‘A Love Supreme’ & John Coltrane’s Stellar Ensemble.

Applied Mathematics and a Spiritual Quest.

In 1964 John Coltrane had a vision of God and it provoked his deepest, most enduring work. In part it was the death of his dear friend Eric Dolphy. He had a new wife, Alice Coltrane. It was the world, the universe. He was struck by the interconnection of all things. It swept him up in a wave of creative expression. The story of John Coltrane and A Love Supreme is one of a spiritual and musical voyage. Elvin Jones, his drummer, subdivided time supernaturally. His Pianist McCoy Tyner explored new harmonic spaces. Coltrane had a mystical mentor, Sun Ra. He had proteges as well, Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders to name just two.

In this article I'll be talking about some of the factors and circumstances around this spiritual awakening. It's also intended to be an introduction to John Coltrane's music of that Era and some other connected artists. There's a Spotify playlist here should the embedded link below not work.. I haven't linked any part of 'A Love Supreme' itself. That should be listened to for the first time with no other distraction than your refreshment of choice.

This epiphany didn’t come out of the blue. This was no glib set of ‘peace and love’ gestures. Coltrane was unlike the disciples of Leary who “tuned in, turned on and dropped out” with one hit and went to live on a commune. He had spent years preparing for such a breakthrough, reading, meditating and practicing.

Since he’d kicked heroin and booze almost a decade before he’d been an early bird, sometimes rising as early as 4AM. He used this time to play along to records, research and reflect.

All this collected experience led him to a conclusion. It was clear to him that love transcended all material experience. His philosophy was a quiet reflective one, at odds with his often violent music. It was informed by a heavy heart.

A Love Supreme between brothers.

In June of that year he lost a dear friend, Eric Dolphy. The two men were inseparable, highly attuned. Dolphy flew places few could dream of in his solos. He mimicked birdsong, sang from the depths of his soul, cried for joy. He can be heard in full flow on recordings from Europe in 1961 and worked on and off with Coltrane till his death. The solos that Dolphy took on those tours are soaring and unpredictable. They spurred Coltrane on, inspired him.

His death was a tragedy, left to die on a stretcher from diabetic complications. The doctors in Berlin, where he died, assumed the needle marks on his arms were from heroin.

Coltrane grieved profoundly for his friend. He would carry a framed photo on tour with him and put it up in his motel room. The motel room he would hole up in, read and meditate before pouring his heart out on stage.

Applied Mathematics and A Love Supreme

Coltrane was always studious, whether with scale books, holy texts or scientific literature. He owned 1,000 books on religion alone. All religions of the world were grist to his mill. He was obsessed by Einstein’s theory of Relativity. Every conversation with his peers lead back to the subject. He was into sacred geometry, the physics of existence, Jungian Archetypes. His mind drew lines between these fields, searching for a way to synthesise them.

‘All musicans are subconsciously mathematicians’

Theolonius Monk.

Music is made of vibrations in the air.

The ratios between them is what makes the magic happen.

It’s a coincidence of evolution that these ratios mean anything to our brains.

They excite our synapses. Ratios change over time, tell a story.

Vibrations combine vertically to make complex sounds.

Horizontally they evolve and form juxtapositions.

Harmonics and reverberations ring out.

Rhythm subdivides time, feeling builds from patterns.

Our Brain searches out these patterns and is rewarded by them.

“Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.”

Claude Debussy

Refracting the optics of sound.

This level of forethought allowed him to break free with absolute expression. “You have to learn the rules before you can break them” Miles Davis said. Intense study let him enter a flow state during performances and recordings.

For Coltrane music was a spiritual conduit. It was a way to commune with a higher power, a bridge between the mundane and the ecstatic. A few years later his Protégé Albert Ayler used the title ‘Music is the Healing Power of the Universe’. This is not much different from Coltrane’s philosophy.

Sun Ra’s influence on A Love Supreme

A big influence in all this was Sun Ra. Coltrane had known Ra since the late 1950s and often visited him and his band. He absorbed the elder man’s gnomic cosmological outlook. Ra had constructed a persona drawing on Egyptian mythology and science fiction. His band was by turn wild and highly disciplined.

Formerly known as Herman Bloundt, Ra claimed to have had his own spiritual experience in the late 1930s. By his account he was taken to Saturn by aliens. While there he was warned that the world would be entering a period of destruction and chaos. They instructed him to use his music to spread a message of love. It should be noted that Sun Ra is the very definition of an unreliable narrator.

There are other worlds.

This persona seemed to many to be gimmicky but his intent was deadly serious. Sun Ra’s appropriation of Egyptian symbolism was an act of liberation from slavery. Furthermore, it was a way of saying ‘let’s forget the era of slavery and return to being kings of our destiny’. The innovative afrofuturist element of the Arkestra had a similar function. Sun Ra wanted black people to imagine other worlds. To free their minds from the daily grind of oppression. The Arkestra prefigured George Clinton’s Parliament/Funkadelic fashion-wise and in philosophy.

Coltrane reveled in the freedom of Sun Ra’s Arkestra. Sun Ra’s players incorporated all kinds of exotic instruments into the band. African drums, japanese koto, Indian reeds, Ra’s electronic keys. His brass section was impeccable, the best in the business. They were operating in new opened liminal spaces, soaring together.

Breaking Free

The time greatly influenced his own band’s collective improvisations. Recordings from 1965 such as ‘Ascension’ and ‘Om’ owe a debt to the most out there moments of the Arkestra. With Ra’s lead saxophonist John Gilmore he pooled knowledge of extended saxophone techniques. Together they explored the physical capabilities of the instrument. Gilmore showed him notes he never knew existed, different from anywhere he had been on his horn. This was applied physics, exploring the harmonic series coupled with the mathematics of musical theory.

Sun Ra’s commune was quite different from his own life. He had after all been a featured player on the biggest selling jazz album of all time, ‘A Kind of Blue’. Commercial success had been kind to him, especially compared to many of his peers. It had bought him a Jaguar XKE to drive home to his large house. In that home he had his new wife, Alice Coltrane. They’d installed a grand piano, harp and other instruments in the spacious salon. There were other trappings of success, a $700 dollar sofa, that library.

Sun Ra and his band lived communally, they organised community projects. The records sold at gigs were independently produced. The proceeds went towards the running of the organisation. Due to all this activity nobody ever saw Sun Ra sleep, which may go some way towards explaining his worldview. What everybody did see was Sun Ra reading, dispensing philosophical epigrams. All this was equally important to his musical work.

Inner Voyages.

There are anecdotal reports that Coltrane was, now, using LSD, and they make sense. This feeling of interconnection is a classic hallmark of the psychedelic experience. What’s more his band was becoming more democratic, fitting in with the concept of ‘ego death’. Some say Coltrane was tripping during the recording of the ensemble improvisation ‘OM’. If that’s true or not will never be known. Whatever, he had studied like a warrior monk for a decade or more. Psychedelic epiphany or plain old study John Coltrane was in a different place.

He was reaching some sort of state of enlightenment, or at least felt he was. This epiphany led him to his crowning achievement.

Acknowledgement

A love supreme’ is John Coltrane’s hymn to a higher power. It’s four movements take the listener through a barrage of emotions. It’s a work explicitly informed by diverse spiritual reading. The 19 incantations of ‘A Love Supreme’ in ‘Acknowledgement’ have Kabbalistic significance. The chant itself could certainly be mistaken as a recitation of the phrase ‘Allah Supreme’ in the manner a Sufi mystic.

Indeed, for a time this was Coltrane’s intended title for the record. Islam, which was connected at this point to the black power movement and to the more radical side of jazz. Coltrane was no militant. Marching, demonstrations, they weren’t the way he wanted to serve the world. Coltrane was a radical for the cause of love.

Many of Coltrane’s pieces around this time reflected the civil rights struggle. He recorded ‘Alabama’, a brooding threnody for the Birmingham Alabama school bombing. Or at least that’s what the title and mood hinted at. He never spoke to the other musicians about the subject. They didn’t even know the title until it was released.

John wanted his work to represent universal consciousness, and love. The name ‘Allah Supreme’ could have alienated listeners. It would have alienated critics being that they were doubtful about the young muslim converts now abounding on the scene. Anyway, Coltrane identified as a Methodist Christian. But it was complicated. He believed in love above all. His vision of brotherhood was far wider than one based on colour or religion. He didn’t even only want to bring humanity together, he wanted to unite the cosmos.

Ecstatic, Evangelical.

The four movements of ‘A Love Supreme’ abound with influence from gospel music. There is the call and response between Coltrane as preacher and band as congregation. All this is coupled with spiralling sequences of chords, injecting dramatic tension, never quite resolving.

The concluding section ‘Psalm’ follows the cadences of a baptist preacher. Rising and falling as if gripped by a vision of the promised land. Equally important is the prayer poem Coltrane wrote for the gate-fold sleeve.

Religion: Other

‘Om’ and ‘Ascension’ from the same period had their own religious implications. John Coltrane identified as simply religious, a spiritual person. He built a patchwork of beliefs from esoteric sources coupled with his experiences.

Coltrane’s own mother wished that he had never written the ‘A Love Supreme’, even if it was so beautiful. The fact he had ‘seen god’ scared the life out of her. Only people who were going to die saw God she said.

John Coltrane’s best music forms a bridge. Between discipline and unbridled emotion, between the theoretical and the free. Ultimately between life and death. His experiments with John Gilmore had paid off. He’d opened up a whole new register to solo in, higher and breathier. An ecstatic cry.

Pursuance of A Love Supreme

There are no official photos of John Coltrane smiling. The main reason for this was that he was ashamed of his crooked teeth. He could have got them fixed but who knows at what cost to his tone? He dressed as was expected of him for playing gigs, nothing flamboyant. His sober, outwardly conservative image was in direct opposition to his music. He was unassuming, a bit of a country boy in the eyes of his peer group.

With Coltrane such a an important figure in 20th Century Music it’s easy to forget his band mates. What makes these recordings so enduring though is the band. As with all great bands the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Represented on this recording is an extended version of ‘The Classic Quartet’. McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison. Intensive practice and a heavy touring schedule had made them a finely tuned machine at this point. They’d hit a groove in 62 and kept developing.

Listening to the live recording of ‘A Love Supreme’ in Seattle in particular it’s almost impossible to ignore them. Pianist McCoy Tyner and Drummer Elvin Jones both impose unique playing paradigms. Musical techniques are algorithms, sets of decisions that the player imposes. The resultant musical material is shaped by those decisions. As a collective the Quartet had built up a formidable vocabulary of tactics by this time.

Set and Setting

‘A Love Supreme’ was recorded in December 1964. This recording was made in October 1965. As such it represents one of the last times that these musicians played together. They’re supplemented here by Carlos Ward on Alto Sax, Donald Garrett doubling up on bass and Pharaoh Sanders on Tenor Sax and extra percussion.

Tyner had been implementing a new approach to chordal playing for years now. His harmonies were based on a kind of stretching out of western harmony.

In traditional harmony everything has a place and a purpose. Chords have distintive flavours (major, minor and so on). They have ‘functions’, meaning certain sequences please us. Think of the lyrics of that old chestnut ‘Hallejulah’. Western harmonic cadences are what our brain is primed for.

Reaching Fourth

Rather than ‘stacking thirds’, Tyner built chords from fourths. This gave an emotionally ambiguous feel to the harmonic framework. It means that moving between different chords doesn’t give the same old results. We’re no longer hearing the same old sequences. Bill Evans and Herbie Hancock to name but two were exploring similar territory at the time.

Chords based on thirds make up most every song you can sing and hum. They are the meat and potatoes of music. Ones based on fourths have what could be called a resonance, a ringing sound. You can hear this effect in a lot of the work of composers like Erik Satie and Claude Debussy. It was this sound that entranced the two men. They explored ways that this style of harmony could be bent to their stylistic will. Tyner released a fine album on Blue Note called ‘Reaching Fourth’ such was his passion for the concept.

Coltrane had form on applying systems to musical theory concepts. His frenetic ‘Giant Steps’ is a famous rite of passage for jazz players. It switches keys so fast it’s almost impossible to keep up. Coltrane kept some of the musical concepts later in his career. He slowed the changes right down, letting the melody do the heavy lifting. At times the chord changes were gone completely. The music now was made of moods, or modes, flavours over a drone. A love supreme is composed of a sequence of musical ideas that interlock and are extrapolated.

Shared Learning

Both of them studied scale books, stuck things together, found routes between keys. They superimposed and transposed them to draw out new unheard combinations. This was Coltrane trying to connect mathematics and physics to musical material.

The harmonic ‘rules’ here come in part from Debussy and Stravinsky. Coltrane described Stravinsky as his “ultimate musician”, poring over his scores. He’d play all kinds of instrument parts from sheet music, piano, harp, violin. Improvising over classical records at home, Bartok, Schoenberg was another way he sharpened himself. He supplemented all this with jam sessions and exotic scale books.

‘Play the whole instrument’ Trane would instruct Tyner. There is a lot going on in the piano playing of McCoy Tyner on this recording. His playing is often incredibly percussive. He flies around in improbable runs which circle and resolve. When necessary he uses those fourth chords to provide a portentous backdrop. The improvisation never breaks free of time constraints. Like the band of James Brown it’s almost always certain where the ‘one’ is rhythmically speaking.

Coltrane knew intimately where his pianist would head in an improvisation. Their styles had evolved in tandem. Between the two of them they formed a new harmonic vocabulary. It let them treat that vocabulary in new ways too.

Eastern Influences

The development of themes has much of the form of Indian devotional music.

In Hindu and Sikh music the term Bhajan refers to any devotional song with a religious theme or spiritual ideas. A Bhajan has no set rules but is usually based on a set of melodies played and improvised upon by a lead instrument (typically sitar). Other instruments improvise within parameters. This is very much what was happening in the Coltrane Quartet of the early to mid 1960s.

Harmonically, indian music is very different to they music of the Quartet. They did however borrow conceptually and in terms of form.

A Love Supreme for Indian Music

Indian music supplied John Coltrane with a wealth of ways to treat his musical material. For one he’d taken up soprano to better simulate the indian oboe or shennai. This was the sound of ‘My favourite things’. Often times the Quartet uses the bass as a drone like the tamboura. A stable base for improvisers to extrapolate upon. Called a pedal tone this device was first used in composition by Coltrane for ‘Naima’. It’s a song the Quartet returned to again and again in concert. It’s main musical building blocks are chord changes over a pedal tone.

In indian music there are no such thing as chords as we think of them in western music. Indian music is free of the ‘push and pull’ of western harmony. Tensions and resolutions are treated quite distinctly. There are combinations of notes but their feeling derives from how they relate to the drone.

A raga is a short melody, a sequence of notes, the type that make up the themes of ‘A Love Supreme’. This melody is improvised upon freely. Sequences of notes are repeated in all possible permutations. Indian classical performances last as long as they need to last. The same is true of the extended improvisations on this recording.

Coltrane himself was so enamoured by Indian music he named his son Ravi, after Ravi Shankar. Ravi was born August 6th 1965. He was born almost exactly nine months after the recording of ‘A Love supreme’ on December 10th 1964.

Jazz Extrapolations

On another level the mechanics of ‘A love supreme’ are the very essence of jazz. From a bare framework musicians have myriad ideas they can superimpose. Group improvisation upon established themes with the application of agreed ‘rules’. The listener picks up on the rules of the piece, how the players are bending harmonic rules. There is a tension between the listeners expectations and reality. Think, for instance, of Theolonius Monk, how his ‘blue’ note choices go against the norm.

This freedom of expression was only enhanced by having a structure imposed upon it. The co-ordination, the tight changing between sections is breathtaking. Irmin Schmidt of Can described group improvisation as being like being a football team. Each player knows the objective and each other’s strengths. Working together they try to make magic happen. This recording finds Coltrane United at the top of their game.

A Rhythmic Powerhouse

All this was only possible because of Elvin Jones. Jones was quite distinct from the majority of ‘free’ jazz drummers. In fact, you could probably say he was never free, at least of time structures. Jones’ playing is always served by an inner logic and precision of purpose. Jones would subdivide beats in unprecedented ways.

His playing had the precision of Max roach. When he wanted he could hit as hard as John Bonham. It’s his ability to mark out the pulse of a piece that makes him so important to the Quartet. Jones was a steady timekeeper, at least when he arrived on time. Offstage he was a ladies man, a big drinker, a heroin addict. The very opposite of Coltrane’s unnassuming presence.

Doubtless this difference in personality type contributed to the two stopping working together.

A Love Supreme Live in Seattle.

Just before Coltrane made that break is the moment in time captured on ‘Live in Seattle’. It’s when his band was most intently focused and finely honed after years on the road and in the studio.

Elvin Jones subdivides beats fractally letting accents echo and play off each other. This subdivision is always subtle, insistent and imaginative.

The music on ‘Live in Seattle’ rises from the mist, fractured motifs play rubato. Rubato is another way of saying ‘free flowing’ and ‘without regard to rhythm’. It’s a tactic the band often used. In this kind of improvisation the musicians ride waves of tension and release. Their ‘Crescent’ album contains some particularly fine examples. The work of the quartet treads the line between free flowing and groove driven.

Jones, like Jaki Leibzeit was always able to play in perfect time no matter what chaos surrounded him. He is a human metronome in the best possible sense here. On cowbell he starts to mark out time. Then, subtly, feathering the kit, he starts to play. Just as Tyner Uses all of the keyboard Jones uses his whole kit virtually all the time. Jones plays rolling flurries of rhythms with their own internal logic. His genius as always lies in his placement of accents, grace notes and flams. The flow of these embellishments engages in a conversation with the other instruments. They are an essential part of the composition/impropvisation.

An academic could spend a career analysing the polyrithms of Elvin Jones. However, this is both an intricate and a physical performance. He would nail his kit to the floor for gigs such was his intensity. Jones’ drums are loud here. You can hear every detail despite the amateur recording.

Extensions

Regular Quartet Bassist Jimmy Garrison is joined by Donalt Garrett here. The two double bassists often play in counterpoint. Sometimes they act as a kind of Rhythmic Tamboura sound (the drone of Indian Classical Music). There are a couple of, long and consequently skippable, bass solos. They may test the patience of the casual listener. In context they work. They’ are labelled ‘interlude’ for ease of skipping and playlist construction.

Another extension of the Classic Quartet is the, shall we say, ascension of a young Pharoah Sanders. He’d been taken in and fed by Sun Ra who encouraged him to change his name from Farrell to Pharoah. For a time in 1964, the year of ‘A Love Supreme’ Sanders sat in on lead tenor for Coltrane’s friend John Gilmore. By 1965, the year of this recording he had become a touring and recording member of Coltrane’s band.

Albert Ayler described John Coltrane as ‘The Father’, Sanders as ‘The Son’ and himself as ‘The Holy Ghost’. All three explored the outer limits of what was possible on a saxophone. Folding frequencies into themselves through strict abuse of their instruments.

Pharoah Sanders would go on to carry the flame for Coltrane through the 70s. His most famous recording ‘The Creator has a Masterplan’ is in many ways an extension of ‘A Love Supreme’. He continued to record with Alice Coltrane for many years. The bassline is an almost direct quote. Here he and Carlos Ward on alto Saxophone act as sidemen.

However ‘free’ the music of ‘A Love Supreme’ is, it never loses it’s heartbeat. The music never loses momentum or collapses into complete chaos. There’s a logic that carries through the different movements. Motifs rise and fall. From Acknowledgement to resolution. There are plateaus and peaks.

Psalm and Resolution

‘Resolution’ is the point that abstraction and improvisation took over in Coltrane’s music. From then on Coltrane’s music would only become anguished and turbulent.

This sea change to a new more violent less palatable paradigm was a contrarian move by Coltrane. ‘A Love Supreme’ was a critical and commercial success. It was nominated for two Grammys. It would have made good commercial sense to continue mining the same vein.

The ‘Classic Quartet’ was broken down by Coltrane soon after this Seattle date. Coltrane ushered in Rasheid Ali.

Coltrane wanted to move further outside of strict tempo considerations.

He felt constrained by the adherence to pulse that Jones’ playing provided. In Rasheid Ali he found a drummer more willing to break tempo. McCoy Tyner’s geometric constellations of harmonies had become tiring too. They were no longer what John was hearing in his head. With Alice Coltrane he forged a new, rawer sensibility.

Those final recordings were made, mainly, with Rasheid Ali, another Sun Ra Alumni. They lack the same hypnotic immersive experience that Jones allowed.

Coltrane had entered his final period. Turbulent troubled music which many have speculated may have reflected his bad health. He was to die of cancer in 1967, the tumour having been caught too late.

Tranquity and Loss

The loss of John Coltrane was deeply felt by the Jazz Community and his influence has only grown over time. He has always been a favourite of rock musicians from David Crosby and Santana to Iggy Pop of The Stooges and Sonic Youth.

In Jazz too his influence can still be heard with artists like Kamasi Washington using a lot of the harmonic framework the Quartet developed.