{"id":5643,"date":"2022-10-14T01:11:00","date_gmt":"2022-10-14T00:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/roglacup.com\/klaus62\/?p=5643"},"modified":"2022-07-14T19:20:53","modified_gmt":"2022-07-14T18:20:53","slug":"5643","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/roglacup.com\/klaus62\/2022\/10\/14\/5643\/","title":{"rendered":"Morning song #John Coltrane #A Love Supreme, Pt. I"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-4-3 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\"  id=\"_ytid_17291\"  width=\"1200\" height=\"900\"  data-origwidth=\"1200\" data-origheight=\"900\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/fth9UUa1Mfw?enablejsapi=1&#038;autoplay=0&#038;cc_load_policy=0&#038;cc_lang_pref=&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;loop=0&#038;rel=1&#038;fs=1&#038;playsinline=0&#038;autohide=2&#038;theme=dark&#038;color=red&#038;controls=1&#038;disablekb=0&#038;\" class=\"__youtube_prefs__  epyt-is-override  no-lazyload\" title=\"YouTube player\"  allow=\"fullscreen; accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen data-no-lazy=\"1\" data-skipgform_ajax_framebjll=\"\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>When John Coltrane released \u201cA Love Supreme\u201d in early 1965, fans recognized it as a masterwork practically on first listen. Best-of-the-year accolades rolled in. It became the biggest commercial hit of his career, and possibly the most timeless piece of worship music in the American canon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cA Love Supreme\u201d was a realized ideal: Its four-part suite perfectly melded spiritual transcendence and physical exertion, powerful composition and openhearted improvising. And as soon as it was released, Coltrane was ready to leap ahead far further.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He started expanding the classic quartet that had recorded the album until the group reached a breaking point. He brought in other, often-younger musicians and guided them into furious improvisations, drawing upon spiritual traditions from across the Global South. And he rarely returned to \u201cA Love Supreme.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Until this week, only one known live recording of it had been released, from a performance in Antibes, France, in mid-1965. But on Friday, Impulse! Records will put out a long-buried private recording, \u201cA Love Supreme: Live in Seattle,\u201d captured in October of that year at the Penthouse jazz club.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s a landmark discovery. Over the course of the extended 75 minutes of the suite, we experience more sides of Coltrane than on some major albums in his catalog.https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/CmDbJ8TrQe8<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Coltrane would later look back on this brief moment in his career with a special fondness, and some longing. His classic quartet \u2014 one of the most revered groups in the history of jazz \u2014 was still intact, but he had taken to attacking its equilibrium, infusing it constantly with fresh blood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI was trying to do something,\u201d&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=8OdTqzv4iR8\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Coltrane told the critic Frank Kofsky<\/a>&nbsp;in late 1966, by which point the drummer Elvin Jones and the pianist McCoy Tyner had ditched the group. \u201cI figured I could do two things: I could have a band that played like the way we used to play, and a band that was going in the direction that the one I have now is going. I could combine these two, you know, with these two concepts going. And it could have been done.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Actually, it&nbsp;<em>was&nbsp;<\/em>done, for a limited stretch of 1965 \u2014 more or less from the assassination of Malcolm X, in February, to the first major escalation of American warfare in Vietnam, in November. Touring the West Coast that fall, Coltrane spent a week at the Penthouse in Seattle, with his quartet augmented by a second bassist, Donald Rafael Garrett, and a second tenor saxophonist, Pharoah Sanders, both of whom had joined the band during its prior tour stop, in San Francisco. (Coltrane had just invited Sanders in as a permanent member, which he would remain until Coltrane\u2019s death in 1967, from cancer, at age 40.)<strong>Sign up for the Louder Newsletter&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/strong>Stay on top of the latest in pop and jazz with reviews, interviews, podcasts and more from The New York Times music critics.&nbsp;Get it sent to your inbox.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Another album from Coltrane\u2019s run that week, titled \u201cLive in Seattle,\u201d came out a few years after his death. Recorded that Thursday night, Sep. 30, it features epic-scale renditions of his originals, and jazz standards turned over. While he recorded prolifically during this period, it was until this week the only live club date from 1965 released as an album.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>On Saturday, Oct. 2, Coltrane invited the young alto saxophonist Carlos Ward, who had been part of the local matinee band at the Penthouse, to join his group as a seventh member that evening. The daytime band had been led by Joe Brazil, a saxophonist and prominent bandleader on the Seattle jazz scene, who died in 2008. An inveterate reel-to-reel tape user, Brazil recorded his own performance that day, and Coltrane\u2019s that night, on the club\u2019s house system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The recordings were high-enough quality for an audio team to successfully restore them, and the final product\u2019s sound is relatively clear, with only the two basses sometimes winding up muffled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The tapes languished in Brazil\u2019s basement for years. It wasn\u2019t until Steve Griggs, another area saxophonist, gained permission from Brazil\u2019s widow, Virginia, to sort through his collection that the \u201cA Love Supreme\u201d reel surfaced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Griggs set about bringing his uncle\u2019s old Akai reel-to-reel player back to working order. \u201cFinally when I did get it working and I could listen to the tapes, I started looking through the Coltrane material, and there was this&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/joebrazilproject.blogspot.com\/2021\/08\/a-love-supreme-live-in-seattle.html\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" target=\"_blank\">one tape&nbsp;<\/a>that said, \u2018Coltrane \u2026 A Love\u2019 on the box,\u201d Griggs remembered in an interview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He had stepped into Joe and Virginia Brazil\u2019s basement hoping to find clues into Coltrane\u2019s historic week in Seattle, thinking he might write something about it. He got more than he\u2019d imagined possible. \u201cThis recording has kind of exceeded my wildest dreams of making that scene come alive on paper,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The first notes of the suite he heard were from \u201cPsalm,\u201d its last movement, the tenderest part: a praise poem, addressed directly to God, that Coltrane had set to music and played through his saxophone. The poem itself is printed in the original album\u2019s liner notes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In Seattle, he chops up and reorders the melody, lingering on and repeating certain phrases (like he did in France, on the other live recording). With Coltrane the lone saxophone on this track, it\u2019s a respite after more than an hour of soaring and crashing, hard-blown notes over Jones\u2019s polyrhythmic waves. Griggs didn\u2019t know about all that until he flipped the tape, and played it back from the beginning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In concert Coltrane was known for pushing himself, and his horn, to the physical limits. It is part of what drew him to Sanders, whose role in the group was largely to provide atonal cries and expressionist sounds (what today would be called extended technique, but his critics often called noise).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Coltrane\u2019s studio albums, including \u201cA Love Supreme,\u201d had included more digestible helpings of spitfire improvising, held to the ballast of his quartet. That would change with \u201cAscension,\u201d a howling large-ensemble session that Coltrane recorded at Rudy Van Gelder Studios in summer 1965, shortly before leaving for the West Coast tour, and that Impulse! would release the following year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cAscension\u201d marked the beginning of Coltrane\u2019s final period. Having written jazz\u2019s major composition with \u201cA Love Supreme,\u201d he now fled from musical prescription.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But on \u201cA Love Supreme: Live in Seattle,\u201d he pushes in both directions. It\u2019s clear from the recording that these musicians hadn\u2019t rehearsed the suite, and some didn\u2019t know it by heart. He gives verbal cues here and there, and at times he has to use the magnetism of his horn to yank the group back to center. He does this on the up-tempo minor swing of \u201cResolution\u201d and \u201cPursuance,\u201d blowing the melodies in strong, controlled gusts, in sync with the multilevel machinery of Jones\u2019s swing feel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The pianist and Coltrane scholar Lewis Porter, who contributed to the new album\u2019s liner notes, marveled at Coltrane\u2019s ability to balance an expert\u2019s rigor with a beginner\u2019s mind. \u201cHow do you square the world\u2019s most amazing saxophonist \u2014 who\u2019s always practicing, partly out of fanaticism, but partly just to get better \u2014 with a guy that says, \u2018Let\u2019s all get together and play \u201cA Love Supreme,\u201d even if you don\u2019t know how it goes?\u2019\u201d Porter said in an interview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He noted that Coltrane had credited Miles Davis with convincing him that rehearsals stifle creativity, rather than draw it out. To a sometimes extreme degree, Porter said, Coltrane \u201ctook Miles\u2019s message to heart.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, 24, is high on the list of young jazz innovators today, and like Coltrane sees both composing and improvising as something akin to a form of worship. Growing up in Philadelphia, where Coltrane spent his formative years, Wilkins came to know the sacred music of \u201cA Love Supreme\u201d via jam sessions, where musicians would call \u201cResolution\u201d and \u201cPursuance\u201d along with Broadway standards, injecting a reverent current into the space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThere was a general common knowledge onstage that we were reaching for something high,\u201d Wilkins said. \u201cThis wasn\u2019t a personal thing; you could feel it on the bandstand. You weren\u2019t done soloing till you felt we had, not even peaked, but reached a transcendent level.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Listening to the newly unearthed recording, Wilkins said that in Coltrane\u2019s push toward a freer aesthetic, he heard a group of musicians reaching escape velocity. \u201cI wonder if they were thinking of the audience in these moments,\u201d he said, considering the nearly 300 paying guests who were gathered at the Penthouse that night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI don\u2019t think they were,\u201d Wilkins said. \u201cI think they completely escaped surveillance.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Posted from: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2021\/10\/19\/arts\/music\/john-coltrane-a-love-supreme-live-in-seattle.html\">https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2021\/10\/19\/arts\/music\/john-coltrane-a-love-supreme-live-in-seattle.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When John Coltrane released \u201cA Love Supreme\u201d in early 1965, fans recognized it as a masterwork practically on first listen. Best-of-the-year accolades rolled in. It became the biggest commercial hit of his career, and possibly the most timeless piece of worship music in the American canon. \u201cA Love Supreme\u201d was a realized ideal: Its four-part&hellip;&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/roglacup.com\/klaus62\/2022\/10\/14\/5643\/\" class=\"\" rel=\"bookmark\">Read More &raquo;<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Morning song #John Coltrane #A Love Supreme, Pt. I<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5648,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[505],"class_list":["post-5643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-morning-song","tag-john-coltrane-a-love-supreme-2"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/roglacup.com\/klaus62\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/roglacup.com\/klaus62\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/roglacup.com\/klaus62\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roglacup.com\/klaus62\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roglacup.com\/klaus62\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5643"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/roglacup.com\/klaus62\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5646,"href":"https:\/\/roglacup.com\/klaus62\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5643\/revisions\/5646"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roglacup.com\/klaus62\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/roglacup.com\/klaus62\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roglacup.com\/klaus62\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roglacup.com\/klaus62\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}