Thoughts on A Love Supreme
I’m currently in Bobby Bradford’s History of Jazz course; while the class is phenomenal, we rarely get to provide comments in class. Most of the course consists of Mr. Bradford speaking, which is AWESOME, but I thought I’d use this opportunity to write down a few of my thoughts on John Coltrane, particularly the album A Love Supreme since that is what we are discussing in both of my classes currently.
The first aspect of the music I want to discuss in Coltrane’s tenor sax. While Coltrane is always extremely expressive, on this album his tenor actually seems to be speaking. As hokey as that sounds, when combined with the elements of the album found in other music forms and cultures, his sax almost seems to be praying in another language.
The hard bop movement in jazz was about the African American community reconnecting to its roots. Unlike the pure intellectualism of Charlie Parker, the hard boppers attempted to reconcile different aspects of African American history. This is not to say that the music of the hard bop era is unintellectual, but to say that it also has aspects of spirituality and music elements that have found a more traditional home in other music forms, such as the Negro spiritual and West African Yoruba drumming. Parker had not quite figured out a way to reconcile the legacy of slavery with current jazz. While Parker’s jazz is sometimes political, it rarely encapsulates the same kind of longing, anger, love, and spirituality that hard boppers have.
A Love Supreme is a milestone in achieving tapping into the spiritual potential of jazz. Jazz is a uniquely American music form; while some Europeans eventually learned to play it, jazz stems (mostly) from two other music forms, the blues and ragtime. In a country with so much spiritual and racial baggage such as the United States, jazz became a way of expressing the complexities of the relationship between Americans, especially African Americans, and their country. The musical legacy found in A Love Supreme especially expresses this – at times Coltrane’s sax sounds like a person singing a work song or a spiritual. The percussive elements sometimes sound like a snake, winding its way through the history of African Americans in this country. Despite the musical baggage in the work, A Love Supreme ultimately offers a completely original and spiritual take on jazz. The music grows progressively more intense. This intensity is not angry, but hopeful and triumphant. The build-up of the album reflects the history of the United States, particularly in the 1960s – a time of struggling, but also of renewal and optimism.
I turned that in for a class. My professor's comments? "I named my first kid Colton after Trane. Thank you for this."
