Donald Clarke tunes in to a deluxe recording of John Coltrane's masterpiece - the majestic 'A Love Supreme'
What better aspiration could there be for a lyrical artist than to conceal one's honed technique in an apparent stream of emotion, to use one's mastery of artistic mechanics to hide that learning and create an illusion of direct, uninhibited communication? That is what the John Coltrane Quartet managed at the height of their career as they forged a music that was as musically disciplined as it was emotionally expansive.
Rightly or wrongly, the 1965 LP, A Love Supreme, has become the most highly regarded item in the group's canon.
Beginning with a four-note refrain (duh DUH duh duh), the rhythm of which evokes the piece's title, this sinuous jazz suite has been asked to carry the burden of religious text, civil rights declaration and even field guide for chemical experimentation.
"If you look in the gatefold of my copy, you might still find a few seeds and leaves in there," writer Ashley Kahn admits from his home in Manhattan. "For me, it was more of a transcendent experience that went towards that side of my 1970s life than any specific religious experience."
Kahn is the author of a lavishly illustrated new book, also titled A Love Supreme, which seeks to make sense of the creation and legacy of Coltrane's most famous work.
This is Kahn's second attempt to wrestle a sacred icon of jazz to the ground; in his 2000 book, Kind of Blue, he directed a similar degree of research towards Miles Davis's much loved 1959 LP of the same name. Yet, despite Coltrane's presence on both, they are very different works. Kind of Blue is contained and mellow; A Love Supreme angular, hectoring and passionate.
"Yes, Kind of Blue is all reserved, restrained elegance, the essence of what we have come to call cool, though that's such a devalued word now," Kahn says. "Miles was about taking a music - jazz - that was then just regarded as entertainment and pushing it towards art. Coltrane was about taking art and pushing it towards spirituality - a word that was also devalued 10 years later or so."
Born in North Carolina in 1926, Coltrane served his time with various rhythm'n'blues bands before hitching up with greats such as Dizzy Gillespie and Johnny Hodges in the early 1950s. But he was troubled by heroin addiction, and it was only after being sacked from his first tenure with Davis in 1957 that he reached an arrangement with the Almighty and kicked the habit. In the liner notes to A Love Supreme, Coltrane says: "During the year 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life."
But Kahn is adamant that Coltrane's intentions have been misunderstood here. "A Love Supreme was not a thank you to God for getting him off junk. It was a thank you for making his music popular. He was saying, 'I don't think I would have got to so many ears as I did if I hadn't made a deal with God in 1957'."
Ironically, the LP was also the last time Coltrane's music skirted the mainstream. Ahead were furious engagements with abstraction on albums such as Ascension and Meditations, experiments which eventually tore the quartet apart. Pianist McCoy Tyner, drummer Elvin Jones and bassist Jimmy Garrison gradually gave way to a new generation of angrier musicians. The results can be heard on an LP released only last year. Recorded shortly before Coltrane's death in 1967, The Olatunji Concert unleashes a squall of anguished distress: unrefined passion to some, the sound of a tractor running over a goose to others.
A Love Supreme shows the music in transition. "This is a moment where the quartet celebrates their three-year anniversary with this incredible musical statement," Kahn says. "Then the very next day Coltrane rethinks it in an expanded form. Those two days represent the forces that would go back and forth and fight against one another throughout 1965. And who would end up winning? The side of avant gardeism, the side of experimentation."
The expanded form Kahn is referring to saw Coltrane invite saxophonist Archie Shepp and bassist Art Davis to augment the classic group. As a result of Kahn's researches, the resulting sextet's recording of the opening section of A Love Supreme is now finally being released as part of a "Deluxe Edition" of the album from Impulse Records.
The recordings were found in the collection of Coltrane's son, Ravi (also a saxophonist). The reissue's producer, Michael Cuscuna, explains what happened to the tapes after their recording by legendary producer Rudy Van Gelder. "Coltrane and any other artist who recorded there used to leave Rudy's with a mono tape of the session that would roll at the same time as the main recording. At home, Coltrane would turn the tape over and then record something on the other side. But without his original machine, it was very hard to isolate the music we wanted from the music on the reverse side."
Cuscuna has done an extraordinary job, and the results make fascinating - if slightly disconcerting - listening for the Coltrane enthusiast. Davis and Shepp, who continued to work with the saxophonist, bring flavours of later, more confrontational material to tunes which have always seemed secure in their time. It is like reading shards of Finnegan's Wake between the lines of Ulysses.
"But the worst problem for this project was the condition of the original Love Supreme LP master," Cuscuna says. "On the third movement, Pursuance, there was a very strange problem with the left channel; Coltrane's sound goes in and out. The tape we had could only be altered in very artificial ways, and even then there was only so much you could do. Then one morning it occurred to me that this record came out in dozens of countries. So somebody must have a copy made directly off Rudy's master. And, sure enough, I eventually found one in EMI's vault in Hayes in England."
He is taking on a heavy responsibility. Even if one is "improving" the listening experience, one is still tampering with a sound people have grown up with. When Cuscuna recently supervised the reissue of Kind of Blue, he corrected a flaw in the original tape speed which had rendered previous versions slightly sharp. Some sentimentalists suggested that he was toying with a sacred relic. "I try to be respectful to the content, but when it comes to the sound, I try and be respectful to the way it was recorded on the day, not to the way the LP sounded."
The new double CD release also includes a 1965 live version of the suite, recorded at the Antibes jazz festival, which offers yet another route into this extraordinary work. One is reminded of something Coltrane's cousin, Mary, (the inspiration behind a classic 1959 tune) said to Ashley Kahn about the music: "It's all about opening the doors of the church. That's what Coltrane was all about. What he was doing was leaving all these doors open to his vision of universality."
A Love Supreme: The Creation of John Coltrane's Classic Album by Ashley Kahn is published by Granta Books (£20). A Love Supreme (Deluxe Edition) is on the Impulse Records label