Live In Seattle’ : NPR

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John Coltrane, photographed performing at the Penthouse during a series of performances in Seattle, Washington, 1965. A recording of a long-lost recording is now being released as A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle. Chuck Stewart / courtesy Universal Music Group Hide caption

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Chuck Stewart / courtesy Universal Music Group

John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, recorded in late 1964 and released early the following year, occupies a lofty plane beyond most other albums in any musical genre. Certainly one of the most famous jazz recordings of all time, it exudes a deep, devoted gravitas – a tangible focused enthusiasm that has long inspired true worship, as Jazz Night in America explored in a recent documentary.

For Coltrane – then as now one of the most revered saxophonists – A Love Supreme was also a precise moment in a changing picture. The middle of the 60s was a time of rapid development for him, when he penetrated further and further into the musical catharsis and distanced himself from the well-known anchorages of jazz performance. He was looking for a straightforward spiritual expression that would set the standard for a cadre of improvisers that emerged behind him, like fellow tenor heralds Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp, both on his free jazz milestone in June ’65 Ascension occurred.

In July, a month after the Ascension sessions, Coltrane and his quartet played the only well-known performance of A Love Supreme at the Jazz d’Antibes Festival in Juan-les-Pins, France. The set was included in a deluxe reissue of the album in 2002; This moment was also captured by a few short recordings available online, the sight of which can feel almost miraculous.

Recordings of Coltrane’s performance in Antibes, France in 1965.

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The Antibes recording was the only living document from Coltrane’s suite – to this day, as Impulse! announced the release of A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle in October. Recorded at the end of a week-long residence in the penthouse of Joe Brazil, a close friend of Coltrane’s, it presents this music in a glorious new light and with remarkably clear sound. (Brazil used the club system, two microphones and an Ampex reel-to-reel, and then kept the tapes for almost half a century as if guarding a Holy Grail. They were found in his archives after his death in 2008.)

The fact that Coltrane performed A Love Supreme in Seattle in 1965 has long been known to a small circle of dwindling eyewitnesses and profound Trane experts – like jazz historian Lewis Porter, who wrote one of the essays in the liner notes of the new album. But because there was never an audio documentary, the fact was never more than a footnote in the lore of A Love Supreme.

A poster promoting Coltrane’s series of performances that recorded A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle. Courtesy impulse! Records hide caption

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Courtesy impulse! records

There was also a separate chronicle of this engagement: Live in Seattle, a double album that was released in 1971, several years after Coltrane’s death. (Last year the Seattle Times included it in a short list of major live albums made in the Emerald City.) For those who advocated Coltrane’s late immersion in turbulent abstraction, Live in Seattle is a touchstone. For some other listeners, it can be a dauntingly powerful elixir. In his book John Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, Ben Ratliff, along with other albums of the period, characterized it as “expressions of flaming determination; they can express what the poet Robert Lowell, one of Coltrane’s contemporaries, once called” the monotony “of the sublime. ‘ ”

The music of A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle is literally sublime, without a trace of monotony. Its release is just as significant in terms of jazz history as any archive jewel that has been unearthed in the last ten or more years. But that’s an academic way of putting the case, namely that this album contains both the focused fire of A Love Supreme as a shout of thanks to the divine, and the more chaotic fervor of the “New Thing” that then merges into Coltrane’s creativity circle . It feels fully realized and full of possibilities at the same time.

Some of this certainly has to do with the combination of a telepathic gang of workers and an eager group of intruders. Along with Coltrane’s fearless rhythm section – McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums – the recording features robust guest contributions from Sanders, alto saxophonist Carlos Ward, and a second bassist, Donald “Rafael” Garrett. The chemistry in this cohort is scary and by no means a solid statement. When the album is released in physical form, it will include liner notes by Porter and another eponymous Coltrane historian, Ashley Kahn, which will shed valuable light on this idea and more.

This morning Impulse released “A Love Supreme Pt. IV – Psalm” along with its announcement, the piece that completes the set and suite. As even an occasional Coltrane expert will tell you, the recitative melody of this movement goes perfectly with the prayer-like poem printed as the liner notes for A Love Supreme – a feature Coltrane never made explicit, though it stands up to scrutiny; Porter is one of those who brought this insight into the public consciousness.

The live version of “Psalm” begins exactly like the album version: with a rapid rustling of piano and percussion, with Coltrane’s tenor setting the melody in a clearly vocal range. However, within the first minute it enters an ecstatic mode before sinking into a boil. Tyner and Jones are spectacularly tuned to the flow of its dynamics and cadence, rolling at free tempo through their extrapolation of the theme. (Note the quiet moments and how they return to a rise in fever as naturally as the high tide on a bank.)

When the piece ends and only a meditative ellipse of prayer bells remains, Coltrane’s audience seems almost too overwhelmed for a proper ovation. (Earlier in the suite – after “Part III – Persecution,” for example – the response is safer and more sustained.) Perhaps it was the sheer intensity of the experience that made the clapping seem other than the appropriate response. Judging by the silence before a second applause, the club guests may have suspected an uncertain signal from the stage.

Or it may be, as always possible, that some of those present were simply not ready to process what they had just experienced. It wouldn’t be the first time for Coltrane, and it wouldn’t be the last either. But if they weren’t ready then, 56 years ago, we are surely ready now.