Whether you’re listening to the innermost revelations of a soulmate or a stranger, the nuances of sound can convey as much as words, sometimes a lot more. The instantly identifiable, voice-like timbre of John Coltrane’s saxophone playing made him one of jazz’s best-loved artists – and in the last years of his short life, it also steadily engulfed the more conventionally narrative-based patterns of pitch and structure in his work. Coltrane’s non-denominational religious album A Love Supreme was one of jazz’s rare big-selling hits, but between that late-64 studio session with his classic quartet (pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones) and this previously unreleased live recording from the following October, the restless Coltrane had begun abandoning familiar maps.
A month beforehand, Coltrane had enlisted saxophonist Pharoah Sanders (a 24-year-old developing the master’s own techniques to make the sax mimic chants, protestations and cries), a second bassist, Donald Rafael Garrett, and sought a more prominent role for percussion – changes that would soon disrupt his long relationship with Tyner and Jones. On this long-shelved amateur tape-recording made at Seattle’s Penthouse club on 2 October 1965, an improvised opening bass duet immediately emphasises a looser Coltrane-ensemble conception before A Love Supreme’s famous four-note hook begins to unfold in constantly changing keys.
Coltrane’s high, wheeling theme statements and whooping repeated figures swap with Sanders’ split-note squeals and ferocious growls, the serpentine Resolution gets a flamethrowing horn workout, bass-duet interludes bring periodic tranquillity, and Sanders’ seesawing atonal figures and a molten Tyner solo dominate the 15-minute Pursuance before the leader’s beautiful tenor-sax soliloquy steals the show on the closing Psalm. Elvin Jones’s elemental muscularity is thunderously upfront in the mix, and Tyner often sounds like the man heading for the exit that he soon turned out to be – but this is a unique document of a landmark 20th-century band at a pivotal moment.
| A | A Love Supreme, Pt. I - Acknowledgement |
| B1 | Interlude 1 |
| B2 | A Love Supreme, Pt. II - Resolution |
| B3 | Interlude 2 |
| C | A Love Supreme, Pt. III - Pursuance |
| D1 | Interlude 3 |
| D2 | Interlude 4 |
| D3 | A Love Supreme, Pt. IV - Psalm |
