(EDITOR'S NOTE: This article is the first entry in the Sun-Gazette's Uptown Music Collective series. Jonah Walters is a UMC?student.)
Though my musical tastes tend to scatter and reconverge as I continuously search for new sounds, there is one album I repeatedly revisit - one that I always find to be moving and inspiring: John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme."
This is an album remarkable for its emotional depth and musical daring, but also for the deep spirituality and soul-barring devotion revealed in Coltrane's transcendent improvisations.
Coltrane's deep, emotive lines scream a sacrificial joy in their delivery, a selfless offering to a God whom Coltrane felt he could only reach through the vulnerability and nakedness of music.
John Coltrane was a deeply religious man, a gifted saxophonist and composer who experienced several religious transformations throughout his life. He never bound himself to a particular faith, but instead welcomed the opportunity to reveal the mystery on his own terms, through the intense vulnerability and emotional exhaustion that came from spontaneous creation.
Toward the end of his tragically short life, he became interested in Kabbalah and eastern religion, and increasingly felt that he only could adequately praise God through his music. In his recordings, we are given the opportunity to examine his deep religiosity and be moved by the inspirational selflessness of his playing; we can stand in awe of the powerful voice he offers through his horn, often playing past the point of exhaustion, straining his lungs, his throat and his lips as he forces air from his frail flesh into the silver-gold of his horn and into the invincible creation where it is immortalized as prayer. A self-flagellation in blue.
More impressive still is that this spiritual nakedness is sought and achieved in the company of others and not within the safe environment of a place of worship, but in the scientific surroundings of a recording studio.
He creates some of his most crushingly emotional music - music of prayerful struggle and religious conviction - among his friends and collaborators, exposed and unembarrassed.
"A Love Supreme" is a suite meant to be listened to as a single entity rather than as a collection of isolated ideas. Coltrane chooses a simple four-syllable phrase (the title of the album) as his mantra, chanting it musically and, ultimately, verbally throughout the course of the first movement, "Acknowledgment" - building this simple idea into the delicate devotion and total trust of the final "Psalm."
Coltrane's playing has been compared to the impassioned shouting of a preacher, the zealous chant of African shamans, the joyful, frenetic song of a congregation possessed and uninhibited in its praising of God. It is powerful and sensitive, prayerful and passionate and above all, grateful in it's intensity and loving in its grace.
The final movement, "Psalm," is meant to be experienced in conjunction with a poem of Coltrane's, included in the liner notes.
Coltrane literally recites the poem melodically through his saxophone, beginning with the title and ending with the devout intoning of his final "Amen."
Using the syllables of the written word as a loose, elastic guide, he plays the poem, adopting the oft repeated "Thank you God" as a kind of mantra - a unifying theme.
So apparent is the bond between poem and melody that one cannot be lost in the text or in the tune, as the emotional colors and syllabic accents are so artfully accurate from line to line - a seamless fusion of language and sound.
At the end of the tune, after his final quivering Amen, Coltrane adds a tag to the melody, maintaining it's emotional depth through the last trembling tone of his horn.
In one of the first instances of overdubbing in traditional jazz, he adds two contrasting saxophone lines panned to two different channels, accented only by the timpani and cymbal swells that are heard throughout the piece.
On the right can be heard a joyful line of rapid, upwardly moving notes - a victorious ascension resolving triumphantly in a burst of grateful sound - while on the left is heard a low rumble, a slow descent to a final, definitive end: the laying down to rest.
For me, this still stands as one of the most moving moments of all recorded music and it is especially relevant now, 43 years after John Coltrane's tragic death.
