All-TIME 100 Albums

A Love Supreme

This album is a humble offering to Him, wrote John Coltrane in the linter notes to his masterwork A Love Supreme. “An attempt to say ‘Thank You God’ through our work.” After groundbreaking work with Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis, Coltrane had taken flight as a solo artist. But after his monumental 1959 Giant Steps, he had taken his powerhouse “sheets of sound” approach to the tenor saxophone as far as he could go. A Love Supreme‘s four-part suite represented a new approach — sparer, more fluid, more intense. This musical prayer was the high-water mark, too, for Coltrane’s classic quartet of pianist McCoy Tyner, bass player Jimmy Garrison, and monster drummer Elvin Jones. (The 2002 deluxe reissue includes the only live performance of the suite.) Elsewhere in the notes, Coltrane wrote that “God breathes through us so completely…so gently we hardly feel it…yet, it is our everything” This was never more true than in the music on A Love Supreme.

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