1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 47. John Coltrane – A Love Supreme (1965)

The second half of the Sixties starts off with, oh no, another jazz album. And to begin with, I wasn’t that inspired since it’s that style of jazz that least interests me, lots of noodling about on the saxophone to a subdued beat section, but one of the things about this kind of jazz is that if you just let it wash over you it does become quite hypnotic. 

The album is divided into four tracks, or movements – Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance, and Psalm. Acknowledgment includes a chant of “A love supreme”, which is the basis for Coltrane’s saxophone “noodlings”, and I noticed that the other tracks put the other instruments to the front – piano on Resolution, drums on Pursuance, and bass on Psalm. I also discovered that Coltrane worked with both Thelonius Monk and Miles Davis, and this album is midway between the two – not quite as fragmented and avant garde as Monk, but less pure cool than Davis. 

This is apparently Coltrane’s homage to his religious faith, and even without knowing this it does come through. Psalm is written as a musical accompaniment to a poem by Coltrane (which is in the liner notes and thus invisible to streamers). If you check out my An Atheist Explores The Bible series, you’ll find that I quite liked the Psalms as a very human set of expressions about faith, and I’d put this album in the same category.  

And that is a lot more than I expected to write about it when I started the album up. 

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