A Newly Released Live Recording of John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” Reviewed

This recently discovered private tape, from 1965, shows the saxophonist and his band at the breaking point of avant-garde inspirations.
John Coltrane plays the saxophone.
There actually isn’t all that much of Coltrane’s playing in “A Love Supreme Live in Seattle,” but what there is of it is extraordinary.Photograph by David Redfern / Redferns / Getty

Live musical performances are usually freer than those recorded in studios, for reasons having to do with the peculiar psychology of many performing artists. In public, where what’s played is what’s heard, the experienced musician—instead of taking fewer chances, as lay people might, in order to avoid waywardness or mistakes—is disinhibited, inspired, unleashed by the existential pressure of the irrevocable moment. Fortunately, these concerts sometimes get recorded (whether secretly, as bootlegs, or for musicians’ personal use). Even more fortunately, sometimes these private recordings get authorized and legitimately released, to the benefit of the artists or their families. That’s exactly what has happened with an extraordinary discovery and release, “A Love Supreme Live in Seattle,” a performance that the saxophonist John Coltrane, playing with his classic quartet plus three other musicians, gave at a jazz club in that city called the Penthouse, on October 2, 1965. (It was recorded by the musician Joe Brazil, who led the club’s house band and was a friend of Coltrane’s.)

No knock on Coltrane’s many great studio performances—which include the original recording of “A Love Supreme,” from December, 1964—but he is one of the prime examples of the artist who finds his greatest audacity and originality in public. This was evident when another live recording of “A Love Supreme,” from July, 1965, was released, featuring the quartet alone. But the Seattle performance is drastically different, and is revelatory in ways that reflect major transformations in Coltrane’s artistry and in jazz at large.

“A Love Supreme Live in Seattle” catches Coltrane and his longtime bandmates—the pianist McCoy Tyner, the bassist Jimmy Garrison, and the drummer Elvin Jones—in a time of tempestuous flux. Coltrane had lately been turning his attention toward what is called, for short, free jazz. He was especially taken with the music of Albert Ayler, a tenor saxophonist who played with an unprecedented, shrieking, roaring fervor. Ayler relied on no harmonic structures, eschewed the foot-tapping beat of most jazz, joined other soloists in raucous collective improvisations, and tapped into the deep roots of Black music—marching bands and gospel sounds—as a springboard for mysterious furies and spiritual explorations. By early 1965, Coltrane’s performances had begun to reveal his affinity for that musical manner. In June of that year, he assembled eleven musicians in the studio—the quartet, another bassist, and five more horn soloists, including a twenty-four-year-old tenor saxophonist named Pharoah Sanders—for an album called “Ascension.” It was an experiment in high-energy and clamorous collective improvisation, interspersed with individual solos. For the West Coast tour that brought Coltrane and his group to Seattle, he turned the quartet into a quintet, bringing in Sanders, who performed in something of an Ayler-ish style, as a regular member. For this club date, Coltrane also added the young alto saxophonist Carlos Ward and the bassist Donald Rafael Garrett.

Because of the size of the group and the many soloists in it, there actually isn’t all that much of Coltrane’s playing in “A Love Supreme Live in Seattle”—about twenty minutes of the seventy-five-minute concert. But what there is of it is extraordinary (even if the sound quality is less than optimal—Coltrane’s saxophone is particularly deep in the mix, behind the piano and drums). “A Love Supreme” is a suite in four movements. On the first, the medium-tempo “Acknowledgment,” Coltrane states a brief introductory theme, then leads the group in setting a vamp, undergirded by the bass players. Only afterward does Coltrane enter on tenor sax, with a statement of the theme, which he distills to a little, cell-like phrase of a few notes and then grasps, compresses, mutates, interweaves with skeins and barrages of sound. He does so with overflowing energy and rapt concentration, fusing intellectual complexity and wild spontaneity, sound-shredding ecstasy and trancelike serenity. Sanders follows with a splendidly youthful and brash solo, playing very rapidly and with a breathy and burry tenor tone, moving around the motif more distantly than Coltrane but no less energetically, albeit with less conspicuous thematic development. Coltrane then returns, delivering another solo of an entirely different sort—instead of interweaving, he keens and wails and blasts in high rhetorical fury before restating the theme and guiding the first section to a concluding flourish of percussion and extended bass solos.

On the second movement, the brisk “Resolution,” Ward takes the first solo, and his playing is both idiomatic and idiosyncratic, borrowing stylistic elements from such altoists as Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy in pursuit of his own compressed and frenetic—if somewhat unvaried—explorations. Then Coltrane comes in with a hectic, driven intensity of heaven-storming streams and screams that, as in many of his greatest solos, resemble playing in tongues. On the extremely uptempo third movement, “Pursuance,” Coltrane merely states the theme and gets out of the way for a long solo by Sanders that leaps quickly into high-intensity shrieks but has nowhere else to go. The star of that section is Tyner, whose nine-minute solo, with a firm post-bop propulsiveness, quickly locks Jones into a mightily swinging groove that the pianist carries into an ever more daringly rapid tempo, poundingly dissonant chords, and grand cascades of bass notes.

The fourth part of the suite, “Psalm,” is Coltrane’s setting, to slow and fervent music, of a poem that he wrote, the words of which aren’t heard in the record but are printed in the original album’s liner notes. Here Coltrane only alludes, in fragments, to the studio performance in the course of a passionately devotional solo that veers from ghostly wails to rapturous ululations. They are matched by Jones’s earth-shaking thunder and Tyner’s scattering of deep shadow and celestial light.

When I learned of the size and makeup of the group featured on “A Love Supreme Live in Seattle,” I anticipated something other than the succession of solos that it presents. I expected the tumult of collective improvisations—because of another set of live recordings that Coltrane and the same group, minus Ward, had made, just two days earlier, at the same venue. Released officially as just “Live in Seattle” (the LP came out in 1971; an expanded two-CD set was issued in 1994), that recording, with its overwhelming and frenetic energy, casts a giant shadow over the performance in “A Love Supreme Live in Seattle.” If this new release shows where Coltrane was coming from, the “Live in Seattle” album indicates where Coltrane was heading. By the end of the year, Tyner had left the band and been replaced by Alice McLeod Coltrane, John’s wife. Early in 1966, Jones left, too, and his position was filled by Rashied Ali. McLeod Coltrane, though a great musician, wasn’t as ebullient a soloist as Tyner, and Ali wasn’t the polyrhythmic colossus that Jones was, but both had the virtue of being in complete communion with Coltrane’s new music.

Coltrane’s musical journey would continue into dangerously uncharted places, as on the album “Om,”recorded in a suburban Seattle studio, on October 1, 1965; on the title tracks of his albums “Kulu Se Mama” and “Selflessness,” which were recorded on the same tour, in Los Angeles, that October 14th; and on the album “Meditations,” recorded in New Jersey, in November. These ecstatic recordings suggest the essential role that the studio, too, played for Coltrane: it was a musical laboratory that prepared him for the unbounded outpourings and indelible inspirations of his public appearances, as preserved, most movingly, in the last minutes of Coltrane’s final extant work, the version of “My Favorite Things” from “The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording,” which took place in Harlem, on April 23, 1967, less than three months before Coltrane died. It concludes with Coltrane on soprano saxophone and Sanders on tenor, improvising together in a musical supernova of holy terror.


New Yorker Favorites