53. John Coltrane - A Love Supreme (1965)



















Track Listing

1. Acknowledgement
2. Resolution
3. Pursuance
4. Psalm

Review

Ahhh! Here we go back to the 4 track Jazz albums, which have the talent to fuck up my track highlights at the end, seeing as choosing my 4 favourite tracks from an album with 4 tracks to it is a bit pointless.

Anyway, we haven't had some hard jazz for a while here and Coltrane comes in to remind us that Jazz is still there and very much thriving. This is an amazing album actually, it manages to be very experimental and quite weird at times but still very accessible. It's interesting because sometimes you pause to actively listen to the album and you think "What the fuck is going on here", this happens to me particularly after I unpause the album, you come to the middle of a track and it just sounds very strange. The natural progression of the album itself makes you not be aware of this if you are playing the album beggining to end.

Again as with most Jazz it is something that needs to be experienced, I could talk about the formal elements of the thing, but I won't because I understand fuck all about that. All I can say is that it sounds like a perfectly built album, beggining to end introducing you into strange realms of Jazzyness while you are almost unaware of it because it builds up so well. And it finishes with a lovely track in Psalm.

Another important thing about this album is the fact that it isn't too long, actually it's a little over 30 minutes, making it a very digestible morsel of Jazz without becoming tiresome or laborious. Listen to it through Napster og buy it at Amazon UK or US.

Track Highlights

1. Psalm
2. Acknowledgement

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

Coltrane was a cool cat, and if you don't dig, you're a square! Dig?

From Wiki:

An alternative version of "Acknowledgement" was recorded the next day on December 10. This version included tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp and bassist Art Davis. The sole live performance of the "Love Supreme" suite from a 1965 performance in Antibes, France, was also remastered and released in a 2002 2-CD set by Impulse! Records with the original album and additional outtakes.

A Love Supreme is usually listed among the greatest jazz albums of all time. It was ranked eighty-second in a 2005 survey held by British television's Channel 4 to determine the 100 greatest albums of all time.The elements of harmonic freedom heard on this album indicated the changes to come in Coltrane's music.

Will Downing released an R&B cover version of the main theme, with the co-operation of John's widow Alice Coltrane, which reached number fourteen in the in the UK singles chart in 1988.