Doc's Jazz Music Reviews

This is one of my all time favorite albums. I can not listen to it enough. In my opinion, this is real “Soul” music. You can sense the passion of Coltrane from the first note on Acknowledgement and it continues throughout the entire work. You can tell that the other musicians were caught up in the experience.

The album was recorded in one session on December 9, 1964 at the Van Gelder studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Coltrane's classic quartet consisted of pianist McCoy Tyner, bass player Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones The album is a four-part suite, broken up into tracks: "Acknowledgement" (which contains the famous mantra that gave the suite its name), "Resolution", "Pursuance", and "Psalm".

“This album is a humble offering to Him”, wrote John Coltrane in the linter notes to his masterwork A Love Supreme. "An attempt to say 'Thank You God' through our work.". Elsewhere in the notes, Coltrane wrote that "God breathes through us so completely...so gently we hardly feel it...yet, it is our everything"

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A Love Supreme is a suite about redemption, a work of pure spirit and song, that encapsulates all the struggles and aspirations of the 1960s. Following hard on the heels of the lyrical, swinging Crescent, A Love Supreme heralded Coltrane's search for spiritual and musical freedom, as expressed through polyrhythms, modalities, and purely vertical forms that seemed strange to some jazz purists, but which captivated more adventurous listeners (and rock fellow travelers such as the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cream, and the Byrds), while initiating a series of volatile, unruly prayer offerings, including Kulu Su Mama, Ascension, Om, Meditations, Expression, Interstellar Space. From the urgent speech-like timbre of his tenor, to the serpentine textures and earthy groove of Elvin Jones's drumming, Coltrane's suite proceeds with escalating intensity, conveying a hard-fought wisdom and a beckoning serenity in the prayer-like drones of "Psalm," where Jones rolls and rumbles like thunder as Garrison and Tyner toll away suggestively--all the while Coltrane searches for that one climactic note worthy of the love he wants to share. --Chip Stern