John Coltrane's Love Supreme
Published March 03, 2003
A year and a half after the release of A Love Supreme, Time magazine would feature a blurting cover story titled "Is God Dead". For Coltrane, and many of his listeners, the answer was a definitive "NO". But how God was perceived would be changing, as many youths sought to find Him through eastern religions, and other non-traditional methods (Tom Wolfe's brilliant mid-1970s essay, "The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening" would brilliantly place all of that searching in context). As Kahn notes, A Love Supreme was right at home:
Saxophonist David Murray--later to record with the Grateful Dead--agrees [with McGuinn] that Coltrane "had pierced into the whole 'flower-child' hippie bass. They might not have even known about any other jazz album, but they knew about A Love Supreme." Like McGuinn, Murray credits the palatability of Coltrane's message. "They connected to spirituality in music, and I don't necessarily mean religion--he was taking the whole religious thing into pure spirituality, and that's where he plugged in, big time."Coltrane would die in 1967, only a couple of years after releasing A Love Supreme, and as Murray's quote foreshadows, he would quickly be canonized as some kind of secular jazz saint by some of his more fervent listeners. (The artsy Bravo cable network occasionally runs a British-produced special devoted to some of the more--one strains for the right word--extreme examples of this process, including a "Church of John Coltrane".)
I'd like to think that Coltrane would view such attempts at worship as a bit silly, and more than a little misdirected. But they do show the power of music specifically, and art in general, when directed towards expressing a higher belief. Even the most hardened skeptics typically concede that Coltrane's album is a singular, personal statement, but one that resonates with millions of listeners worldwide.
To understand more about it, be sure to read A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album.
- John Coltrane's Love Supreme
- Published: March 03, 2003
- Type:
- Section: Books
- Filed Under: Books: Entertainment, Music: Jazz
- Writer: Ed Driscoll
- Ed Driscoll's BC Writer page
- Ed Driscoll's personal site
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Great Article!!!
The writer here is well meaning I'm sure
but also really WRONG on several points.
Miles Davis' "Kind Of Blue" was recorded
and released in the spring of 1959 as
was Coltrane's "Giant Steps" erroneously
tagged here as being a 1960 release.
As an aside,Charles Mingus' LP "Ah Um"
was from 1959 also.Definitely a stellar
year for Jazz.
It's a darn good article! It catches the spirit of the 60s, the revolution in the social air that gave the music a home.
There has been a lot of, and in fact most of the articles dealing with Trane's social and spiritual connectedness with the Hippies, and it is good that people know that. But, his music was very profoundly influenced by and influencing of the spiritual lives of those of us in the Black community who were in a state of open rebellion, and many of us who became Marxist dogmatic materialists had become atheists.
The loss of the ghostly God - the unbodily body - was a loss of spirituality. As I said we were dogmatic materialists.
But, Trane's piece "Spirituals" performed Live at the Village Vanguard enabled us to merge with the spirituality if pantheism, as Art as Hegel said was the empirical side of the Region of the Absolute Spirit. Trane's "Psalm" poem connection with the final movement of the Suite, as did the music itself in A Love Supreme took us into a pantheistic spirituality.
This is to say, a spirituality that comprise nature, as the Absolute is not just Subject, but Substance as well (to do an inversion of Hegel and Feuerbach re Spinoza)and Trane, Alice and Pharaoh provided a Pantheism that we felt, as well as rationally understood.
Lil Joe
Los Angeles
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Very informative and thought-provoking. People look for transcendence wherever they can find it.