by John Coltrane List Price:$11.00 Our Price:$10.00 Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Product Details
Media: Audio CD
Release Date: Tuesday, August 19, 2003
Label: Impulse Records
Average Customer Review: 0 Based on 0 reviews.
Sales Rank: 388
Tracks
1.
Love Supreme: Psalm
2.
Love Supreme: Pursuance
3.
Love Supreme: Resolution
4.
Love Supreme: Acknowledgement
Top Customer Reviews
Rating:
5 Changed my life
The negative reviews are from people with poor taste and poor ears. As for the review in 'trying-to-write-Ebonics' -titled "What's the hype, dog?" by some idiot from Garden City, MI United States - white guys fronting as black guys is very easily discerned by the knowing. Know that, playa-hatin' white boy! Now - to the album. This is pure music. PURE. This is music that comes undiluted from the soul of a COMPLETE HUMAN - who knows the contours of light and dark, who knows the depths and ecstasies of the human soul, whose love is boundless and heart huge - who knows suffering as well as exhilaration - and who has the genius to express every shade of his gigantic wisdom and understanding without breaking apart. Pure, liquid, undiluted, gorgeous, heart-expanding SOUL - that's what this is. You don't need to look up a jazz encyclopaedia and throw words around to understand this - people who do that are usually trying to show off because they lack soul. Well - all you need is SOUL. You'll feel a soul speaking to you. A soul tracing the contours of your own pain and ecstasy, a soul encompassing the breadth of human experience. The minute this sound fell on my ears it was like receiving an initiation. I felt the frozen and stuck parts of my being come alive. A healer plays these sounds - a medicine man. It goes beyond bars, dim lights and hipness. It is real, true, reaches deep into the earth and high into the heavens. Coltrane is a Bodhisattva.
Rating:
5 After a few inital listens
One warms to this album after hearing it for a few times.In the beginning, it can sound a bit foreign: it is unusual work for any genre of music - but if you can get past your own obstinacy, you begin to hear wonders in the pattern of the music. These songs do not just rise toward their climactic moments; they unfold. One reviewer on this site claims that the music will not hold up to repeat listenings, but I disagree: I took this CD with many others on a week-long vacation, and it never left my discman. And besides, A Love Supreme is cited in hundreds of jazz compendia, and exalted by such well-known critics as Ben Ratliff. It is one thing for a work to be overhyped by the public, but when experienced - and honest - critics hail it as a hallmark of jazz history, you can take that to be the truth. Such is the case with this album. No matter how often you listen, the tracks, given a discerning ear, will constantly reveal new facets of themselves. Does in swing in a way that any lay listener can enjoy? No. Is it slick hard bop, with those all-too-clever chords? No again. But what it is, is a masterpiece in a genre that Coltrane created. Not for nothing is this man listed by Miles Davis's side, even though Coltrane's music wasn't so stylistically facile.
Rating:
5 The madman makes beautiful, desperate music
By 1964, John Coltrane was an ex-drug addict who, like many chemical dependents, needed to cling to the superstition of a God to keep himself away from his old habits. Many musical artists' most beautiful, stimulating work was recorded during their least sane, most desperate periods. This is no exception. In the saddening delirium of his new AA-type religious dogma, Trane cried out with this long piece of music, this lovely cornucopia of rhythms and melodies yelled from the depths of a recovered junkie's crumbling sanity.He gave us a piece of music that transcends genre, and will lift you up and away from any petty little concerns if you close your eyes, open your ears wide and lie still while listening to every note and bringing no preconceptions into the music with you.Not only highly recommended, this wonderful music, in spite of the rehab-induced mythology and raving-madman liner-note kookiness that Trane imposed upon it after it was recorded, is absolutely essential if you have, in Zappa's words, "outgrown the ordinary." It's absolutely fantastic. It's the last really good album that the man ever made, as he become more "avant-garde" later and lost his flair for melody as his brain deteriorated even further. Let this desperate cry take you into other realms.You also need: Blue Train, Giant Steps.
Rating:
5 Great Jazz Album
Until I checked the amazon reviews page, I had never met a single person who had heard this album and didn't absolutely love it. I'm not saying that the single star givers aren't entitled to their opinion, but my experience is that my large swathe of Jazz Fan friends would unanymously give this 5 stars. It is not hard bop, but it is beautiful, whether you invest in the spirituality of it or not. This is one of the great albums of all time.
Rating:
5 An oasis for the soul
I have tried many times to describe this album to others but have failed with fumbled words and detached phrases. I believe the reason why is, this is the type of music that touches something deeper than your ears or mind. Admittedly I am far from a religious person, but spirituality is a different matter, and this album is truly a spiritual experience. Coltrane was filled with a spirit that transcends time and place and removes the listener from all material entanglements thus allowing a freedom seldom provided outside of meditation. A pure form of unspoken language in a private conversation, personal and accesible. To think that four individuals can come together to make a piece of this magnitude gives hope to all. Very few albums will receive 5 stars from me but this album is a no-brainer.If anything buy this album simply to have it...because unlike others, I believe every house needs A Love Supreme inside.
Rating:
5 Heavenly
I'm a big fan of Coltrane, and though I at least like all of his material, several albums stand out to me as really being special. This is definitely one of them.I enjoy Coltrane's fast playing, but have always felt that he played better when he dropped the tempo down a bit. Now, there is a lot of playing on this album that I wouldn't necessarily call slow, but it's more relaxed and "tender" than some of his other work. I feel that this is the best of his earlier work. John really hit it out of the park with this one. Every music fan should, if not own, then at least listen to this all the way through once in their life. And, if you're a jazz fan, then you'll definitely need to own this. It is a monumental achievement and is a piece of history.
Rating:
5 My Love Supreme
For something like John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" to move the human being to such heightening cannot be overstated in any realm of adulation, regardless of praise's nature tendency to overvalue. It was less than two years ago that, by chance, this disc found it's way into a CD player that I had been borrowing. As a shallow jazzist, at best, I was one day perusing through the limited Jazz section of an independent CD/bookstore in Whistler, BC. I had listened to much Coltrane by then, but only selectively. The limits of my Trane knowledge where painfully obvious by my utter ignorance of his actual works, or albums; all that I had enjoyed to that point was, embarrassingly, downloaded material. When I saw Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" for $15, I didn't think twice about dropping the money. Finally I could hold tangible, material proof of my love for the saxophone - at the time, that's all I really thought the album could hold in value, as I had never known of it's existence, (let alone it's legacy). That night, as friends and I were on a road trip and crammed into one single hotel room, my under-the-kitchen-table mattress proved itself not in propriety, as a sleeping device, but rather as celestial; it was my Coltrane refuge. My under-table mattress was an other-worldly hideout, and with the catalyzing effects of "A Love Supreme," the most blissful, quartet sounds ever to be recorded transformed all that I felt myself to be. Since first experiencing the masterpiece that is "A Love," not once has my hard mind not been softened by the grace, and purity of those four musicians, who recorded a piece, on one innocent day, to shed light upon an often otherwise dark existence. "A Love Supreme" is of the most effusive Trane reveries, and is arguably one of the greatest works of art ever created.
Rating:
4 A Supreme Racket
Acknowledgement? Resolution? Pursuance? Psalm? Why didn't he just make it all one song and call it "Crazy" instead? Thats what it is. It's an hour of Coltrane going just absolutely bonkers on tenor sax. Of course that's what Coltrane does anyway, but he's just in outer space on this record. He mangles and twists the hell out of his horn in modal and chromatic spasms and sometimes will just wail on one or two notes or non-notes like like he's screaming into the the thing. Meanwhile, the piano player just puches and plunks and slams and rolls all over the place, while the drummer whangs around and smashes and farts and trips over everything then goes crazy in long billowing solos. Ever so often some clunking and deranged spectre of a melody comes stomping in like a zombie and crashes around a bit, but it always goes back to the same jumbled and dissonant freak-out that makes up most of the recording. Most of the time it sounds like there is no real rythym at all, much less structure, which is cool, I suppose, if it's done right--and it is. I give this record a completely arbitrary four stars since I just like the way it sounds and I don't know how to possibly rate it! This is way out there if you dig that kind of thing. It's free. One would almost think Coltrane pioneered this style if he didn't know better.
Rating:
5 The Best of the Best
John Coltrane, Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, and Jimmy Garrison are acknowledged masters of their instruments in the field of jazz. From my 45 years in the jazz field I have not yet one jazz musician who would not acknowledge this. As a musician who was following jazz (and especially Coltrane) in the sixties, this record blew us all out when it first came out (with the exception of those who were hearing Trane live on stage or playing with him). It was one more amazing step in an amazing musical career of an amazing musical talent. 1964-65 was also very culturally craetive time in American music in general I am sorry to say that we expected this kind of expansive music to continue to expand and evolve, but as time has gone on (now almost 40 years later), this album stands out today as my favorite. I want to say that it is the best of the best, but that kind of discernment doesn't fit into the jazz ethos where each genre has its own unique flavor, expression, and contribution against an organic backdrop where there is not static standard. In other words, if I said best, then this may reflect negative on another work of art or artist that is no less exquisite or beautiful. here I am not desiring to compare, but simply to state that this set is uniquely powerful. Now some one who doesn't like jazz or didn't like "new jazz" might not like "a Love Supreme", but for some one who is open and listening there exists incredible power and beauty here -- love and wisdom in these sounds where these master musicians have dared to go! This is muisc that I can open up to and trust!Thank you Elvin, Jimmy, McCoy, and John!
Rating:
5 A Love Supreme: A Musical Revelation
In a time when jazz was beginning its downfall, this four-part masterpiece recorded in 1964, is John Coltrane's attempt to give thanks to God. In doing so, and regardless of your religious beliefs, he delivers a performance in the company of McCoy Tyner (piano), Jimmy Garrison (bass) and Elvin Jones (drums) that makes it clear what he meant when he said in 1966 he planned "to become a saint" in response to the question about his plans for the next decade. Sadly, he died of cancer not too long after that statement, but he left a legacy of work that -like this album- are testimony of what an inspired soul can let flow and give to others. Today, almost forty years after its original release, Coltrane's memory is alive and kicking and his timeless work continues to inspire musicians of all genres across the world. In my journey of discovery of this beautiful jazz music, this album has turned out to be a true musical revelation and I want to share it with you too.
