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A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album
 
 
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A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album [Hardcover]

Ashley Kahn (Author), Elvin Jones (Foreword)
4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews) |

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Book Description

Publication Date: October 24, 2002
Bringing the same fresh and engaging approach to music that characterized his critically acclaimed Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece, Ashley Kahn has written an even more illuminating celebration of saxophone legend John Coltrane's 1964 spiritual opus and masterwork. A Love Supreme is a passionate and revealing portrait of a timelessly resonant musical statement, artfully balancing biography, analysis, and a palpable enthusiasm that anyone from the casual listener to the avid fan will enjoy.

A Love Supreme was written with the full cooperation of Coltrane's family and features the voices of more than a hundred musicians, producers, and witnesses, including the surviving participants in the album: Elvin Jones, pianist McCoy Tyner, and engineer Rudy Van Gelder. With unpublished interviews with Coltrane and bassist Jimmy Garrison and scores of never-before-seen photographs, A Love Supreme weaves a rich historical backdrop to the 1964 recording and examines the questions and myths surrounding the album.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Along with Miles Davis's seminal album, Kind of Blue, saxophonist John Coltrane's A Love Supreme is undoubtedly one of the world's most influential jazz recordings. Recorded with pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones over the course of one evening in 1964, the record "caught Coltrane at a pivotal point in his creative trajectory: the crystallizing of his four years with this renowned quartet, moments before his turn toward the final, most debated phase of his career." In A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album, Ashley Kahn (Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece) covers how the album was made, where it was made, why it is so important and how it reached such a broad audience (it is one of the top-selling jazz albums of all time). Music fans and historians will devour the book, which is rife with anecdotes and commentary from Bono, Phil Lesh, Alice Coltrane (Coltrane's widow); black-and-white photographs; and previously unpublished interviews with Coltrane himself. It features a foreword written by Elvin Jones.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Jazz writing appears to be moving toward high art, with Kahn leading the way. In his second study of a groundbreaking jazz recording (the first was on Miles Davis's Kind of Blue), he addresses the less obvious aspects of Coltrane's album, including the saxophonist's ideas and the actual recording session, interweaving them all with snippets of interviews with the Coltrane family and musical cohorts. Five brief sections, or interludes, discuss topics like the label that released the record (Impulse), the producer, and related poetry, while the epilog concisely summarizes the text. A Love Supreme, Kahn reveals, was a spiritual manifesto that touched countless listeners. Many issues come to the fore: the cultural movements of the mid-1960s, including expression of spiritual values, and technical musical challenges. Coltrane fulfilled his desire to record in one finite session without regard to commercial pressures. He was able to pull together much of his previous work and concentrate it in one piece. The only book-length treatment of the record, this is absolutely essential jazz history for all libraries. [This book's publication coincides with the Verve Music Group's release of an expanded, two-disc version of A Love Supreme.-Ed.]-William G. Kenz, Minnesota State Univ., Moorhea.
--William G. Kenz, Minnesota State Univ., Moorhead
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 286 pages
  • Publisher: Viking; 1st edition (October 24, 2002)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0670031364
  • ISBN-13: 978-0670031368
  • Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.7 x 0.9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #802,208 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful
love it March 20, 2003
By A Customer
Format:Hardcover
I loved this book. In fact I was just ordering a few extra copies to give as gifts to serious jazz connoisseurs when I came across this drivel from Rich Fontana in the customer reviews section. I felt that as a fan of both the album and the book, I am compelled to reply to his assiduously prepared critique.

In taking the author to task for being a fan, he misses the point of the book entirely: it is intended as a passionate celebration as much as carefully researched study. The author admits it unabashedly, Coltrane himself stated that an "emotional reaction" to music was paramount (in a '64 interview with Leonard Feather) and how else can one measure the effect and influence of a spiritual album without engaging the emotional?

As stated clearly by the author, and Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner - A Love Supreme was indeed a culmination of the quartet's three years together, not a culmination of Coltrane's career. Yes, Crescent was important and the author states that, even proposing it as an effective blueprint for the four-part suite that ALS is. Mr. Fontana's argument that his own perspective on Crescent is significantly different from the author's goes so far into the realm of picayune that - if it were deemed important enough to be published -- the vast majority of readers would end up scratching their heads and closing the book. (And while on the subject of hair-splitting, Crescent was recorded and released in 1964 - not 1963 - as Mr. Fontana maintains, an important matter in the hyper-charged Trane timeline.)

As to Kahn's use (another small matter apparently missed by someone who relishes detail: the author's name is K-A-H-N) of rock n' rollers (and minimalists, and world musicians) in gauging the reach and influence of ALS. One of the primary intentions of the book is OBVIOUSLY to show how Coltrane managed to transcend stylistic and categorical boundaries - and still does. In the same way the old Blindfold interviews in Down Beat - in which say, Coltrane would praise Lester Young, leading certain fans to ferret out and enjoy old Count Basie recordings - today's far-flung media allows a Carlos Santana oreven the dreaded Bono to help point their fans to the music of Coltrane

In the end, Mr. Fontana comes across as one who requires his music writing the same way: dry, analytical, single-minded. Jazz - and music in general - is NOT rocket science and should not be left to the cold, hard interpretation of one person (such as Mr. Fontana's own, opinion-as-fact portrayal of Coltrane's musical path.) In the virtual round-table Kahn has produced in this book, there is life and passion (and a helluva lot of great photographic images), powered by his own perceptions but mostly by the input of others: jazz musicians, jazz fans, even regular (G-d forbid -- non-jazz) listeners. He trusts his reader to figure it all out for him or herself, that somewhere among all those voices sits the general truth of music, Coltrane and A Love Supreme.

I applaud Ashley Kahn for making a very readable, authoritative book that exudes love and respect for its subject. This kind of writing will do more to breathe life into the jazz continuum than the boring tomes that more often pass for jazz writing. I can't wait to see what Kahn comes up with next.

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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Perfect Gift for Jazz Lover December 4, 2002
Format:Hardcover
A gorgeous book, it gracefully fuses art and literature into a beautiful form with a most compelling story. Any jazz fan will appreciate the depth of the writers research into the making of this historical album and into the mind of the master. The interviews are fresh and fascinating, the photos sublime. One of the best music books I've read in years.
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Homage or Adulation? October 13, 2005
Format:Paperback
Kahn's stellar research for this volume on Coltrane's best known album, "A Love Supreme," is undermined by sloppy prose and lack of focus. Kahn does a great job showing just how powerful the album has been for generations of listeners, from Wayne Shorter to Bono. The biographical material on Coltrane is very good, but profoundly impersonal, skipping over key aspects of his life. The best part of the book is his meticulous documentation of the December 9 & 10, 1964 sessions that resulted in this album. Kahn describes the music with vivid language, and includes details about where Elvin Jones' drums were placed and how Rudy Van Gelder lit the studio to create a Jazz Club atmosphere for the performers. After that, Kahn's book loses focus. It's as if he had a 100 page manuscript, but then the folks at Penguin asked him to make it 250, and he had scratch around for any extra material he could find. His assessment of Coltrane's career post-"A Love Supreme" is very tepid, and the chapter on the legacy of the recording, especially from the vantagepoint of JOWCOL publishing, shows promise, but ultimately goes nowhere. Kahn's major problem here is that he doesn't know who his audience is. Is it for die-hard Trane-iacs, or is it for the casual listener that has "A Love Supreme" and no other Coltrane album? Some of this might not be Kahn's fault, as the content suggests this is for experts, but the formating of the book, with its wide margins and coffee-table book size, make it seem as if it's simply for show and tell in some bourgeois apartment. The book could have been better organized, more historically contextual, and filled with glossaries and footnotes for the more casual fans. Also, Kahn's lack of historical grounding makes it seem as though "A Love Supreme" was the only album released in 1965, and that jazz was the most popular music at that time, which is far from the case (just as it is today). Here, his homage to this wonderful album bleeds over into the realm of adulation. If this was a book for the "experts," it would be more critical of the album, instead of an all-out gush-fest. But Kahn's research must be commended (especially since he seems to be responsible for getting the December 10th performance of "Acknowledgment," with Davis and Shepp as added musicians, unearthed and onto the Deluxe Edition reissue of "A Love Supreme).
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
a must read for any coltrane fan!!
extremely insightful book. any fan of jazz/coltrane or musician MUST read this book. anyone who owns this album Must read this book, you will listen to the album in a whole new... Read more
Published on November 16, 2009 by John L. Hussain
A Love Supreme
This book is not "a listeners guide" to John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, although there is some of that in an elementary way. Read more
Published on July 1, 2009 by Sam Adams
The Dream That Became A Love Supreme
I love stories of how things come to be. There is always a story behind EVERYTHING in the world of form. Things don't just "appear" out of sheer nothingness... Read more
Published on September 13, 2008 by John P. Morgan
An Excellent, Informative Read
You KNOW the music. Now learn about the events in the life of John Coltrane that lead up to the pinnacle, the mountaintop of his career. Read more
Published on July 14, 2008 by Talking Wall
One More Session For A True Expressionist
What can be said about this album?; on this book are mentioned details about this historic spiritual session that any music, jazz fan must indeed know. Read it and grow.
Published on September 6, 2007 by andrecornal
Great book!
"A Love Supreme" was already one of my favourite jazz record before I read this, but after having read the book, now I listen to the music in a totally different way. Read more
Published on February 11, 2007 by John Williams
This book is really good!
Ashley Khan did a great job. I first picked up Coltrane's A Love Supreme, in the early 90's while a teenager, in a used section of a Parisian jazz record store, at that time i was... Read more
Published on March 31, 2005 by Kool Side
Loved it
Great music for those who love traditional jazz. Coltrane shows off his dexterity with the sax throughout this entire record.
Published on February 19, 2004 by J. Lewis
A "companion " to the music
I'll try to keeep this simple because the editorial reviews and the various opinions expressed , most notably by Rich Fontana and one "ny metropolitan reader " are very... Read more
Published on January 15, 2004 by Enrique Torres
Highly recommended for the uninitated
But if you are a long time Coltrane fan, there is nothing new here. And the guy is not a musician, so expect the usual metaphores when trying to describe what is happening when... Read more
Published on June 9, 2003 by Blues Bro
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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Van Gelder, New York, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Favorite Things, Elvin Jones, Jimmy Garrison, Giant Steps, Sonny Rollins, Archie Shepp, Alice Coltrane, Half Note, Art Davis, Bob Thiele, Blue Note, Duke Ellington, New Jersey, Branford Marsalis, Charlie Parker, Dave Liebman, Lester Young, Ornette Coleman, Paul Chambers, Pharoah Sanders, Wayne Shorter
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