Archive for the ‘Great Music’ Category
A Love Supreme… by John Coltraine…unreal… and completely wonderful…
If you ever have that moment where you were seeking to have a paradigm shift in consciousness? If you ever want to throughly feel a masterful piece of music so ethereal and entrancing, please do yourself a huge favor and put on John Coltraine’s A Love Supreme. This album will not only allow you to escape a mundane reality but it will transform it, note by note. I have listened to Coltraine a bunch of times, but this time for me, this particular piece of music felt like just what my mind required. It layed like silk over my whole space enveloping me into such a state of peace while I organized my business papers, packed for a show, and read and edited a book. It also inspired me in many ways personally to pay attention to the world around me in a patient manner, if that makes sense.
If you feel yourself in a particular mental space which challenges you, or you are seeking to understand a situation outside of you, put on this album and your mind will become excited and peaceful- how incongruent, but true. For me, it opened up my mind to things I may have forgotten about myself, and good things. I contemplated, planned and felt a clarity and cleanliness that everyone should be allowed to feel… Thank you world for giving us John Coltraine! Open your mind a bit with some ethereal, multi-dimensional and beautiful music…
A Love Supreme is a suite about redemption, a work of pure spirit and song, that encapsulates all the struggles and aspirations of the 1960s. Following hard on the heels of the lyrical, swinging Crescent, A Love Supremeheralded Coltrane’s search for spiritual and musical freedom, as expressed through polyrhythms, modalities, and purely vertical forms that seemed strange to some jazz purists, but which captivated more adventurous listeners (and rock fellow travelers such as the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cream, and the Byrds), while initiating a series of volatile, unruly prayer offerings, including Kulu Su Mama, Ascension, Om, Meditations, Expression, Interstellar Space. From the urgent speech-like timbre of his tenor, to the serpentine textures and earthy groove of Elvin Jones’s drumming, Coltrane’s suite proceeds with escalating intensity, conveying a hard-fought wisdom and a beckoning serenity in the prayer-like drones of “Psalm,” where Jones rolls and rumbles like thunder as Garrison and Tyner toll away suggestively–all the while Coltrane searches for that one climactic note worthy of the love he wants to share. –Chip Stern
One of the great redemptive post-heroin jazz albums in the history of redemptive post-heroin jazz albums, A Love Supremewas recorded the same way it was composed, and was composed the same way it was conceived: quickly, in the moment’s inspiration. It happened in 1964, seven years after it all turned around for John Coltrane. He went upstairs with nothing but pen, paper, and saxophone, and didn’t come down until five days later. When he did, “[i]t was like Moses coming down from the mountain,” according to his wife, Alice, “it was so beautiful. He walked down and there was that joy, that peace in his face, tranquility. He said, ‘This is the first time that I have received the music for all that I want to record, in a suite. This is the first time I have everything, everything ready.’” Earlier in the year, in the form of John Coltrane, Jr., he had received a gift from God. Now he was ready to return to God, bearing a gift of his own, in gratitude.by By: Lary Wallace
