless delivered ecstatic reviews. Beyond the commercial, other well-timed factors helped boost the 9 album. At the decade’s midpoint, the seeds of a collective political and spiritual change were set to flower. “A Love Supreme reached out and influenced those people who were into peace,” Miles Davis noted astutely, “hippies and people like that.” The Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh offers a telling snapshot of his mixed-ethnic neighborhood in San Francisco, soon to become the cradle of national youth culture. That’s one of the records I would hear walking through the Haight [Haight-Ashbury] on a spring night, all over town. You’d be walking, and somebody’d be playing [Bob Dylan’s] Bringing It All Back Home, and somebody’d be playing [Miles Davis’s] Sketches of Spain, and another time it was A Love Supreme. It was all just coming out of people’s windows.
Within months, from college dorms and ghetto apartments, on jazz radio and underground FM stations alike, the album began to emerge as Coltrane’s career-defining, genre–defying classic.
As 1965 ended, the music industry and public spoke in unison. A Love Supreme was nominated for two Grammys (it would yield to winners Ramsey Lewis and Lalo Schifrin); Down Beat’s year-end readers’ poll picked Coltrane as tenor saxophone player of the year and inducted him into the magazine’s Hall of Fame. A Love Supreme was crowned album of the year. It was to be the last time during his life that Coltrane enjoyed such a unified front of support. The trajectory of the music that followed — the loose big-band charge of Ascension, the tenor-on-tenor fury of the live recordings with Pharoah Sanders, the final multirhythmic duets with drummer Rashied Ali on Interstellar Space — tested and eroded his universal appeal. From the piano bench in her husband’s group, Alice Coltrane watched as the crowds began to thin.
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When he became avant garde . . . he lost many people, many followers, [but] there was no way he could go back. . . . What he had already done often became obsolete the next day. That was the type of mentality he had. . . . From A Love Supreme onward, we were seeing a progression toward higher spiritual realization, higher spiritual development.
Most enthusiasts agree that the album marks a departure point, a stark line dividing the music that came before and after. But to Coltrane, it was only another step in an ongoing journey. As a complete composition, he returned to it only once, performing it on July 26, 1965 at an outdoor jazz festival in Antibes, France.* “I remember very definitely,” Bob Thiele once stated. “I said, ‘Which album do you really dig the most?’ ” Coltrane’s answer: “Well, I like them all. . . . After I listen to one for a few weeks, I stop listening and forget about it.” Yet a vast, varied musical audience cannot. In sound, spirit, and name, whether embraced as pure musical performance, heartfelt prayer, or some *Fortunately recorded, and featured on A Love Supreme (Deluxe Edition) Impulse 314 589 945-2.
subjective combination of the two, A Love Supreme emits an arc of influence that remains unbroken. Perhaps writer Nat Hentoff, who witnessed the arrival of the album, sums it best, extolling Coltrane’s most renowned work while returning it to its point of humble, mortal origin: By the time A Love Supreme hit, Trane struck such a spiritual chord in so many listeners that people started to think of him as being beyond human. I think that’s unfair. He was just a human being like you and me — but he was willing to practice more, to do all the things that somebody has to do to excel. The real value in what John Coltrane did was that what he accomplished, he did as a human.
Ashley Kahn June 2002 Ashley Kahn is the author of Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece (Da Capo Press, 2000) and A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album (Viking, 2002).
McCOY TYNER
JIMMY GARRISON
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A LOVE SUPREME THE ORIGINAL LINER NOTES
DEAR LISTENER: ALL PRAISE BE TO GOD TO WHOM ALL PRAISE IS DUE. Let us pursue Him in the righteous path. Yes it is true; “seek and ye shall find”. Only through Him can we know the most wondrous bequeathal.
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During the year 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music. I feel this has been granted through His grace. ALL PRAISE TO GOD. As time and events moved on, a period of irresolution did prevail. I entered into a phase which was contradictory to the pledge and away from the esteemed path; but thankfully, now and again through the unerring and merciful hand of God, I do perceive and have been duly re-informed of His OMNIPOTENCE, and of our need for, and dependence on Him. At this time I would like to tell you that NO MATTER WHAT . . . IT IS WITH GOD. HE IS GRACIOUS AND MERCIFUL. HIS WAY IS IN LOVE, THROUGH WHICH WE ALL ARE. IT IS TRULY — A LOVE SUPREME —. This album is a humble offering to Him. An attempt to say “THANK YOU GOD” through our work, even as we do in our hearts and with our tongues. May He help and strengthen all men in every good endeavor. The music herein is presented in four parts. The first is entitled “ACKNOWLEDGEMENT”, the second, “RESOLUTION”, the third, “PURSUANCE”, and the fourth
and last part is a musical narration of the theme, “A LOVE SUPREME” which is written in the context; it is entitled “PSALM”. In closing, I would like to thank the musicians who have contributed their much appreciated talents to the making of this album and all previous engagements. To Elvin, James and McCoy, I would like to thank you for that which you give each time you perform on your instruments. Also, to Archie Shepp (tenor saxist) and to Art Davis (bassist) who both recorded on a track that regrettably will not be released at this time; my deepest appreciation for your work in music past and present. In the near future, I hope that we will be able to further the work that was started here. Thanks to producer Bob Thiele; to recording engineer, Rudy Van Gelder; and the staff of ABC-Paramount records. Our appreciation and thanks to all people of good will and good works the world over, for in the bank of life is not good that investment which surely pays the highest and most cherished dividends. May we never forget that in the sunshine of our lives, through the storm and after the rain — it is all with God — in all ways and forever. ALL PRAISE TO GOD. With love to all, I thank you,
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A LOVE SUPREME
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I will do all I can to be worthy of Thee O Lord. It all has to do with it. Thank you God. Peace. There is none other. God is. It is so beautiful. Thank you God. God is all. Help us to resolve our fears and weaknesses. Thank you God. In You all things are possible. We know. God made us so. Keep your eye on God. God is. He always was. He always will be. No matter what . . . it is God. He is gracious and merciful. It is most important that I know Thee. Words, sounds, speech, men, memory, thoughts, fears and emotions — time — all related . . . all made from one . . . all made in one. Blessed be His name. Thought waves — heat waves — all vibrations — all paths lead to God. Thank you God. His way . . . it is so lovely . . . it is gracious. It is merciful — thank you God. One thought can produce millions of vibrations and they all go back to God . . . everything does. Thank you God. Have no fear . . . believe . . . thank you God. The universe has many wonders. God is all. His way . . . it is so wonderful. Thoughts — deeds — vibrations, etc. They all go back to God and He cleanses all. He is gracious and merciful . . . thank you God. Glory to God . . . God is so alive. God is.
God loves. May I be acceptable in Thy sight. We are all one in His grace. The fact that we do exist is acknowledgement of Thee O Lord. Thank you God. God will wash away all our tears . . . He always has . . . He always will. Seek Him everyday. In all ways seek God everyday. Let us sing all songs to God To whom all praise is due . . . praise God. No road is an easy one, but they all go back to God. With all we share God. It is all with God. It is all with Thee. Obey the Lord. Blessed is He. We are from one thing . . . the will of God . . . thank you God. I have seen God — I have seen ungodly — none can be greater — none can compare to God. Thank you God. He will remake us . . . He always has and He always will. It is true — blessed be His name — thank you God. God breathes through us so completely . . . so gently we hardly feel it . . . yet, it is our everything. Thank you God. ELATION — ELEGANCE — EXALTATION — All from God. Thank you God. Amen. JOHN COLTRANE — December, 1964
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Reissue Produced by Ken Druker, Ashley Kahn, and Bryan Koniarz Mastered by Rudy Van Gelder at Van Gelder Recording Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey Studio production by Michael Cuscuna Art directed by Hollis King Designed by Edward ODowd Art production managed by Sherniece Smith Production assistance by Mark Smith Photographs by Chuck Stewart except page 5 by Esmond Edwards Notes edited by Peter Keepnews Special thanks to Cary Anning, Hiroshi Aono, Alice Coltrane, Michelle Coltrane, Ravi Coltrane, Elaine Crowther, Michel Delorme, Yasuhiro Fujioka, Nathan Graves, Regina Joskow-Dunton, Bill Kaplan, Jamie Krents, Erick Labson, Marc Lipiner, Chris Morris, Wolf Schmaler, Takeshi Uno, and Jeff Willens Check out our full catalog complete with soundclips and sign up today for free downloads, newsletters, artist updates, videos, contests, and more at: www.impulserecords.com © 2003 The Verve Music Group, a Division of UMG Recordings, Inc. All rights reserved. • Printed in the USA. • B0000610-02
John Coltrane saw the album-length suite A Love Supreme as his gift to God. The world has come to see it as a classic — not only Coltrane’s best known work, but one of the most important and influential jazz records ever made. 1>Part
1 — Acknowledgement 7:43 2 — Resolution 7:20 3>Part 3 — Pursuance / 4> Part 4 — Psalm 10:42 / 7:05 2>Part
John Coltrane (tenor saxophone); McCoy Tyner (piano); Jimmy Garrison (bass); Elvin Jones (drums). Recorded December 1964 at Van Gelder Recording Studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey Original recordings produced by
Bob Thiele
Original recordings engineered by Rudy Van Gelder Original-LP cover photograph by Bob Thiele
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© 2003 The Verve Music Group, a Division of UMG Recordings, Inc. Distributed by Universal Music & Video Distribution Corp., 100 Universal City Plaza, 4th Floor, Universal City, California 91608. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction, hiring, lending, public performance, and broadcasting prohibited. Printed in the USA.
