A love supreme
| A love supreme | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Studio album by John Coltrane | ||||
|
Publication |
||||
|
admission |
||||
| Label (s) | Impulses! Records | |||
|
Format (s) |
||||
|
Title (number) |
4th |
|||
|
running time |
32:50 |
|||
| occupation | ||||
|
Studio (s) |
Van Gelder Recording Studio, Englewood Cliffs , New Jersey |
|||
|
||||
A Love Supreme is the most famous and successful studio album by jazz saxophonist John Coltrane and was released in 1965. The album, composed in the form of a suite , is still considered Coltrane's masterpiece to this day. It wants to be a hymn of praise to God and "represented the - later it should show: provisional - end point of John's long research trip into the worlds of sound and spirit" ( Arrigo Polillo ). Published by the music label Impulse! Records , it was nominated for two Grammys in 1965 , and Down Beat magazine readers consecutively voted Coltrane Tenor Saxophonist of the Year and inducted him into the magazine's Hall of Fame . The album marked the height of Coltrane's success with listeners - his subsequent releases became increasingly avant-garde and the majority of his fans did not follow him any further.
Search for new forms of expression
In 1959, John Coltrane worked on Kind of Blue . This record by the Miles Davis Quintet founded the new movement of modal jazz . It was the turning away from the musical clichés and the traditional bebop recipes, which can be summarized under the umbrella term chord changes , towards improvisation using unknown and unfamiliar modes (scales). Although was Kind of Blue enormously successful and meant the final breakthrough as Coltrane's tenor saxophonist, but he was already looking for new ways as a soloist, as head of a band and as a composer. The appearance of Ornette Colemans and his playing style, which was to lead to the emergence of free jazz , was the decisive breath of fresh air that Coltrane was still missing. After a last European tour by the Miles Davis Quintet , Coltrane separated from the trumpeter in April 1960 and went his own way. As a farewell, Davis gave him a used soprano saxophone whose nasal tone and the ability to create Indian and Arabic sounds met Coltrane's interest in exotic sounds and which would decisively advance his development as an artist and in his career.
The classical quartet
The piece of music in which Coltrane first successfully used the soprano saxophone (in addition to the tenor saxophone) was a popular and well-known waltz-like piece from the successful musical The Sound of Music : My Favorite Things . The title came as a shock to some listeners and was still a great success. Was added My Favorite Things by Nesuhi Ertegun in the studio of Atlantic Records . It was the first studio appointment for a band under Coltrane's direction. But the quartet, which consisted of relatively young jazz newbies, could not satisfy Coltrane's wishes in terms of homogeneity. As his musical approach had evolved, he needed backing musicians who not only knew their way around chord-related music, but were also familiar with more experimental non-chordal playing and could handle the intensity of his playing and long solos .
As early as 1957, at the time of his drug withdrawal and turning to religion and spirituality, Coltrane had played with the young pianist McCoy Tyner from Philadelphia . The much younger Tyner lived in the same neighborhood. They shared common musical preferences, a deep religiousness and their personalities complemented each other. Tyner had long been waiting for a chance to join the saxophonist in his band.
Coltrane had also played together with drummer Elvin Jones in 1958. During his time in Sonny Rollins' band , Jones had developed a dynamic, polyrhythmic style and he could play extremely loud. With Jones in the band, Coltrane no longer had to deal with the rhythm, but could devote himself entirely to his experiments.
Tyner and Jones were two of the three band members who made A Love Supreme what it should be. Coltrane changed the record company in 1961 and went to the newly founded Impulse label ! Records . Impulses! gave him the opportunity to realize his most ambitious studio project to date. Africa / Brass was recorded in a big band line -up and included the traditional greensleeves . The album was the prelude to a collaboration with the label, from which both benefited equally. Coltrane ensured the company lasting financial success (even after his death), and Coltrane was granted almost unlimited artistic freedom. During the recordings for the second album ( Live at the Village Vanguard ), which was made live at Club Village Vanguard in 1961 as the debut of producer Bob Thiele, the fourth man to the classic quartet came on stage for the first time in place of Reggie Workman .
The bassist Jimmy Garrison had also accompanied Coltrane during his drug withdrawal. Garrison had been in the bands of Curtis Fuller , Lennie Tristano and Bill Evans . He was playing for Ornette Coleman when Coltrane brought him in, and he only switched because of "financial reasons," as he himself said. Garrison was just the guy strong enough to take on Jones on drums, and in 1962 he finally replaced Reggie Workman on bass. Had Eric Dolphy the band originally expanded to a quintet, Coltrane left but these draw in the spring of that year. The ideal cast for Coltrane's musical ideas for the next few years and for A Love Supreme was determined, and for the jazz author Arrigo Polillo "a new chapter in the history of jazz began".
The suite
The publication of Crescent at the end of 1964 already marked a departure from Coltrane's previous publications on Impulse! . More clearly than anything before, it gave the impression of a self-contained statement. The mood of the album was contemplative and relatively relaxed. It looked like a sketchbook for A Love Supreme .
The elaboration of the four-part suite A Love Supreme was essentially based on Coltrane's five-day creative break in the late summer of 1964. But Coltrane's wife Alice Coltrane said that the idea for the work was based on a vision that he had already had during his military service in 1946 and that he did not yet know how to interpret. In an interview with Branford Marsalis , she said that on a late summer day in 1964 he came down the stairs in her new house "... like Moses descending the mountain ..." and had the finished concept of the suite in his hand. Initially the work was intended for a nine-piece ensemble including Latin percussion instruments, but even when it was recorded as a quartet, numerous characteristic passages and features of the suite (such as the “reciting” of the prayer in the fourth part of the Psalm ) were created according to deliberate planning.
The sound engineer Rudy Van Gelder had originally started recording records in his parents' home in Hackensack, New Jersey . With an increasing reputation among the greats of jazz music, the licensed optician decided to build his own studio in Englewood Cliffs (a twenty-minute drive from Manhattan ). The atrium-like room with a vault-like, wooden ceiling construction, exposed brick walls and smooth cement floor offered space for a complete orchestra. The studio and the name Van Gelder have a downright mythical connotation among jazz musicians. Coltrane associated Van Gelder with great mutual admiration and the same work ethic: precise, well prepared and focused. Here on December 9, 1964, the suite A Love Supreme was created in a single session .
At another session at Van Gelder on December 10, 1964, tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp and bassist Art Davis were added and two alternative versions of Acknowledgment were created . However, the two recordings were only released for authorized publication in 2002 in the so-called De Luxe Edition of the album. The double CD also contains the only live performance of the suite from July 26, 1965 at the Antibes Jazz Festival.
Acknowledgment
Even the first note on the album signals that something is different from usual. It is a Chinese gong whose enchanting, exotic sound, according to Ashley Kahn, brings a majesty to the music that has never been seen in previous jazz music. Then Coltrane starts with a short fanfare . A fanfare calls for attention and announces the importance of the following message. In the context of A Love Supreme it acts like a spiritual welcome, a blessing. After barely more than half a minute, Garrison starts on the bass with a four-tone motif that brings the cadences of the album title to life syllable for syllable. This famous riff is a phrase that is one of the basic building blocks of the blues and forms an unmistakable reference point here. While Garrison plucks the leitmotif, Jones puts soulful accents on the drum rim and cymbal. The lively cradle gradually gains presence and Tyner joins in with a series of hard hit chords set in the offbeat . Then Coltrane starts again. More powerful than before, he blows a three-note melody along the rhythmic structure of Garrison's bass figure, which becomes the main character of the piece. Now the quartet finds a swinging groove and a vamp- like structure that is open to the end . After the music has acquired a more meditative coloring, one of the most famous and amazing moments of the album follows: Coltrane blows the leitmotif of four tones a total of thirty-seven times in a seemingly random sequence of keys . Then Coltrane's conjuring voice sets in, repeating the four syllables a love supreme ... over and over again. The vocals contain an overdub of Coltrane's own voice, which was only recorded the next day and added afterwards. The overdub fades away, Tyner and Jones gradually get out and a Garrison bass figure leads seamlessly to the next part of the suite.
Resolution
For acknowledgment , only one take was recorded and used on the album that day - with Resolution it took four aborted attempts and one unused take before it worked on the sixth attempt. In contrast to the first part of the suite, the second part is again on a terrain familiar to most jazz listeners. With his deceptively muffled foreplay, Garrison awakens expectations before Coltrane's entry leads to an explosion. The stormy tenor saxophone leads the band through a swinging jazz piece in 4/4 time. There is a melody that can be hummed along, the pulse can be snapped with your fingers and the structure is clearly visible. Tyner plays a piano solo of great passion and intensity that has become the model for many pianists. Tyner and Coltrane are perfectly coordinated here. At the end of the piece, Coltrane leaves the field to the pianist again before it ends with a drum roll and a cymbal beat from Jones.
Pursuance
The third and fourth parts of the suite were recorded in one take. Its length corresponds exactly to the duration of one of the 7-inch tapes used for the recording. The introduction to Pursuance is Jones' moment on the album. A short one and a half minute solo in different rhythmic patterns with a half Afro-Cuban beat. In the most dramatic moment, Coltrane plays the motif of Pursuance twice - followed by Tyner's second solo - clearly, quickly and concisely intoned. At the moment when a twenty or thirty minute solo by the saxophonist would normally follow live, Coltrane plays a solo condensed to two and a half minutes with a view of the studio clock. The conclusion is a bass solo, which becomes more and more meditative and melancholy towards the end. The deep rumble of a kettledrum , on which Jones had received a classically oriented training, opens the psalm with a hint of the blues .
Psalm (psalm)
Psalm is the muted, wistful ending to A Love Supreme . The different nature of the piece emerges all the more clearly after the previous one. There is hardly any structure to be recognized: meter and rhythm are hardly indicated. The emotionality of the piece can be felt throughout. Instead of a beat, the piano, bass and drums create the atmosphere. A poem and prayer written by Coltrane is printed on the inner sleeve of the album. It later received the title A Love Supreme . This poem determines the flow of Coltrane's saxophone like a libretto . Coltrane did not say in the text accompanying the album, nor to his fellow players and those involved in the studio, how closely his lecture follows the text of the prayer. When the album was released, only a few listeners understood and appreciated the poem's function in building the last part. It was a secret that was initially only discovered and made known by a few, but its game follows the text word for word to the final amen . The piece finds its dramatic conclusion in a flood of sounds. The last few seconds of Psalm were accentuated even more by overdubbing. Garrison's archery mixes with the plucking of the double bass, the clanking of Jones' cymbals is accompanied by a roll on the kettledrum and while the original saxophone can be heard throughout the piece on the left channel, the later recorded sounds can be heard on the right. A virtual septet can be heard for a moment before the suite ends.
Poem and prayer
“ On the [album] cover ... he bared his soul, in the letter and poem. He put a lot of thought into these lyrics before deciding to write them. This is the last part, the fifth part, the suite. "
Coltrane wasn't very confident in the language and avoided interviews. His music should speak for itself. For A Love Supreme , Coltrane decided, for once, to write the accompanying text himself. He divided his thoughts into two parts: a letter written in prose to the audience and the prayer and poem as the libretto of the final part. The letter is well thought out and describes his personal redemption and rebirth in 1957 through God and the gift of his music. The poem contains a litany of expressions of loyalty and thanks (to God) and spiritual advice (to the reader). It contains echoes of American preachers as well as Eastern beliefs and begins with the lines:
I will do all I can to be worthy of Thee O Lord.
It all has to do with it.
Thank you God.
Peace.
There is none other.
The lyrics are as integral to A Love Supreme as Coltrane's phrasing on the saxophone is. For Joshua Redman the words "... are still part of my experience of this music."
The cover
For the first time, producer Bob Thiele did without the unmistakable design of the Impulse! Albums in orange and black for A Love Supreme . The graphic artist George Gray used a black and white photograph of Coltrane by Thiele and emphasized the monochrome character by working with a limited color palette. The simple, elegant cover bears the slightly ascending lettering A Love Supreme / John Coltrane in large letters . The artist and jazz enthusiast Victor Kalin was commissioned to illustrate the inside of the fold-out cover . Kalin created a portrait drawing of the saxophonist in black and white based on a photo he himself took of Coltrane's live performance in 1961. Also different than usual, the names of the four movements of the suite are not clearly visible on the cover. The titles were only mentioned in Coltrane's accompanying text and on the labels of the records.
Live in Antibes
Coltrane's quartet had a small hit in America with the album. However, there is no indication that one of the many live performances in the months following the release of A Love Supreme would have performed all or part of the suite in front of an audience. Coltrane noticed that the structure of his music no longer made it easy for the listeners and required a different performance location than usual. The opportunity arose in the summer of 1965. Since 1960, the small town of Antibes on the Côte d'Azur has organized a week-long series of concerts similar to the Newport Jazz Festival with a colorful mix of jazz musicians. Thanks to big names, the reputation of the Antibes Festival spread very quickly. Eight months after the album was released, on July 27th, the band played in front of a packed crowd of European jazz fans, local dignitaries and television cameras. It was not a faithful reproduction of the studio recording and the live playing time was 48 minutes, 15 minutes longer than the album. The reactions of the audience as well as the critics (nobody in Europe had heard the album before) were mixed. Michel Delorme of the French record company Vega recalls: “A third of the audience was screaming because people wanted more. They thought forty-eight minutes was not enough. Another third screamed because they didn't like it and the last third screamed because they loved it. ”The next day of the festival, Coltrane complied with the organizers' wishes and played familiar material again. “Decades later, those who were lucky enough to have been there praise the impact and importance of that evening,” writes Ashley Kahn. The recording of the concert, the reaction of the audience and the final announcement by presenter André Francis was published on CD in 2002.
Quotes about the album
“ It was the era of Eastern religions, a time of spirituality and Hare Krishna , and that was Coltrane's matrix - he hit exactly that mood. "
“ When I first heard A Love Supreme , it hit me like a robbery. As far as I was concerned, it could have been from Mars, or from another galaxy. "
“ Half of the radio listeners in 1965 were white, the other half black. Coltrane was hugely popular with white kids who liked jazz, but for black teenagers he was Trane , for whom he had a completely different meaning. There was an echo on A Love Supreme like maybe Malcolm X or the March to Washington or even the awakening consciousness of blacks. "
“ It's one of the records I could hear on every street corner on a spring evening while walking through the Haight district . You were walking around and somewhere someone ( Bob Dylan's ) was playing Bringing It All Back Home , and somewhere else someone ( Miles Davis ´) was playing Sketches of Spain or A Love Supreme . You could just hear it through the open windows. "
“ I was sitting upstairs at the Grand Hotel in Chicago (on tour in 1987) listening to A Love Supreme and learning the lesson of my life. I used to watch television preachers and see them make up God in their own image: tiny, insignificant, and greedy. Religion has become an enemy of God, I thought ... Religion is what happens after God, like Elvis , leaves the house. From my earliest memories I knew that the world was moving in a direction away from love, and I too felt this pull. There is so much wickedness in this world, but the beautiful is our consolation ... the beauty of John Coltrane's saxophone voice, her whispering, the knowing in her, her hidden sexuality, her praise of creation. And that's how I started to understand Coltrane. I hit the repeat button and stayed awake to listen to a man approaching God with the gift of his music. "
Commercial win
Even though he split the critics, Coltrane was at the height of his career in 1965 and the album's commercial success was fully evident in the winter of 1965/66. The record industry nominated A Love Supreme for two Grammys. Down Beat readers voted Coltrane into the magazine's Hall of Fame as the first living musician . ABC-Paramount as the parent company of Impulse! -Labels never applied for the album to be awarded a gold record (it was simply forgotten), but still had a gold-plated replica made, which was proudly displayed in the company's main building in New York. Even a rough estimate of the sales figures is no longer possible due to several changes of record company. In 2001, Verve, as the current owner of the rights to the album, received a gold record based solely on the number of CD sales (that is, at least 500,000 copies shipped) . It can be assumed that the total number of copies sold since the album was released has exceeded the million mark. It has sold equally well at all times.
Lasting effect of the album
| source | rating |
|---|---|
| Allmusic |
|
| All about jazz |
|
| Pitchfork Media |
|
| Penguin Guide to Jazz |
|
| Laut.de |
|
The record influenced and continues to influence numerous musicians from all branches of the music industry even after decades. Soon after the album was released, the four-tone bass mantra was picked up by numerous musicians. The list of genres ranges from jazz, rhythm and blues ballads and rock numbers to trance versions . One of the most famous cover versions is by John McLaughlin and Carlos Santana from 1973 (on their album Love, Devotion, Surrender ). There are recordings by soloists as well as recordings by large orchestras. The title A Love Supreme is ubiquitous on numerous publications in a wide variety of media. Alice Coltrane, as the administrator of the estate, subjected all inquiries she received to a strict moral test: no drugs, no profanity, no violence. Even Spike Lee was not allowed to use the title in a film as planned (it then appeared under the name Mo 'Better Blues ).
In 1999 the album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame , and in 2015 into the National Recording Registry .
Rolling Stone magazine selected A Love Supreme in 2013 in its list of the 100 best jazz albums in first place. It also ranks 47th in the selection of the 500 best albums of all time . Pitchfork Media selected the album as number 3 of the 200 best albums of the 1960s. The magazine Jazzwise leads A Love Supreme # 2 in the 100 Jazz Albums That Shook the World . The magazine Time took A Love Supreme to the compilation of the 100 most important albums.
The titles
Title of the original album
- Part 1 - Acknowledgment (7:43)
- Part 2 - Resolution (7:20)
- Part 3 - Pursuance (10:42)
- Part 4 - Psalm (7:05)
The titles of the Deluxe Edition 2002
Disc 1
- Part 1 - Acknowledgment (7:42)
- Part 2 - Resolution (7:19)
- Part 3 - Pursuance (10:42)
- Part 4 - Psalm (7:02)
Disc 2
- Introduction by Andre Francis (1:13)
- Part 1 - Acknowledgment (Live) (6:11)
- Part 2 - Resolution (Live) (11:36)
- Part 3 - Pursuance (Live) (21:30)
- Part 4 - Psalm (Live) (8:49)
- Part 2 - Resolution (Alternate take) (7:24)
- Part 2 - Resolution (Breakdown) (2:13)
- Part 1 - Acknowledgment (Alternate take) (9:09)
- Part 1 - Acknowledgment (Alternate take) (9:22)
In addition to John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, Archie Shepp played tenor saxophone on tracks 12 & 13 of the second CD, as did Art Davis bass.
literature
- Ashley Kahn : A Love Supreme. John Coltrane's legendary album. Rogner and Bernhard Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-8077-0030-7 .
- Ashley Kahn: Impulses! The label that Coltrane created. Rogner and Bernhard Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-8077-1026-6 .
- Konrad Heidkamp: We are the world . In: Die Zeit , No. 4/2005; about the album and Ashley Kahn
Web links
- Harry Lachner: John Coltrane - A Love Supreme . Arte , May 16, 2006, series: "30 recordings of the century of jazz"
- A deep dive into John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme", by his biographer Lewis Porter at WBGO
- Interviews about A Love Supreme at jerryjazzmusician
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Arrigo Polillo: Jazz .
- ↑ a b Ashley Kahn: Impulse! The label that Coltrane created .
- ↑ Coltrane's A Love Supreme Live. DVD; Marsalis Music
- ↑ A Love Supreme / John Coltrane De Luxe Edition
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i Ashley Kahn: A Love Supreme. John Coltrane's legendary album
- ↑ Kahn. P. 164. The analysis is from Lewis Porter, detailed e.g. B. in his John Coltrane , 1998, p. 244 f. Porter notes, however, that Coltrane has left out a few lines of the poem.
- ↑ Announcement of the book by Ashley Kahn. (No longer available online.) Two thousand and one, formerly in the original ; Retrieved November 29, 2007 . ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )
- ^ Martin Kunzler : Jazz Lexicon .
- ↑ Review by Sam Samuelson on AllMusic.com (accessed September 2, 2017)
- ↑ Review by Robert Spencer on allaboutjazz.com (accessed September 2, 2017)
- ↑ Review by Mark Richardson on pitchfork.com (accessed September 2, 2017)
- ↑ Penguin Guide To Jazz: "Five Star" Recordings ( Memento of the original from July 8, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on counterpoint-music.com (accessed May 12, 2018)
- ↑ Review by Toni Hennig on allaboutjazz.com (accessed on September 2, 2017)
- ^ Grammy Hall of Fame. In: Grammy.com. Retrieved June 24, 2007 .
- ↑ Complete National Recording Registry Listing on loc.gov (accessed May 12, 2018)
- ↑ Rolling Stone: The 100 Best Jazz Albums . Retrieved November 16, 2016.
- ↑ The 200 best albums of the 1960s on pitchfork.com, accessed September 2, 2017
- ↑ All-TIME 100 Albums on time.com (accessed June 13, 2018)
