Love Supreme, Sound Superb
The Age
Saturday January 11, 2003
Book review: A LOVE SUPREME: THE CREATION OF JOHN COLTRANE'S CLASSIC ALBUM, By Ashley Kahn, Granta, $49.95
Even while growing up in a tiny cramped apartment in Philadelphia, John Coltrane would spend hours practising on the saxophone. Needless to say, the neighbours weren't impressed. Fortunately, the pastor from a nearby church provided salvation for young Coltrane and his neighbours - he said he could practice all he wanted in the church giving him a key so he could come and go as he wished.
Alone in the chapel, surrounded by his thoughts, silence and sanctity, Coltrane would devote himself to the universally transcendent worlds of music and explore his craft assiduously.
Things came full circle less than 20 years later, on December 9, 1964, when Coltrane blew out the suite of music now known as A Love Supreme.
It wasn't just his best-known album. It was one of the great pieces of iconic and groundbreaking art, held together by tension of forces pulling in opposite directions - modernist jazz, an art form built around notions of creative destruction, that was also intensely religious.
Saxophonist Archie Shepp compared Coltrane performances to being in church: ``Like Bach and Mozart, Coltrane actually raised this music from the secular to an area of serious, religious world music."
Indeed, the music itself seemed to transcend jazz. As Ashley Kahn points out in his second book on a jazz hit (the first examined the Miles Davis iconic work Kind of Blue), a Web search on A Love Supreme with no reference to Coltrane will lead to new and surprising worlds.
These include '80s love songs, worldbeat, rap, soul, R&B, techno, a British soccer fanzine and a high-quality photographic collection of African-American couples.
Listening to the album while on tour, U2's leader Bono said it showed the transcendent possibilities of music.
``There is so much wickedness in this world but beauty is our consolation prize," Bono said.
``The beauty of John Coltrane's reedy voice, its whispers, its knowingness, its sly sexuality, its praise of creation. And so Coltrane began to make sense to me. I left the music on repeat and I stayed awake listening to a man facing God with the gift of his music."
Kahn's book dissects the forces that shaped Coltrane and his music. Just as significantly, it provides a blow-by-blow analysis of the recording session with Coltrane and his quartet of drummer Elvin Jones, bassist Jimmy Garrison and McCoy Tyner on piano.
Each part of the suite is taken apart, from the way Elvin Jones opened with an exotic splash by striking a Chinese gong, to the way Coltrane recited the poem - subsequently printed on the inside of the album cover - into the saxophone, allowing the libretto to define the lyrical flow of the music.
The album that redefined music was in the can in just a few hours, four at the most. One of the most important recording sessions in the jazz story was over before midnight.
Kahn even examines the lost session recorded the next day when A Love Supreme was reworked with two basses (the second was Art Davis) and two saxes (Shepp).
The master tapes have disappeared but the never-before-heard session has appeared in a special release late this year.
This is no jazz biography or slice of jazz history. Kahn's purpose is purely journalistic - laying bare the methodology, vision, industry and players who set out on the journey.
Fastidiously researched and tightly written, it offers insights that help unfold the mysteries of an artwork that was always destined to become an icon.
© 2003 The Age
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