My Mum is a big jazz fan and growing up I had listened through half open ears as she would play Cannonball Adderley and Ray Charles records. But during my time at university I was on a musical journey, going deeper into the woods, and acquired access to jazz through my university city’s library. I was listening avidly to this incredibly absorbing and immersive music but never straying too far from be-bop, Miles and Coltrane.
I was studying Fine Art and our painting studio resided in an old drill hall in Wolverhampton. I got the impression that all the students who didn’t quite fit in with the university’s perceived obsession with Conceptual Art were moved to this dreary place to keep us out of the way just in case someone came for a look around. One day I heard this distorted jazz noise coming from one of my fellow painter’s CD player.
It was a five CD set of rare and unissued recordings by John Coltrane spanning 1951 – 1965 and I persuaded its owner to part company with this heft of CDs while I recorded them to cassette.
About seventeen years later subsequently ‘lost’ all my cassettes during a house move and I hunted desperately for a copy of the CD, finally tracking it down in the US via Ebay. I had a great sense of achievement finding this as it reminded me of the much-missed old days of having to actually hunt for a record by visiting a record shop. I do miss that – Amazon, Play and iTunes have taken the fun out of actually looking for and buying music.
Anyway, I digress…
One track always stood out for me on this collection of remarkable performances: ‘A Love Supreme.’
The liner notes are vague at best and this was recorded live (at some point) in 1965 in Europe (somewhere) and features the same line up as the studio recording of this suite. This is a quartet with so much skill and energy that it is breathtakingly dangerous and thrilling: John Coltrane (tenor sax), McCoy Tyner (piano), Jimmy Garrison (bass) and Elvin Jones (drums).
The original studio album from 1965 is separated into four ‘movements’ over three tracks (Parts 3 and 4 joined together as the final track) but here the whole of ‘A Love Supreme’ is presented as one track that runs just shy of forty minutes and insists you listen from beginning to end, uninterrupted and fully focussed on the action.
From around the two minute mark Coltrane is off, slipping in and out of the framing joy of the suite’s main refrains. It is almost as if he couldn’t wait to leave the safety of the ‘tune’ behind and leap headlong, fearlessly and with a child’s excitement into new musical territory. Tyner tries to nail him down with heavy and necessary chords but Coltrane weaves around these effortlessly. At times this comes off as a battle of wills, Tyner in the roll of sensible adult trying his hardest to make their mischievous child fall into line, but it quickly becomes an elegant and exciting dance.
Thankfully the spoken mantra of ‘Part 1: Acknowledgement’ is absent here (I was never a great fan of this on the studio album) and it isn’t needed. If the mantra was intended as a preacher style sermon, Coltrane’s playing alone checks all the boxes for its purpose: elation, elegance and exaltation. Coltrane’s 'personal search for purity’ and his belief that ‘his talent and instrument [are] owned not by him but by a spiritual higher power’ is conveyed with power and complete conviction by he and his quartet’s talent, belief and focus.
The quality of this lo-fi recording with Coltrane moving in and out of focus as he seemingly moves around the stage, the barely perceptible bass of Garrison, the clatter and pound of Elvin’s drumming and Tyner’s nailing and grounding piano work makes this for one of the most compelling and exciting jazz recordings I have ever heard.
This is the sound of Coltrane pushing himself, his music and his instrument to the very limits of his ideas and creativity, his saxophone acting as a flexible, malleable barrier as he blows the music closer and closer to rapture, his instrument creaking and straining to accommodate his search for spirituality and creative freedom.
As Coltrane flies off to the outer reaches Tyner leaves him a musical trail should his band leader stray too far and need a little guidance in returning home to the main refrains which the quartet do with deadly accuracy time and time again. I know these are musicians at the top of their game but while listening I like to imagine Tyner, Jones and Garrison hanging on Coltrane’s every note with wide eyed wonder.
It is an extreme listening experience because of the music performed and the quality of the recording but it is a performance of unmatched vigour and vitality that is documented on this CD. Coltrane and his quartet are enjoying themselves, getting lost in the music, getting lost in each other’s playing and seeing where it takes them without being self conscious and without the constraints of recording a ‘product’. The performance comes first here and the recording is a happy coincidence.
This is truly exciting stuff and, although not for everyone, if you can track this boxset down and you are focussing completely on the unfolding drama of Coltrane and his quartet this is an incredibly worthwhile and rewarding listen and may even bring you close to musical rapture.
John Coltrane – The Legendary Masters Unissued or Rare 1951 – 65
SIAE – Recording Arts Reference Edition, 1988
