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September 26-October 2, 2002

music

Pursuance to Psalm

A new book and a newly packaged reissue illuminate John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.

by Nate Chinen

“During the year 1957,” John Coltrane famously wrote, “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. I feel this has been granted through His grace.”

The incident sparking Coltrane's awakening was severe and self-inflicted. It was late April of 1957, 10 years before he would die of liver cancer, and the saxophonist's raging heroin addiction had finally provoked a pink slip from a recently sobered Miles Davis (also fired was fellow Philadelphian and junkie Philly Joe Jones; Davis replaced him and Coltrane with Art Taylor and Sonny Rollins respectively). And so a chastened Trane returned to his hometown, locked himself in a room of his mother's house, and fasted until his poisons had run their course. As some accounts have it, the saxophonist saw the image of God during this excruciating exile; according to legend he emerged from his sick room, like Moses from Mount Sinai, a boldly transfigured man.

Apocrypha aside, Coltrane's physical and spiritual transformation after this point are incontestable. After a month spent detoxing by day and tentatively playing by night (at the Red Rooster, with a 17-year-old local pianist named McCoy Tyner), the saxophonist commuted to Manhattan to record his first session as a leader: the simply titled Coltrane, on Prestige. (Among the tunes recorded was a telling "Straight Street.") Mere weeks later, Coltrane joined the Thelonious Monk Quartet in what would become a legendary run at the Five Spot; by engagement's end he was invited back into Miles Davis' employ. From then on, he followed a continuing, if erratic, upward trajectory -- culminating in the 1964 Impulse! LP for which Coltrane penned the supplication above.

Certain previous studio albums may merit equally fulsome praise -- the hard-bop apotheosis Blue Train, the harmonic dissertation Giant Steps, the modal exploration My Favorite Things -- but Coltrane's weighty discography includes no album invested with as much meaning, or cultural import, as A Love Supreme. That album, fast approaching its 40th anniversary, has enjoyed a reign as one of jazz's most powerfully timeless statements. Ironically, the four-part suite was very much of its time. "Arriving at the midpoint of the sixties," writes Ashley Kahn, "A Love Supreme distilled the decade's theme of universal love and spiritual consciousness." Simultaneously, an album coming months after Malcolm X's assassination and Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Alabama couldn't help but reflect "the struggle against opposite forces" (in the words of Amiri Baraka), along with the "transcendental embrace of what is, and what is going to be."

In truth, A Love Supreme is simply a document marking one moment in the development of an artist and his group. To understand the album in context is to know where Coltrane was coming from, and where he was going -- and, if possible, how and why. This is no small task, but it's easier now than perhaps ever before, thanks to the forthcoming publication of Kahn's A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album (Viking) and the release of A Love Supreme (Deluxe Edition) on Impulse!. The former is a window onto rich, expansive terrain. The latter is the view.

Kahn approaches Coltrane's opus with admirable, almost obsessive objectivity. As in his last book, a deconstruction of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue (Da Capo Press), the critic and former VH1 editor illuminates his subject from many angles, eschewing grandiloquent claims in favor of detailed particulars. Through exhaustive interviews and secondary citations, he paints a bright portrait of Coltrane's musical and professional evolution -- along with information about such behind-the-glass participants as engineer Rudy Van Gelder and producer Bob Thiele, and sidemen Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones. Musical analysis, offered mostly by musicians, is presented plainly and without pretension. Hagiography, easily the Coltrane scholar's most dangerous houseguest, barely sets foot in the foyer. In fact, Kahn's stance is avowedly agnostic. A self-proclaimed "diehard rationalist," he affords more space to a discussion of sociopolitical import than to any spiritual concerns. Citing Coltrane's written credo "God breathes through us so completely, so gently we hardly feel it," Kahn marks his agreement -- "with a qualifying Œif.'" That "if" prompts him to allow for a number of musicians' testimonials. As a historian, he evinces an almost academic interest in the possible link between "A Love Supreme" and the noted 19th-century tract "Love: The Supreme Gift," by Scottish theologian Dr. Henry Drummond. (Which Coltrane, who was raised Methodist, might well have encountered.)

Stylistically, A Love Supreme occupies a tensile middle ground between the moody modality of previous Impulse! albums (like Crescent) and the avant-garde abandon of subsequent experiments (Ravi Coltrane points Kahn to the deliberate but unsystematic key transpositions in "Acknowledgment" as an early indication of harmonic freedom). Spiritually, however, the album is an ecstatic public dedication. "I think you have to be aware of the religious meaning of that piece," averred Lewis Porter in the radio documentary Tell Me How Long Trane's Been Gone. "Because a lot of the way that piece is structured has to do with the religious message he wants to convey." Porter, whose biography John Coltrane: His Life and Music (University of Michigan Press) stands as the finest to date, alludes specifically to "Psalm," the suite's final movement -- a musical rendering of a poem penned by the saxophonist. (Impulse! published this poem on the gatefold of the LP, but the literal connection between verse and music went largely unnoticed for years.)

But with each revelation comes the threat of reckoning. Pianist Bobby Timmons once described a conversation he had with Coltrane's mother: "I remember her telling me about A Love Supreme and how she was wishing he'd never written it. ... She was worried to death because she said, ŒWhen someone is seeing God, that means he's going to die.'" (In fact, he did, less than three years later, of sudden liver failure owing to earlier abuses.) This may account for the fact that, when "reading" his poem through the tenor, Coltrane notably skipped the phrase "I have seen God." It may or may not have anything to do with the fact that the saxophonist never performed his devotional poem again. In the only known live performance of A Love Supreme, at the 1965 Juan-les-Pins Festival in Antibes, "Psalm" is rendered not as a meticulous syllabic translation but as a vehicle for beseeching improvisation. (This concert, along with alternate studio takes featuring Art Davis and Archie Shepp, appears on Impulse's new CD release.) By that time, Coltrane had moved to another place and plane. Some, but by no means all, would say his ascension had begun -- into heaven, transcendence, or perhaps something as simple as truth.

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