Don’t get me wrong here when I say this as I love Spotify to pieces, without it this project would have never come to fruition, but sometimes I bloody hate it. This isn’t a slight against the annoyingly out of place adverts for Lethal Bizzle as I listen to Coltrane or the amateurism that are the voice-mail advocates. Those are old complaints and there is a new one, specific to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. If you feel the need to listen to this album after my review here is a prior warning: Spotify have two different albums listed under the same title. This is something that is worth noting as it took a good 6 minutes of listening for me to work out this wasn’t the right album. So let that be a lesson to everyone, One thing that only just dawned on me is that this is the first jazz album that I have reviewed for a while. In fact the last one, if I recall correctly, was the abomination that was Charles Mingus’s The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. Wow, there is little wonder why I actually approached this album with as much trepidation as I did. Either way, it is time to put my jazz hat back on and utilise the rules of jazz appreciation as stipulated in my earlier review for Jimmy Smith’s Back at the Chicken Shack.
John Coltrane is one of the few names in jazz that I had actually heard of, although it’s a sad fact that this is now my jazz knowledge completely used up and anyone I now encounter will be greeted with a resounding ‘who the hell are you?’. Either way, it is nice to know that my knowledge of him has been rewarded with a thoroughly good jazz album. Coltrane, unlike Mingus, knows how to balance the complexity of a piece so that it’s not completely overwhelming whilst not making it too sparse so as to induce a coma. He wants to create a mood and he will find the perfect combination of instruments to make this a reality. This is the truest on Psalm, the closer and my favourite track on the album, is backed with a smattering of cymbals and ends on the rolling of some great drum.
A lot of these classic jazz albums tend to have some running theme, or a message that they are trying to send such as Duke Elliington tried to in Black and Tan Fantasy. This is something I only because a teacher of mine tried to explain this to me a few years back in a music appreciation class where he actually sat on the floor and mimicked someone rowing a boat. Do I remember why? No. Was it funny? Kinda, maybe a better word to describe is absurd. This is something that I got from this album, both from the musical content and the names of the tracks. After all they all have some pretty big names such as Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance and Psalm so there is probably some hidden meaning linked in with the title. I didn’t look it up as I preferred to make my own interpretations but I got something possibly spiritual and an attempt to explain the journey someone, maybe Coltrane, took as a means to truly find themselves. Whether this is true or not, it is my interpretation.
The sheer fact that an instrumental jazz album was able to reach out to me is a very new thing for me, not even Kind of Blue did that. The arrangements are brilliant and at just over half an hour this is the perfect length for this genre of album so that it never actually feels stale and that 5 play-throughs later you are still enjoying the subtle nuances that jazz really is all about. Definitely an album for the iPod.
8.5/10
Fab Four:
...it’s four tracks long and only just over half an hour. You know the drill
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