#66 John Coltrane, 'A Love Supreme' (1965)

Previously #47

John Coltrane’s masterpiece. Jazz records have been few and far between on this list so it’s refreshing to run into this one again. I heard it for the first time last time around and it immediately grabbed me. Recorded in one session, each member of the quartet seems to be running their own race. It honestly sounds as if they’re all reading from different pages of their music scores, but at the same time it completely works. That’s Freeform Jazz for you.

Track 1, ‘Acknowledgment,’ starts with a gong and ends with a chant, which is where the album gets its title. The vocals in the chat were Coltrane himself overdubbed 19 times. And before the chant comes the motif, in which the 4 notes are repeated 36 times. Track 2 starts with a stunning piano solo by McCoy Tyner, and similarly, track 3 starts with a drum solo by Elvin Jones, immediately going into a crazy run of piano playing. Coltrane, the bandleader, lets his band members do their thing before coming in on the sax reminding them who’s running this show. Guitarists, Carlos Santana and John McLaughlin have cited the album as a major influence on their playing and if you stop for a moment and imagine the sax as guitar, you can totally hear Santana’s playing. Martin Gayford, a noted Jazz critic, summed it up perfectly: “If a listener is in the mood, it's majestic and compelling; if you're not, it's interminable and pretentious."

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