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A Love Supreme | 
| Artist: John Coltrane
Label: Impulse Records
Category: Music
List Price: $15.98
Buy New: $11.42
You Save: $4.56 (29%)
New (24) Used (2) Collectible (4) from $11.42
Rating:  131 reviews
Format: Original Recording Remastered
Media: LP Record
Discs: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 12.2 x 12.2 x 0.3
UPC: 011105015516
EAN: 0011105015516
Release Date: June 20, 1995
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new Item. CD, DVD, Book, VHS more than 400 000 titles to choose from. ALL days Low Price !
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| Tracks:
| • | A Love Supreme, Pt. 1: Acknowledgement | | • | A Love Supreme, Pt. 2: Resolution | | • | A Love Supreme, Pt. 3: Pursuance/Pt. 4: Psalm |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com essential recording
A Love Supreme is a suite about redemption, a work of pure spirit and song, that encapsulates all the struggles and aspirations of the 1960s. Following hard on the heels of the lyrical, swinging Crescent, A Love Supreme heralded Coltrane's search for spiritual and musical freedom, as expressed through polyrhythms, modalities, and purely vertical forms that seemed strange to some jazz purists, but which captivated more adventurous listeners (and rock fellow travelers such as the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cream, and the Byrds), while initiating a series of volatile, unruly prayer offerings, including Kulu Su Mama, Ascension, Om, Meditations, Expression, Interstellar Space. From the urgent speech-like timbre of his tenor, to the serpentine textures and earthy groove of Elvin Jones's drumming, Coltrane's suite proceeds with escalating intensity, conveying a hard-fought wisdom and a beckoning serenity in the prayer-like drones of "Psalm," where Jones rolls and rumbles like thunder as Garrison and Tyner toll away suggestively--all the while Coltrane searches for that one climactic note worthy of the love he wants to share. --Chip Stern
Album Description
The second in a series of John Coltrane's classic Impulse! albums which are restored, reissued and newly remastered. Digi-Pak packaging is re-creating from the original LP design.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 126 more reviews...
This could be it... May 26, 2008
finulanu (Here, there, and everywhere)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I know that everyone has, at one point or another, opened a review with the words "arguably the greatest album ever" or "It changed my life" or something similar. I will be no different. This is certainly the best John Coltrane album, though there are plenty of competitors, and it might be the best jazz album ever. I'll stop short of "best album", because it would be impossible for me to go that far. In a way, it also changed my life, or at least the way I thought about music. Before I bought it, my musical tastes were mostly confined to classic rock. After I bought it, and the only reason I did was because I enjoyed the Greatest Hits album of his I owned (which at the time was one of my four or five jazz albums), it opened my mind to all kinds of music. Soon not just jazz but funk, R&B, blues alternative rock, and some reggae caught my attention, and began to assimilate themselves into my daily listening diet, so to speak. It is more or less solely responsible for making me realize just how much there is to music. More than the DJ's at your local classic rock station want you to believe, that's for sure.
So, how about the music? That's a good question. Like most of Trane's other dates recorded after he signed with Atlantic and began to make some of the best music known to mankind, the band is a quartet, this time consisting of Trane on tenor and soprano saxes plus McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums, a group better known as the "classic quartet". A little note on Tyner: he's a brilliant pianist, at least as good as Trane's previous cohort Tommy Flanagan, and maybe even better. It's a four-part suite devoted to God, and it's a gripping, emotional work of art.
The album grips you right from the first part, subtitled "Acknowledgment", where Trane unleashes a cascading sax solo. When this ends, Garrison states the brilliantly simple theme, and Trane forgets all about convention and swoops right in on a solo. It's not just sheets of sound, it's also sheets of rising and falling emotion, tension being built up and released over the course of my favorite eight minutes in John Coltrane's entire career. The title is also chanted almost religiously near the end. This blends seamlessly into "Resolution", which is brilliant as well. Trane's interest in Indian culture and religion is made rather obvious by the piece's melody, and McCoy Tyner's piano solo is even more impressive than Trane's, which is really saying something quite impressive. The captivating third part bookends intense soloing with a rhythm section double-feature, and then it's onto the sweeping fourth movement, where Coltrane "reads" a poem he wrote with his saxophone. That is, he ignores all conventions of melody, and just plays the meter of the poem, offering a preview of where his music was about to go. You see, this marked the end of Coltrane's period as a universally respected musician. Soon it was free jazz time, and we all know what that means. Controversy. I like the free jazz a lot, though.
Even if you don't think you like jazz, it may change your mind. It's a must-own release!
masterpiece March 19, 2005
Shawn K. Smith (Indianapolis, IN United States)
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
For those that get this album it is nothing short of a masterpiece. For those that don't it is anything but a masterpiece. Before judging this album one way or the other I recommend multiple listenings over a fairly extended period of time. Try listening to it 8 or 9 times over the period of a couple of weeks. I've actually known people who at first thought this album was awful, but after a while their ears opened up to it and they absolutley loved it.
First on my list of favourites February 17, 2005
Fernando (Canary Islands, SPAIN)
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
I resort many times to this record when I really want to get carried away with music. For me this record is medicine. So Coltrane, Tyner, Jones and Garrison are here like a group of therapists so to speak.
This one is truly unique. Never listened to something even similar and don't want to. Because "A love supreme" is just perfect. I have other Coltrane works like "Giant Steps" or "Blue Train" but these ones don't mean much to me. And I even don't like much John's way of playing: too many notes in such a little time space. Many times they don't tell me anything. And it is the same reaction that I get sometimes from Bird. "Ok, you're a virtuoso. Congratulations!. So what?".
But this record was really his cornerstone for me. He was in a different approach. He meant something to me in every note he blew from his sax. He really got into something. And he's here with the great McCoy Tyner. With his piano helps Elvin Jones to create a mystic atmosphere where you can feel they are in some kind of spiritual voyage. And everything is a wonder.
So if you are one like me who's not very fond of Coltrane, it doesn't matter at all. This is a must have. Who told you that "Kind of Blue" was the all-time best?. It is "a love supreme". It is about pure inspiration from four geniuses of Music. It'll change you. For good!.
Still supreme after all these years. November 30, 2004
R Jess (Limerick, Ireland.)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
It's a testament to John Coltrane's artistic vision that a piece of uncomprimising music such as a 'A Love Supreme' can be heard for the universalism it stands for. Recorded in a studio in New Jersey in late 1964, Coltrane had spent a week alone in a room in his house away from his wife and children. During that time of contemplation and isolation, he put pen to paper to bare his soul to God and the essence of 'A Love Supreme' was born. I don't think it was a coincedence that at the time this album was recorded in the mid-60's, a new philosophy of spirituality and peace & love began to prevade popular music in general. The Church of St. John Coltrane still resides in that bastion of hippiedom, San Francisco.
The music on the album itself is powerful not just for Coltrane's playing itself but also for the fanatical interplay of the quartet. 'Acknowledgement' opens with Garrison's passionate bass line, leading into Coltrane's dynamic and ingenious playing, the quartet's spirited performance like a fervant, untamed emotion that has gripped them all. 'Resolution' blazes from the record with Tyler burnishing the track with some brilliant playing of his own. Jones's frantic drumming comes to the fore on the opening of 'Pursuance', a track where the meaning of 'Chasin' The Trane' becomes self-evident as Garrison, Tyler and Jones follow in hot pursuit of their leader's furious joy. Tyler's playing is again compelling as the quartet trade notes with such alarming velocity before Garrison's bass tip-toes and leads us like the pied-piper to the concluding 'Psalm'.
It's refreshing in this day and age to hear an artist whose sincerity and integrity shines through his work.
 talk about navel-gazing... June 9, 2004
Mark Mazurek (Chapel Hill, NC United States)
9 out of 67 found this review helpful
Okay already, I'm convinced you have chops! You don't have to keep trying to impress me...or each other...or yourselves... This album encapsulates the fatal flaw of jazz music, the element that is relegating it to the dustbin of history: form over substance. Nobody will care about the technical achievements of these guys in 100 years (not many do now except those who confuse self-obsession with depth). There are moments, especially the middle section, where Coltrane and co. hint at some melodic structure, some level of aesthetic appeal, but inevitably a stylized flourish ruins everything. I suppose it's good that someone pushed the 'repetitive droning and squawking' envelope, but do you really want to listen to him do it? Art reaches out, speaks to the universal, appeals to the heart. Jazz excludes, speaks in code, demands analysis. I prefer art.
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