‘A Love Supreme’: What is the perfect entry point into jazz music?
“I don’t like jazz” is a ridiculous statement, spoken only by the ignorant and idiotic.
It is a statement akin to “I don’t like food” or even “I don’t like music”. The fact is, jazz has been around for so long and has been reinvented on so many hundreds of occasions that tarring the entirety of the jazz landscape with the same brush is offensively reductive.
If, by some cruel curse of hearing, you cannot find anything of worth in Louis Armstrong’s playing, for instance, that doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t enjoy the hip-hop and Afrobeat inspiration of contemporary jazz outfit Ezra Collective. There are entire worlds built up under the enduring umbrella of jazz, and some are certainly more habitable than others. If you are searching for a general entry point, though, John Coltrane is the obvious choice.
Whether or not Coltrane is the greatest jazz artist of all time is an entirely different debate, though he is inarguably up there with the greatest. Nevertheless, the saxophonist’s discography contains a vast plethora of different sounds, eras, and influences, stretching from the hard bop mastery of his Prestige-era recordings in the 1950s to the Spanish influences on Olé Coltrane and the ultimate improvisational freedom of his final projects.
A crowning jewel within that discography is, of course, Coltrane’s 1965 magnum opus A Love Supreme, which might just be the perfect introductory album for jazz sceptics. For starters, it encircles so much of what made John Coltrane such an important, beloved, and revolutionary artist, marking the pinnacle of his modal output while simultaneously hinting at the spiritual jazz that would follow in later years – both in terms of John Coltrane’s own discography, and that of his wife, Alice Coltrane, who typified the spiritual jazz sound.
Despite that wide breadth of sound, or even the incredibly ambitious nature of the suite contained on that LP, A Love Supreme is not an overly challenging listening experience, at least not in comparison to some of the more experimental, subversive jazz records beginning to be released around that time.
While it is certainly experimental in its own way, Coltraine’s excellence reveals itself to you, the listener, over the course of the tracklisting; you don’t have to go digging around in the depths of harsh experimentalism.
If A Love Supreme wasn’t such a defining record for 1960s-era jazz, typifying the kind of sound that the vast majority of audiences associate with the genre, you might argue that the LP transcends the barriers of the genre entirely. You don’t have to scrutinise the grooves of the record too closely to see the various connections between that 1965 album and the R&B, soul, and, indeed, rock and roll that was dominating the mainstream airwaves of the day.
Not only is A Love Supreme a perfect gateway into jazz because of its accessibility, but also because of what it leads the listener onto in its wake. If you dig into the John Coltrane Quartet, for instance, every member who performed on the album is worthy of a deep dive in their own right, with McCoy Tyner’s solo work being a particularly rewarding diversion. Coltrane himself, of course, also boasts an utterly incredible, expansive discography for which A Love Supreme provides an excellent starting point.
There are, presumably, people out there who are not fans of A Love Supreme, but if those people even exist, then they are likely not to be trusted. The compositional genus and sheer emotive performance of the quartet, not to mention the landscape-changing innovation at the heart of the album, isn’t just a highlight of jazz, but it is a masterpiece of human expression.
If that doesn’t succeed in hooking you into the vibrant realm of jazz music, then perhaps it is simply too late for you.
