Day 45: John Coltrane - A Love Supreme
Album cover courtesy of Impulse! Records
Today I had the time and energy to really make a meal out of my daily album. I had my face mask at the ready, I’d fluffed my pillows just so, and I had a big, fat cup of spiced camomile tea on my bedside table. I was ready to listen to something hat I have to properly sink into to enjoy, and I knew exactly what I was after. Today was the day I listen to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.
In my 45 days of album-a-daying, I’ve only given one rating of 10/10, and that was for Karma by Pharoah Sanders. That was fairly unexpected, I never really thought I would be that big of a jazz person. I always thought jazz was a casually enjoyable form of music but also an inaccessible pursuit meant for the hoity-toity upper-class sophisticates of the world, a club where proles like me need not apply. That’s probably still true, but I did also find out that I do very much enjoy spiritual jazz.
Released in 1965, John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme is pretty much the definitive record of the spiritual jazz genre. Up until the late 1950s, Coltrane had been struggling with alcoholism and heroin addiction, losing his job touring with Miles Davis’ group as a result of his personal struggles. He experienced a spiritual awakening that helped him get sober, and he says in the liner notes that he asked God to give him the means to make other people happy through his music. He says that A Love Supreme is his offering to God and his way of saying thank you.
The album consists of four parts, each of which really hits you like a ton of bricks. While I didn’t feel A Love Supreme as strongly in my body as I did with the only other spiritual jazz album I’ve listened to so far, it is still a very physical experience. Especially during Acknowledgement, it felt like there were instruments lodged near the base of my skull. I had to take my headphones off at one stage to make sure there’s no sounds coming from elsewhere in the flat, it sounded almost too all-encompassing.
Written as Coltrane’s ode to the love of God, which he describes as a love supreme, it’s also a spiritually uplifting piece of work to the listener. It’s almost meditative, I wasn’t sure if I was about to doze off at one stage or if I was just deeply somewhere else. It’s very good, a strong 9/10.