Sixty years ago this month, John Coltrane and his quartet settled into Van Gelder Studio in New Jersey. Alongside McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, Elvin Jones on drums, and Coltrane as bandleader and on saxophone, the group recorded one of the most influential musical proclamations of all time: A Love Supreme.
The catalyst for the composition was, per Coltrane's liner notes, a "spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life" that occurred seven years prior. He continues in the liner notes, "At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music."
It more than certainly delivered on that wish.
Coltrane was not yet 40 years old when A Love Supreme was recorded, though he already had more than a dozen albums in his discography. Released in January 1965, A Love Supreme's influence permeated through the jazz world and culture at large — it opened doors for spiritual jazz and musical experimentation in 1965 and beyond.
The album sold a half-million copies by 1970 and earned him his first nominations for Best Instrumental Jazz Performance - Small Group Or Soloist With A Small Group and for Best Original Jazz Composition at the 8th GRAMMY Awards.
For Coltrane, the spiritual element was infused in his entire approach to musicianship and personal development. This was no concept album, it was the concept. "There's no ambiguity whatsoever about what the music is about and what Coltrane is about," says Leon Lee Dorsey, renowned jazz bassist and Berklee College of Music educator.
By the early 1960s, jazz musicians had already been evolving and experimenting since the era of bebop, with Max Roach’s We Insist! Freedom Now Suite (1960) and Ornette Coleman and Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (1961), not to mention the futuristic sounds of Sun Ra, literally.
"[Coltrane's] transition from style to style is almost hard to process," Dorsey continues. In the late '50s, the saxophonist recorded multiple records with Miles Davis, including the legendary Round [About] Midnight and Kind of Blue, the latter of which was "already breaking the mold with modal jazz." He explains how Coltrane had gone from interpreting popular standards like "All of You" and "Bye Bye Blackbird" on Midnight, to modal jazz with the classic and influential Kind of Blue. The album was groundbreaking for its intentional break from the complexities and chord changes of bebop to modal structures. Coltrane expanded on this, later revisiting the iconic "So What" chord sequence by reimagining it for "Impressions."
"It's just a few years, but that really speaks to his spiritual and musical development," Dorsey says of Coltrane. "In my mind, what he said on Kind of Blue after his constant searching and development, he came back to that [on 1961's "Impressions"] because he was at a different level than he was [with Miles]."
Impressions as a record didn’t just reference Coltrane’s previous work and the evolving genre of jazz, but musical constructs and ideologies from all over. Compositions like "India" explore eastern musical influence and spirituality. Next, he recorded Crescent, the studio album just prior to A Love Supreme, and avante-garde jazz firmly found its way into his sound along with spiritual elements. Following that record, those elements gave way to a focused theme of spirituality, while still paying homage to pre-existing musical practices and structure.
Read more: John Coltrane, 'A Love Supreme': For The Record
Ingrid Monson, Quincy Jones Research Professor of African-American music at Harvard University, describes how the theme of A Love Supreme develops, builds, and hooks the audience, while having distinct structure and sections. "So it's almost like a little sonata form in that sense. It's got a couple of themes, that then he systematically develops that…and then he decides he's going to play the theme of A Love Supreme in all 12 keys." Then listeners hear the chant and Coltrane’s vocals, a rare inclusion that Monson describes as "This incredible moment when the voice comes in and goes down to the key [that] the next movement's going to be in."
The musical references and structure, also heavily dissected by Coltrane’s biographer, Lewis Porter, underscore both its reference and evolution of genre.
The piece was prepared in detail for a spiritual performance, as illustrated by the written manuscript for the piece. "He clearly had it planned to be in four movements and that it would feature each one of the band members [in each movement]," Monson explains. "There is an incredible ethical importance to it."
To wit, "Psalm" was also a musical narration to a prayer that Coltrane had written; its final chord is a reference to that of "Alabama," a piece Coltrane composed shortly after the Birmingham bombings, as noted in the music manuscript for A Love Supreme. "Alabama" was also inspired by the rhythm of a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr; some say it was inspired by the eulogy for the four victims of the bombing. In this sense, Coltrane wasn’t using spirituality and music to reflect on existing stories, but to say something new and relevant to the times.
The complexity isn’t for the sake of being performative, it’s within the spiritual nature of the piece — something other scholars and even Tyner himself have recalled of the studio session.
Arthur Magazine described a performance not a year after the release of A Love Supreme as touching "a communal nerve." Although Coltrane only performed "Acknowledgement," "the chant from the well-known album — a year old by that point — had certainly become part of the lingua franca of the jazz circle, disseminating as well into the larger Black community."
Although spiritual jazz was an existing and evolving genre , exploration accelerated once A Love Supreme hit the world. A concentration of interest took hold through the 1960s, exemplified by Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts (1965-1973) and pianist/arranger Mary Lou Williams’ shift to sacred music. The Beatles would later weave spirituality into their music.
"His impact is great, equally as great as Miles, outside of jazz," Dorsey elaborates. "You see this kind of spiritual journey that musicians kind of weave into their compositions and concepts of the albums and all. He's really probably the first artist where that quest was in the titles of the songs, and his legendary musicianship was wrapped into his spiritual journey."
Coltrane's spiritual quest was unusually openly displayed compared to his contemporaries. For Coltrane, it wasn't just in the music, but in his entire approach to musicianship and personal development.
"I really do think that part of his cultural impact is that he represented this incredibly moral force that people wanted to identify with and different groups of people articulated that in different ways," says Monson. She notes how Muhammad Speaks of the Nation of Islam was initially skeptical of Coltrane’s work, later changing their view and presenting a "simple eulogy to this Black Colossus and his widow and the four small children he left behind", declaring that "his phenomenal performances opened special spheres for untold millions in this world and in the worlds to come. (Muhammad Speaks 1967: 21).
A Love Supreme changed the tides and moved so many individuals, spiritually, politically, and musically.
"I think a lot of players wouldn't have happened without him. People like Pharaoh Sanders, for example, Leon Thomas, and all that spectacular stuff they did exploring a kind of spiritual dimension," Monson notes, citing modern musicians like Kamasi Washington as continuing to move forward the needle Coltrane pushed. It’s worth noting that Pharaoh Sanders became a member of Coltrane’s band in 1965, performing on Ascension and Meditation, which firmly placed Coltrane on the map of avant garde jazz as the genre evolved.
Read more: Virtuosos, Voyagers & Visionaries: 5 Artists Pushing Jazz Into The Future
Dorsey contemplates the lasting impact of Coltrane’s music and struggles to find words to do it justice. "Like, how would you describe your mother's love?" he questions with a laugh. After all, his output was contained in just a 12 year window.
"That's almost mythological," he adds, elaborating on how Coltrane played with other jazz greats and persevered with a vision, catapulting spiritual jazz to influence generations to come. "I don't think there's a more revered jazz musician when you add that spiritual factor in."