Treble 100: No. 5, John Coltrane – A Love Supreme

The oldest known piece of written music is a prayer. Dated to around 1400 B.C., the Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal was uncovered during a 1950s excavation of the Royal Palace at Ugarit (modern-day Ras Shamra, Syria) inscribed in cuneiform writing on fragments of clay tablets. Hundreds of years later, the pagan sacrifices, rites, and religious rituals of antiquity were almost always accompanied by a musician or singer. For Greeks and Romans, music performed within such a cultic context was even deemed to grant humans a level of control over the gods, a testament to the enormous power these cultures ascribed to their art. Some anthropologists have gone so far as to suggest that music’s initial purpose may have been religious, the primary means of communicating with the divine.

Music has always carried that association, a fact that is perhaps unsurprising when one considers its elemental structure. To briefly state the obvious, we are simply hearing the movement of air, manipulated into particular vibrations, propagating as a wave at particular frequencies, somehow attaining an emotional quality, a complex, multilayered meaning, along the way. Unlike most other art forms, this is an invisible affair, far beyond the realm of visceral human understanding. Elusive and intangible, music becomes the supreme aesthetic corollary to our religious or spiritual inner lives. In the words of Claude Levi-Strauss, it is “the supreme mystery of the science of man.”

Within that ancient religious-aesthetic dynamic there is a vast realm of possibilities, a limitless capacity to push the imagination into new territories, internal or external. That rich tradition of sacred music has often made me reflect on my own limited experience. I’ve grown up with music as a purely secular phenomenon, acknowledging the strange alchemy at play without digging any further. I’ve loved and been moved by music considered “spiritual” without feeling any overwhelming sense of transcendence or spirituality myself. In spite of my passion for these forms of expression, I’ve remained alienated from their devotional dimension, devoid of an especially religious or spiritual upbringing to truly ground that pursuit.

I suspect my early encounters with sacred music entrenched that detachment.
My defining experience of explicitly religious music was the bleak and obligatory weekly Sunday service of the British boarding school system, a proceeding I thankfully only witnessed a handful of times. In the early morning, dressed in ill-fitting, itchy uniforms, often hungover, boarders would solemnly trudge their way to chapel, cold, disheveled, wholly uninterested in the forthcoming hour of sermons. There was none of the meditative introspection of Indian classical, nor the rapturous elation of much gospel. This was not a site of communal uplift nor individual enlightenment, but a host to the damp, institutional tedium of the Church of England, an exercise in solemn routine and order. Though there is surely some spiritual capacity within the hymns and choral music of Anglican services, there is little to be found in the dejected singing of sleep-deprived teenagers.

It wasn’t until I heard Pharoah Sanders’ Karma that I recognized a different approach to spiritual music. Excited by this newfound modality and its unusually visceral effect, I explored the avant-garde cosmology of Sun Ra, the ethereal, Eastern influences of Alice Coltrane, the vibrant contemporary sounds of Kamasi Washington and Shabaka Hutchings, Nduduzo Makhathini and Nala Sinephro. This was a spirituality of a very different order, warm and expressionistic, free-flowing and non-denominational, irrepressibly emotional. A far cry from the unchanging, ascetic Anglican music I had known.

And behind all of these magnificent works, there appeared time and time again one touchstone: John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Within the oft-quoted spiritual jazz trinity described by Albert Ayler, “Trane was the Father,” the definitive, foundational figure of this emerging idiom. If jazz was born grounded, profane, and danceable, before becoming artful and challenging with bebop, it was Coltrane who made it transcendent.

From the first blissful wash of instrumentation that begins “Part 1 – Acknowledgement,” you can hear the sound of man reaching for something far beyond himself. But the peaceful, gong-assisted tone that introduces A Love Supreme can easily deceive first-time listeners. As the remainder of the recording shows, Coltrane’s was not an easily containable spirituality, far from the soothing New Age music modern audiences might associate with such divine intentions. This is in many regards a deeply challenging record, its rich emotionality hidden behind a wall of avant-garde influences. Coltrane was, after all, as much inspired by pioneers like Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra as he was by various pan-global theologies. If not in the right headspace, the dizzying rhythms of Elvin Jones and turbulent, modal melodic structures of Coltrane, McCoy Tyner and Jimmy Garrison may appear impenetrable, a band traveling deep within themselves and forgetting to bring everyone else along for the ride. But A Love Supreme’s uncompromising intensity and formal innovations shouldn’t be mistaken for overly cerebral inaccessibility or pretension. Coltrane sought above all to spread joy through his music, even if that mission required patience and concentration. As he wrote on the inner sleeve of the LP: “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…”

Once you’ve tapped into A Love Supreme’s world, a vast geyser erupts. A spirituality assuming form from the ground up, never losing itself in the heavens but remaining rooted in lived experience. After all, before he was a kind of musical guru, Coltrane was a man who had suffered through a crippling heroin addiction, seen close friends and fellow jazz players lose their own battles with dependency. He was a Black artist in 1960s America, witness to the brutal suppression of the Civil Rights Movement, the murder of Medgar Evers, the bombing of young Black church-goers in Alabama—all experiences that informed Coltrane and many African Americans’ interest in alternative religious and spiritual organisations (particularly Muslim sects like the Nation of Islam or Ahmadiyya). Asked if his music incorporated political undertones, Coltrane once replied, ”Well, I think that music, being an expression of the human heart, or of the human being itself, does express the whole thing—the whole of human experience at the particular time it is being expressed.”

As such, A Love Supreme, conceived as one continuous composition, floats through the vastness of Coltrane’s world. There is great warmth and tenderness, horrendous pain and torment, joyful transcendence and quiet, solemn reflection. There is understated groove, constantly teetering towards the edge, occasionally slipping off into frenzied, rapturous disorder; a dynamic held in microcosm by the inimitable serpentine polyrhythms of Elvin Jones.

Coltrane’s breadth of tone makes itself known right away. The serene introduction of “Acknowledgment” soon gives way to Jimmy Garrison’s mantra-esque bass line. Coltrane intentionally locks himself into a limited melodic range, pushing his ideas to their farthest limits. The band members grow more expressive and untethered from the groove as the piece goes on, before finally withdrawing, making space for the iconic multitracked chant of “A Love Supreme.”

Unlike the gentle initiation that begins the record, Coltrane explodes into “Resolution,” demonstrating the electrifying, often violent mercuriality that alienated so many critics. Skeptics could however find some comfort in its familiar fast-swinging rhythm and catchy lead melody. But Coltrane wouldn’t let them settle for too long, always pushing the song off-axis. In one particularly memorable detour, his tenor perilously ascends a series of jagged, wonderfully cumbersome notes, miraculously reaching a summit and returning to the central theme.

And then Tyner takes centre stage, handling his first of two solos on the album. In many respects, despite their later separation, Tyner was the perfect match for Coltrane’s intensity, his playing constantly modulating between light and graceful phrasings and harsh, powerful block chords. As accompanist, he is equally as mesmeric, his right hand dancing across the keys, his left thudding insistently, all the while forging a beautiful, unresolved harmonic ambiguity, a grey area for Coltrane to operate in.

This dynamic applies to the rest of the band too. Garrison, Tyner, and Jones specialized in cultivating incredibly dense, busy styles of performance, without losing their remarkable elasticity. After Jones’ remarkable opening solo, “Pursuance” pushes their unique synthesis to the brink of collapse. Tyner becomes a mad genius spiraling at light speed into the cosmos. Coltrane pushes even further, darting in and out of key, reaching higher and higher, eventually leading his band into rapturous mania, a frenzied, cacophonous blur of sound, a chorus of possessed musicians.

This could be as virtuosic and bustling as bebop, without its rigidity, as spiritual and contemplative as traditional sacred music without the need for solemn, blissful space. Rather than finding the divine through calm, Coltrane gives the impression of a man trying with all of his power to communicate, blowing his horn far beyond its capacity, corralling his players toward similarly cosmic eruptions of energy. Here, the skyward prayer or introspective meditation is not a quiet, tranquil affair but an exercise of immense, thunderous effort, at times strenuous and heartbreaking, at others joyful and exultant.

“Psalm” is the moment after the euphoria. The structures, melodies, and grooves that brought them so far, that facilitated their transcendence, now dissolve into a peaceful, formless beauty. Coltrane’s tenor is gentle and tired, sounding out syllable-by-syllable the poem printed on the inside of the record sleeve. Slowly the band subsides, departing with one last plaintive cry.

Despite the claims of countless listeners who have attested to A Love Supreme’s transformative, divine power, I’m still yet to experience that kind of revelation. I remain somewhat begrudgingly tethered to the material world, unable to transcend the secularism of my background. But A Love Supreme and its many disciples remind me that there is another kind of spirituality out there, another mode of contemplating, feeling, and articulating the ineffable, mystic dimensions of our experience. If at some point in the future, I or any other open-minded listener wants to pull on that thread any further, I know A Love Supreme will be waiting.

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