Album: A Love Supreme
A Love Supreme is an album by the jazz saxophonist and composer John Coltrane. He recorded it in one session on December 9, 1964, at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, leading a quartet featuring pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones.
A Love Supreme was released by Impulse! Records in January 1965, and ranks among Coltrane's best-selling albums and is widely considered as his masterpiece.
A Love Supreme is a through-composed suite in four parts: "Acknowledgement" (which includes the oral chant that gives the album its name), "Resolution", "Pursuance", and "Psalm". Coltrane plays tenor saxophone on all parts.
The album begins with the bang of a gong (tam-tam) and cymbal washes on the first track, "Acknowledgement". Jimmy Garrison enters on double bass with the four-note motif that lays the foundation of the movement. Coltrane begins a solo. He plays variations on the motif until he repeats the four notes thirty-six times. The motif then becomes the vocal chant "a love supreme", sung by Coltrane accompanying himself through overdubs nineteen times.
In the fourth and final movement, "Psalm", Coltrane performs what he calls a "musical narration". The devotional is included in the liner notes. Coltrane "plays" the words of the poem on saxophone but doesn't speak them.
A Love Supreme has been categorized as modal jazz, avant-garde jazz, free jazz, hard bop, and post-bop.
The track list is Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance and Psalm.
Further information about the album is found here.
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This content was excerpted from the Wikipedia article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Love_Supreme, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).
A Love Supreme - John Coltrane, 1965
