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[11] A Love Supreme |
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Song Of Praise
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Saturday, 24 December 2005 08:30 |
A Love Supreme
The John Coltrane Quartet
(Impulse A-77)
John Coltrane, tenor & soprano saxophones; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums: A Love Supreme : Part I Acknowledgement; Part II Resolution; Part III Pursuance; Part IV Psalm. Recorded December 9, 1964,
Each new album he produces, it seems to me, in all likelihood will be
a major exhibit in the continuity of his artistic growth. There are very few artists
in any field whose every work is of interest. John Coltrane is one.
Ralph J. Gleason,
Liner Notes to Ole Coltrane (1961)
A Love Supreme is an enormous musical, emotional, personal statement by a genius of modern music. The continuing record we have, of John Coltrane's music, is an index to the development of an artist of gigantic stature, & it can be taken as an immediately useful model for anyone, of whatever persuasion, who is looking to grow, to extend the limits of consciousness as far as they will go. How John Coltrane found himself, & took what he found of himself, into himself, & brought it back out, thru himself, to us. A Love Supreme shows us where he is, now, & why, & even how. It is of the greatest interest, to you, if you are at all interested, in yourself, & what John Coltrane has to do with you.
With his latest recording, Coltrane has moved into a freer, more open music than many of us had thought possible, for him. What he has done, now, is to begin to analyze emotional states, through his music. Up to this record he has moved mainly to create emotion, & to transmit it, thru energy, to you, to create an emotional involvement, there, out of your own energies, as listener.
Trane has deposited possible feeling for you to pick up on, for you to use. It has up to now been your own choice, to use it or to waste it, that's been up to you. Now he has withdrawn a step, sbstracted, removed himself from that close one-to-one relationship with you, in order to tell a story, of himself, how he has grown to be able to tell the story, thru his own forms, to you, & for you. A Love Supreme is Coltrane's own biography, his autobiography, of himself & from himself, how he has made it, & with what help.
The process thru which Coltrane has come to this point is available to anyone with ears. I divide it up this way:
Stage 1 getting to himself, because he had to, that was when he came up, in that time when a man had to work into himself thru the forms that were left him (the records with Miles, then Monk, & back with Miles, for Kind of Blue, etc.);
Stage 2 getting into himself, to find out where he was at, & what to do with what he found (the Prestige quartet & quintet sides, circa 1958, the Atlantic sides 1959-61 Giant Steps, Coltrane Jazz, then the breakthrough on My Favorite Things, Coltrane Plays The Blues, Ole Coltrane);
Stage 3 coming out of himself, to create feeling, not merely mirror it (which is where most artists had stopped, up to that time, altho a few Ornette, Cecil Taylor had begun to find the way, out) this starts for me with Chasin The Trane, Out of This World, Impressions & India, Afro-Blue, etc.;
Stage 4 refining feeling, which takes place at the same time as the creation of it, e.g., Soul Eyes, the albums with Duke Ellington & Johnny Hartman especially Lush Life, Autumn Serenade and the Ballads album, After The Rain, Alabama, & the ultimate refinements of the Crescent LP, especially Crescent, Wise One, Bessie's Blues ;
& Stage 5 (so far) moving into a personal music, creating his own forms, with which to create feeling, & move it, out, to you, into music, of the highest order. His own A Love Supreme, how to tell his own story, his very own way.
Coltrane's example is unique because he is the only second-generation (i.e., after Bird) musician who has reached this level with such intensity & emotion created & communicated during the process although it can easily be argued that, say, Sonny Rollins &/or Charles Mingus are not far behind there are indications of their singularity (Our Man In Jazz, Black Saint & The Sinner Lady) but not of the magnitude of A Love Supreme.
Of the creators of his generation, Miles Davis is once again simultaneously creating & refining, tho he may never really get out of himself; Monk is refining; Rollins & Mingus; George Russell; not many more maybe Jackie McLean, tho of a lesser magnitude; etc.
Of the third generation: Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, now Archie Shepp, John Tchicai & company, for whom such a system of measurement may be totally irrelevant, as they had not the intense period of finding a way to themselves that Coltrane had, they came into music without the burden of the immediate past/present to cope with, they had somehow gotten under that, were not stuck with it, as Trane was.
In this connection I find LeRoi Jones postulation of Coltrane as Ornette & Cecil's hired assassin valuable: [Coltrane] is using the various post-bop reactions to prepare, as it were, an area for Taylor & Coleman. . . .Coltrane's salvation will come only as a murderer, an anarchist, whose anarchy seems so radical because references to the old music still remain. (Kulchur #8).
Which is only to say, that the new musicians, because of Trane's work, will have to waste less time getting into themslves, & can spend what little time they do have, on getting what is there, as themselves, out, to you the real business, they have to do.
The newer musicians, in fact, will find this measurement unnecessary, as implied above, & not of much essential use in working out their own destinies, but for Coltrane's generation it is a matter of fact, i.e., it is what has actually happened.
That Coltrane has made it, to himself, & out through, is a simple measure of his genius; that he has created so much music in the process, is an even more convincing measure. He is now on the way to creating what is completely his own music, i.e., without the references to the old music, he still retained.
A Love Supreme, then, is in many ways the end of the road John has been traveling these many years, & the beginning of the new road, that will take him where he has wanted for so long to go. And there is a bigger & better place for you, as listener, on that new road, if you can bring yourself to move with him.
Coltrane, in the past few years (Stages 3 & 4) has, more than any of his contemporaries (generation), left a place for the serious listener, to get into the music; the more you bring to Trane's music, has always been the rule, the more you will take back from it. On any level. This is what has always excited me about Coltrane's music, & about the music of the whole third generation, that I have been rewarded in direct proportion to what I have taken to it feeling for feeling, idea for idea. It is not entertainment, no, not in the casual sense that word is meant, but rather enlightenment. A new concept, it seems, in jazz as art.
Given the atrophied sensibilities most Americans take to whatever art they bother with, it is not surprising to find that they are as easily satisfied as they loudly claim to be, whether as artists or as members of audiences. But John Coltrane has somehow found his way out of the artistic dead-end Americans are taught to accept I always consider it miraculous that any of us ever escape this brainwash, heavy as it is has transcended it, & has moved beyond reaction to creativity & self-expression. Which takes us back, specifically, to A Love Supreme.
The music that is A Love Supreme is the most ambitious Trane has yet undertaken: with it he has moved beyond song-form (i.e., blues or popular melody) into his own personal form, a form that rises up out of his own experience to transform that experience into melody, into music.
There are no tunes on this record, only four parts of a total composition. Trane has heretofore always been a tune player possibly the very best of that genre & has consequently been limited by the song-form (i.e., limited to expressing the ideas & emotions that form(s) suggests, even though he has extended the uses of the traditional forms farther than any other musician extant.
No matter how far he has brought himself within the pre-determined shape of the song-form, now that he has begun to make his own forms he has another & wholly open field in which to work. His mastery of traditional forms is complete, & he has found, as have many other artists of different disciplines, that these made-up forms are not adequate for complete self-expression, i.e., once one's self has gone beyond the forms it has been told define its limits.
So Trane has moved, finally, to create his own forms for his own content, & to stop trying to fit his ideas into anyone else's shapes. Not that there's really anything wrong with them, they re just not adequate for an expanded vision, tho they still can be put to one's own use when they fit the occasion not vice versa.
That A Love Supreme makes the most powerful (& accurate) registration of Coltrane's genius yet, can be offered as proof of the validity of his new method. E.g., Pursuance reaches a point (just before the end of John's solo) when his emotional force is almost unbearable to listen to, so precisely is it registered. And the Psalm section of the composition communicates the same emotion on a highly-abstracted level, something of which the song-form was incapable.
In his new open or projective music (to use two terms which the poet Charles Olson has applied to the analogous movement in contemporary American poetry), Coltrane can make new forms that are direct extensions of his musical content. He no longer (now that he's hip to it) has to try to fit his content into pre-determined forms, no matter how many alterations or extensions of them he might have made (e.g., in Out of This World, where he reduced the normal chord sequence to two repeated chords for his harmonic base his trademark of late, from My Favorite Things to now, & a technique that is made use of on the first section of A Love Supreme, as an example of how whatever forms there are can be put to use by the artist when he is in control of his art).
Another determining factor in the growth of Coltrane's music has been the rhythm section McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, Elvin Jones that has been with him steadily for the past 3-1/2 years, growing along with him, working through the same progressions that he has until, now, the rest of the Quartet is ready to move into its own music as Coltrane has moved into his.
Jimmy & Elvin are as free now as they will ever need to be, they can & want to play every bit as much as Trane, & do. McCoy, who has become the most limited member of the group in its new sense only because his own music is so strongly tied to the old music, is now too moving into new areas of piano music, but he actually has the farthest to go, of the four. When he frees himself from the modal force that presently organizes his playing, & moves into free expression on the piano (virtually an untapped instrument for new music, with the exception of Cecil & only a very few others), the whole group will be ready to make some exceedingly personal registrations. What they are now set to do to people's heads shouldn t be allowed but thank God it is.
And thank God is just what John Coltrane & group do on A Love Supreme. Don t let the religious connection Coltrane makes bother you at all you should rejoice in it. Coltrane has chosen to term the huge love in him, God, & he pays homage to it (Him) in this record. A Love Supreme is soul music, John Coltrane's soul love music, free music, they re all the same thing. The composition moves from a religious base ( Acknowledgement ), into its resolution ( Resolution ), to the reality aspect the blues ( Pursuance ), to abstractions of the totality ( Psalm ) as Charles Moore puts it, Life Love (Living Music.
But I don t need to talk more about the music, in a specific sense, it's all there, on the record, for everyone to hear, where you can get at it. Just listen to it, that's all you need to do. John Coltrane loves you enough to give it to you take it. HEAR!
Detroit
Winter 1964/65
3.1.667 |
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