Consider and answer me, O LORD my God;
Enlighten my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death
A friend once told me that Kind Of Blue is everyone’s first jazz album. I don’t think it was even one of my first ten. My first was Time Out (better with time, I’ve found, as I shelved at first listen & now I can’t get enough of it), & my second would become one of the most arrestingly beautiful pieces of music I’d ever heard.
John Coltrane – A Love Supreme (1965)
There are things about this album that drive me wild — make me lose my mind, in ways you wouldn’t fully grasp unless you’ve heard it (again & again & again & again…). It was recorded in one day. It is a four-part suite tied together with amazing congruity. It’s a jazz album…but it has vocals! (Imagine it!) It contains coded prayer (something that I still don’t understand fully, but I believe it’s better that way anyway). It’s freakin’ John Coltrane right after he made bop records & right before he made free jazz records. I used to have a CD player in my shower (don’t ask me how Americans think that things like this are a good idea, but they do, & they are), & this album was a favorite of mine to wash myself to. TMI, you may say? Nay! Who doesn’t wash their bodies to Coltrane these days?
I’ve been sitting here after work each night for the past few days listening to A Love Supreme trying to think of what I could possibly write that could express how emotionally appealing this album is for the listener. It’s poemusic (get it?) penned for no other reason but for redemption & spiritual guidance, & somehow this makes its way through every single note very loud & very clear. A quartet where each note from each instrument is perfectly twanged, tapped, or blown, & for every far-out or straight-forward album that Coltrane released before or after this doesn’t come close to that. Hardly any jazz album does (I would argue that Black Saint & On the Corner do as well, though the latter relies on loop machines so maybe that doesn’t count? On a sidenote, please buy On the Corner right now. Amazon.com is open 24/7, people).
See? I really have nothing to say about this album, & that saddens me in a certain way. This album holds a bigger place in my heart that probably any other jazz album does, & there’s no way to describe what it does for the active listener than to just sit someone down & play it for them. If music is your thing, then get saved.
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This actually seems kind of cheesy at first, but it does a pretty good job of overlaying music & text. Or just minimize the window & crank the volume. I support either one — Part IV, Psalm.