Book Review: A Love Supreme, The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album

By Ashley Kahn — Foreword by Elvin Jones

While John Coltrane's musical output—in the form of vinyl, CDs, and video—is measured in feet and yards, Coltrane didn't pontificate much in print or on tape. One has the impression that he wasn't that dynamic of an interview. He was well known as quiet, spiritual and introspective. As his importance as an innovator grew, he was modest, almost dismissive of his role in changing the face of Jazz forever. Like most of the greats, he was content to let the music speak for itself. So in a sense, A Love Supreme, Ashley Kahn's follow up to Kind of Blue: The Making of Kind of Blue, serves as a musical detective story of sorts, an assemblage of reportage and a tale that takes almost a third of the book to unfold before Coltrane and his accomplices even set foot in the Rudy Van Gelder's studio to record this most famous work.

Viking

Most of the 80+ pages of lead-in is a basic history of Coltrane, recapping well-known events leading up to the "scene of the crime." A Love Supreme and the making of the classic recording make excellent use of context. While it may be old news to many of the album's ardent fans, Kahn cleans the slate by beginning the mystery from its beginnings, by recapping important "milestones" like Coltrane's days playing in military bands, recording for Prestige, Atlantic, Blue Note, and eventually Impulse!, and eventually forming the famed Quartet. These brief histories are thankfully punctual and not too detailed or laborious. Then comes the meat of the book, the recording (and re-recording) of the classic sessions that became A Love Supreme.

Kahn in his analysis not only cites Coltrane as one of the major forces (alongside Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, and Sun Ra) to walk the line between avant-garde and modern Jazz, but he also documents A Love Supreme's impact on all sorts of musicians as diverse as Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead, Maurice White of Earth Wind and Fire, New Music composer Terry Riley, Donald Fagen of Steely Dan, Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, and funksters Rick James and Bootsy Collins. As much as A Love Supreme shook the jazz world in its day, the 1965 classic had an equally rippling effect on the rock n roll and psychedelic music that was just beginning to be produced that year.

Maybe that's why A Love Supreme remains both one of the greatest selling and most important Jazz albums of all times. It was released during a time when America (still in the throes of the Vietnam war), the music business (still in the throes of youth culture), and the recognition of world music in America (it was Coltrane who was one of the first to champion international music) were still in its infancy. For better or for worse, (and the book talks about the kicking he took from critics like Leonard Feather) Coltrane was a major force who took Jazz out of the hands of the dancing mainstream and into the clutches of the intelligentsia and the elite. And for that you can either curse or congratulate Mr. Coltrane for turning the Jazz world topsy-turvy.

Kudos must go to Viking's art department, who did a stunning job of designing the book, from the beautiful cover to making efficient use of typeface, photographs, and formatting in order to make A Love Supreme an exciting reading experience. That aspect alone separates A Love Supreme for the scores of Jazz tomes currently on bookstore and library shelves that tend to over-intellectualize the Jazz experience.

As a Jazz record, A Love Supreme was arguably the most influential "crossover" vehicle ever released. Whether you were listening to Duke Ellington or Big Brother and the Holding Company, here was music that encouraged common ground, making it possible for Jazz, Rock, Classical and R&B musicians to co-exist and cross borders to cross-pollinate. In an underlying way, this book documents the unorthodoxy that went behind knocking down walls that segregated the different genres of our music. But since 1965, almost forty years since the release of A Love Supreme, a lot of the walls that tumbled have been built back up. And while we currently live in an age of micro marketing and niche programming and tastes, A Love Supreme vividly tells the story of a musical earthquake that most every serious music fan and musician alike felt the challenge to acknowledge and react to.