A Love Supreme

Some records are music. A Love Supreme is closer to prayer, and John Coltrane never pretended otherwise.

Recorded in a single session in December 1964, the album is a four-part suite — Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance, Psalm — conceived by Coltrane as a spiritual offering, a thank-you to a higher power for pulling him out of addiction and into something like grace. You do not need to share his faith to feel it. The devotion is in the playing, raw and searching and almost unbearably sincere, and it reaches across whatever you happen to believe.

The famous opening: a four-note bass figure from Jimmy Garrison, and then Coltrane’s saxophone entering like a question. By the end of Acknowledgement the quartet is chanting the title — “a love supreme, a love supreme” — Coltrane’s horn having transmuted the phrase into a mantra. It is one of the most hair-raising moments in recorded music, the sound of a man naming the thing he is reaching for and then reaching anyway.

The genius of the record is the quartet itself — McCoy Tyner’s cascading piano, Garrison’s anchoring bass, and especially Elvin Jones, whose drumming is less timekeeping than weather, a constant rolling storm that pushes Coltrane higher and higher. On Pursuance they play at the edge of chaos and never tip over. On the closing Psalm, Coltrane plays a wordless recitation of a poem he wrote, the saxophone literally speaking the syllables, music and prayer collapsed into one.

It is not easy listening, exactly, but it is not difficult either — it carries you if you let it. The intensity is the point; this is a man playing as if the music could save him, which by his own account it did. There is no irony in it anywhere, no cool remove. Just a complete and unembarrassed offering of everything he had.

Put it on alone, with the volume up, when you need to be reminded that sincerity is not the same as simplicity. A Love Supreme asks for your full attention and repays it with something close to the transcendent.

Few records ask as much of a quiet room as this one. The vinyl is worth the shelf space.