A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album
Ashley Kahn
(Viking)

Jazz holds a precarious place in our culture these days.

On one hand, it's celebrated in documentaries and concert halls as the most American of musical forms, a democratic balance between the free self-expression of the individual improviser and the tightly knit, responsive community of the jazz ensemble.

On the other hand, if you judge by CD sales, jazz makes up a thin slice of the American musical pie, accounting for less than three percent of the nation's musical purchases.

All this seems to confirm Miles Davis's grim 1976 pronouncement that jazz has become "the music of the museum," but even over at National Public Radio—the closest thing we have to a music museum—things aren't much better. When the station compiled a list of the hundred most important works of twentieth-century American music, jazz made the grade only sixteen times. Even worse, its most recent listing came with a record cut nearly forty years ago, filled with music so extreme in its expression that many critics at the time referred to it as "anti-jazz."

The record was John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, and some sense of how jazz got to where it is today—as well as why this sonically challenging, thirty-three-minute, four-part suite holds such a pivotal position—is sketched out in Ashley Kahn's A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album.

As with his earlier Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece (a book about, significantly enough, the next-to-the-last jazz entry on NPR's list), Kahn offers an engaging mix of social history, artist biography, and musical analysis. Rich in interviews with people who knew and worked with Coltrane, as well as with musicians from diverse musical styles, Kahn's book follows Coltrane's development up to, through, and then beyond his groundbreaking album.

Born in North Carolina in 1926 to musical parents, with Methodist ministers for grandparents, Coltrane developed an early devotion to both music and spiritual concerns. (A Love Supreme, is, among other things, a deeply religious work motivated by Coltrane's anguished quest for God.)

As Kahn points out, Coltrane's development differed from that of most of his sixties contemporaries. Where they arrived on the scene as full-blown musical revolutionaries, Coltrane had started from deep within the tradition and worked his way out. His early years were spent in rhythm and blues bands before he established himself as a virtuosic sideman with respected bandleaders like Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis.

By the time of the landmark A Love Supreme, however, he had already become legendary for his fierce, extended soloing technique, favoring songs that used simple but deeply moving melodies as launching pads for improvisations than sometimes ran twenty or thirty minutes. His style was once described as "sheets of sound," an attempt to play virtually every possible note in a given chord simultaneously.

Not surprisingly, these musical explorations pushed him beyond the tastes of many tradition-minded critics. As Kahn notes, though, the same intensity that repelled the establishment began to attract listeners from outside the jazz community. In a time of growing civil rights protests, his music's ferocity seemed to sum up younger blacks' dissatisfaction with the social restrictions of Jim Crow, and elicited, according to jazz deejay Joel Dorn, "a response . . . like you would have to Malcolm [X]."

At the same time, the openly spiritual quality in his music attracted "the whole 'flower child,' hippie base," says saxophonist David Murray. "They might not know about any other jazz album, but they knew about A Love Supreme."

Kahn details the enormous impact of A Love Supreme with testimonies from a startling wide range of musicians—not only jazz players, but also such disparate individuals as Donald Fagen of the rock band Steely Dan, James Brown's bassist Bootsy Collins, U2's singer Bono, Indian sitar master Ravi Shankar, and punk rocker Patti Smith.

For anyone who is not a trained musician, the most valuable part of Kahn's book may be the central chapter, where the author guides the reader through the intricacies of the astonishingly energetic blast of music that is A Love Supreme. Through interviews with surviving members of Coltrane's quartet, as well as the recording engineer, music company executives, and Coltrane's wife and son, Kahn reconstructs the actual recording session. Woven throughout this section is a step-by-step, reader-friendly analysis of the music's structure, as well as of several outtakes from the studio recording which have recently become available on Impulse's Deluxe Edition of A Love Supreme.

Coltrane's restlessness was such that, despite the album's success, he was already headed in a different, even more experimental direction; he played the full suite only once in concert. If A Love Supreme had pushed the envelope, his later work burst the seams altogether, often featuring multiple instrumentalists soloing simultaneously over multiple drummers. Yet it is the trail blazed by this later, fiercely uncompromising work that has been the richest influence on many contemporary jazz musicians.

So, while jazz didn't end with Coltrane's early death in 1967, the music may never again see the sort of divine simultaneity of creative experimentation and popular acclaim reached by A Love Supreme. While Kahn's book clearly targets a jazz audience, the wide-ranging, charismatic appeal of John Coltrane's music makes the book—and the re-released CD—a surprisingly good introduction to an American musical form that only seems to have passed away four decades ago.

© Edward Batchelder
(from The Tennesseean)