Masterpiece: A Love Supreme

[Today: John Coltrane talks to God, but I hear something else...]

What an album means is much different from what makes it meaningful. Almost every song ever recorded has a specific meaning encoded within it, but music is absorbed and appreciated in millions of different ways that have nothing to do with any lofty artistic intentions.

Take, for instance, A Love Supreme. John Coltrane wrote the album as an offering of love to God – his way of saying thanks to the man upstairs for helping him kick heroin and focus on his music. Coltrane’s playing here contains a spiritual edge that pushes it higher and farther than it ever would have reached without divine inspiration. Trane divided this album into four parts (‘Acknowledgement’ ‘Resolution’ ‘Pursuance’ and ‘Psalm’) that neatly track his religious odyssey. Rarely has an album’s meaning been more transparent.

But for me, A Love Supreme has nothing to do with God, and everything to do with love itself. That’s because the woman who gave me this album (and introduced me to the music of John Coltrane) was someone I once loved very much – someone I had ideas of a long future with. Then one day I woke up and she was gone, and I was left with my record collection and a mountain of broken glass that was once a functioning heart.

I haven’t exchanged a word with her since, but her mad dash to the exit didn’t alter the meaning of A Love Supreme all at once. It took me years to realize that what I’m hearing while John Coltrane is blowing to the heavens is the sound of that relationship in full – its hesitant bloom, blissful duration, and ultimate end. There’s no God, just me and a bunch of questions about what might have been. And every time I listen, the record ends right where it should, and I pick myself up and swap it out for something even better.

Listen: Acknowledgement

Tags: A Love Supreme, Jazz, John Coltrane