John Coltrane performing at the Drome Lounge, in Detroit, in June, 1966.Photograph by Leni Sinclair / Getty
If you only own the original studio release of John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” (recorded on December 9, 1964, and issued in February, 1965), then the new three-disk release “A Love Supreme: The Complete Masters” of the classic album by Coltrane’s classic quartet will be a revelatory experience.
It’s a revelation because of one particular set, one that many Coltrane fans have heard before: the live performance by the quartet from Juan-les-Pins, France, on July 26, 1965, of the entire suite of “A Love Supreme.” This set was also included the “deluxe” two-disk edition of “A Love Supreme,” issued by Impulse! Records, in 2002. By making that performance readily available to the general listener, Impulse! sparked a major advance in the appreciation, the understanding—and the love—of “A Love Supreme.” The merits of that recording shed particular light on the importance—and, strangely, the limits—of the original studio recording of “A Love Supreme.”
The new release, “The Complete Masters,” also includes additional, previously unreleased material that, though intermittently excellent, isn’t essential. These nine previously unreleased tracks add up to thirty-five minutes of music—sort of. Two of those tracks are mono dubs of the last two movements (the second side) of the original LP issue, made not for release but for Coltrane’s reference. One track is the entirety of the last movement, “Psalm,” exactly as originally released except for the last half-minute, which is heard without the overdubs included in the released version. Two tracks feature the last two minutes of the first movement, “Acknowledgement,” as released but with different overdubs of Coltrane’s chanting of the phrase “A love supreme.”
Only four tracks, running a total of twenty-three minutes, offer previously unheard performances—two complete takes of “Acknowledgement” as played by a sextet that also includes a second tenor saxophonist, Archie Shepp, and the bassist Art Davis, and two takes that break off quickly. The 2002 set was noteworthy for its inclusion of two takes by that larger group, which had never been released in any format. Coltrane, in his liner notes to the original album, alluded to the existence of a “track” featuring Shepp and Davis. They were something of a holy grail for Coltrane-philes (as a fan of Shepp’s as well, I had my own curiosity aroused from the time I bought the album, around 1974)—and the 2002 release of those two takes made clear why Coltrane decided not to include them. The band didn’t quite mesh; the rhythms were a little stiff, the interaction between the two saxophonists was somewhat tentative. Shepp, whose guitar-like attack and buzzsaw tone brings an urban-blues edge to his complex modernism, doesn’t cut loose any more than Coltrane does. The context, like a garment that pinches in some places and bags in others, sounds inhibiting to both saxophonists.
The two extra complete takes of the sextet included in the new reissue are better than the ones that were formerly available, especially because of Coltrane’s playing. In the last and longest take, he builds his solo slowly until, for a minute or so, he tosses a thematic fragment back and forth to himself in a sort of spontaneous, high-speed, trance-like architecture. It’s a wonderful moment. Yet it’s hard to justify a release that adds a disk—and nearly doubles the price—for the sake of two fine but brief solos by Coltrane, two by Shepp, and thirty un-overdubbed seconds. As completism goes, it’s an archivists’ delight. For a music lover who already has the earlier “deluxe” edition, the new set is a true luxury. The release may be good business, but it’s a distraction from the record company’s bully pulpit to extend the legacy of Coltrane, one of the greatest and most important musicians ever to record and to perform.
There are two—or, rather, three—superimposed layers to the chronology of a musician’s career. There’s the time when recordings are made; the time when they’re released; and the concert performances that were given, most of which are unlikely to be recorded and made available as commercial releases in step with the artist’s career. A listener who followed Coltrane’s career as it unfolded through commercially available recordings might well find “A Love Supreme” to be a great advance, in its solos as well as its unity of tone and intricacy of quartet interplay. And if such a listener had then heard Coltrane in concert, the experience would have been a shock, because of the length, intensity, complexity, the sheer power and fury of performances in clubs. That shock is delivered by the French concert performance of “A Love Supreme.”
Unlike most jazz improvisers, Coltrane was used to playing, on his own, at lengths comparable to that of an entire album. In clubs, he played solos that ran an hour or more, and Elvin Jones recalled Coltrane once soloing for three straight hours. There’s an astonishing private taping of the second movement of “A Love Supreme,” titled “Resolution,” recorded at a club called Pep’s, in Philadelphia, on September 18, 1964. It’s a half-hour long (and in dim sound), and it features Coltrane in two solos, one that’s five minutes long and the other that runs nine minutes, and both of them reach ecstatic and frighteningly intense crescendos, in phrases that sound like a soul baring itself to the universe.
By contrast, on the studio recording of “A Love Supreme,” Coltrane simplifies, clarifies, abbreviates, and moderates his solos. The album profoundly conveys the sheer beauty, the clarity and purity of Coltrane’s sound; the exalted concentration reflected in the band’s free and spontaneous unity—a unity of purpose as well as of musical conception; and the quasi-symphonic unity of the four movements, one grand composition in four parts. “A Love Supreme” isn’t merely a collection of performances. It’s both one unified composition and, in effect, a concept album. And the core of that concept is more than musical—it’s the spiritual, religious dimension.
The devotion reflected in “A Love Supreme” is explicitly cited by Coltrane in his original notes to the album, which include his poem, “A Love Supreme.” In his liner notes, Coltrane explains that “the fourth and last part is a musical narration of the theme, ‘A LOVE SUPREME’ which is written in the context; it is entitled ‘PSALM’.” As the music historian Lewis Porter famously noted, Coltrane meant something very specific: that Coltrane’s saxophone solo in that section is the nearly word-by-word setting of that poem. That sense of sacred fervor and reverent yearning suffuses “A Love Supreme.” The album’s unity of tone, mood, thought, and philosophical contemplation matches its organic musical flow. The album is an idea, an abstraction, a sublime idealization of Coltrane’s religious philosophy. It has an air of autobiographical reflection and personal confession—one that’s emphasized by his liner notes, in which he cites 1957 as the year of his “spiritual awakening” and alludes to his subsequent spiritual trials.
