The A Love Supreme session has lived so long in my ears, brain and soul that the very concept of listening to it with fresh ears, brain and soul is essentially impossible. It’s A Love Supreme FFS. Uhhh Looove Sooopreeme. Uhhh Looove Sooopreeme. Uhhh Looove Sooopreeme.
Choosing this legendary recording as the first entry in The Ascension Years is the riskiest way to launch a daunting project: what can I actually add to a conversation this well worn? Fear and reality intertwined, and the answer came as I sat in my regular listening spot procrastinating dropping the needle, fidgeting with the A Love Supreme: The Complete Masters cover: don’t try to say something new about the album, and instead listen to the session itself, take by take, the way it actually happened at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio, 445 Sylvan Avenue, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, on December 9 and 10, 1964.
This post is part of The Ascension Years, a session-by-session listening journey through John Coltrane’s final years. Start from the introduction to follow the whole series in order.
Coltrane in Context
By December 1964, John Coltrane’s home life had already begun to shift in ways the session tape doesn’t advertise. His son with Alice, John William Coltrane II, known as John Jr., was about four months old, born that August while Coltrane was still legally married to his first wife, Naima.
Using nothing more scientific than counting backward roughly seven and a half months from a birthdate, a method that gives a rough window rather than a documented fact, Alice appears to have first become pregnant with their second son, Ravi (born August 6, 1965), sometime around the third week of December, just after these two sessions wrapped. Whether Coltrane already suspected or knew before he stepped into the studio on December 9, or found out only in the weeks after, isn’t something the record shows either way.
Alice’s presence in Coltrane’s life during this period, as partner, and increasingly as spiritual and musical collaborator, is hard to overstate. The transformation audible across A Love Supreme‘s four movements doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s unfolding alongside a home life in genuine flux: a new son, a still-undissolved first marriage, and a second pregnancy about to begin.
The A Love Supreme Session
Two dates, two different bands, one A Love Supreme session in name but really two distinct recording events. On December 9, 1964, Coltrane’s classic quartet, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, Elvin Jones on drums, recorded the four-part suite that would become jazz legend.
The next day, December 10, an expanded sextet convened for a single afternoon, adding Archie Shepp on tenor and Art Davis on second bass, and attempted to rework “Acknowledgement” into something larger. None of the experimental sextet material was used on the original release. It sat unheard for decades until it surfaced on A Love Supreme: The Complete Masters, the box set this listening session draws from, alongside alternate takes, breakdowns, and the undubbed version of “Psalm.”
Listening to both sessions back to back, in the order they were actually recorded rather than the order the catalog presents them, changes how the finished album sounds. You hear the core four’s fluency first. Then you hear what happens when that fluency gets tested by an unfamiliar addition on a high-stakes recording date.
Side One: Acknowledgement and Resolution (Master Take)
The opening wash is gentle, delicate, and beautiful. Perfectly executed. Subtle. Smooth as ice cream, the incense in a whispering wind and a morning raga. The ensemble timing is impeccable throughout, the segues, the entrances, the dynamic shifts, the push and pull of the grooves and harmony all move together.
Coltrane probes, pushes, questions, reiterates, deflects, reassesses, reforms, and restates the material with slick diversions and asides. He sounds serene. Comfortable. He’s exploring the material without telegraphy, communicating complicated emotions through advanced technique while somehow still sounding like he’s underplaying. This isn’t Parker, and it isn’t Giant Steps-style etude running. This is a man who feels the music and plays it. One production note worth knowing before you listen closely: the vocals on the famous “a love supreme” chant were overdubbed.
Resolution hits like a flurry of punches, each one pummeling the groove deeper into the spine. Tyner’s solo is epic, veering, spinning, dancing around the ring. Garrison and Jones work in a kind of telepathy, jabbing to full effect underneath him. Coltrane zooms in to focus at the barrage, winds up, and lands a few haymakers of his own before calling a close to Side One with Resolution’s amazing head. It’s hard to believe, hearing this level of chemistry, that this band would disintegrate within the next few months.
Side Two: Pursuance and Psalm (Master Take)
Elvin’s drum solo opens Pursuance, grabbing and holding the energy until the band drops in for a full chase. There’s a lovely detail here too, Coltrane’s off-mic ghost melody right after he finishes the head, easy to miss if you’re not listening closely. Tyner, Garrison, and Jones work a kind of magic together, throwing each other freshly jigsawed pieces that somehow fit into an ever-blooming puzzle.
Coltrane returns to the stand in evolution of the head, splaying it out in specks and trails, as the law firm of Tyner, Garrison, and Jones cross-examines the witness. The band keeps cooking until it boils over into Jones’s batterie bonanza and Garrison’s bass soliloquy, which harmonically transitions the Acknowledgement chord planing straight into the closing wash of Psalm, one of the most striking passages in the whole A Love Supreme session.
A couple of details worth flagging for the vinyl and production nerds: the tympani rolls under that transition are a small joy on their own, and Tyner, in this stretch, channels the French pianistic tradition, Chopin, Ravel and Satie, in klang, harmony, and subtle beauty.
Resolution, Alternate Takes
Take 4 has the bounce, and Tyner’s solo here is circular, crawling into isorhythmic corners, finding trapdoors and creating new architectural spaces as he explores. McCoy nearly steals the take outright. Coltrane picks up the horn and answers with a full blow, creating mazes within mazes.
Take 6 shifts the ground under the tune. Garrison picks different roots here, making the modal writing feel functional in a completely new way. Coltrane screams in quickly, then hands off to Tyner before the take fades out.
Psalm (Undubbed Version)
The undubbed version of Psalm is the original performance from the A Love Supreme session, before the resolution note Coltrane later overdubbed onto the final release so it would resolve properly. Hearing it without that added layer exposes just how much of Psalm’s gravity, in the finished version, comes from that closing gesture on the saxophone. Legend has it Coltrane was “playing” the “A Love Supreme” poem included in the gatefold album’s interior cover, note for word.
The Sextet Session: December 10, 1964
Six takes of Acknowledgement, and what you’re hearing across all six is essentially a proto-Ascension, Coltrane testing the density and mass he’d fully commit to six months later, except here it’s still wearing A Love Supreme’s skin.
Take 1. Two basses make the bottom thump, at the risk of sacrificing Elvin’s gentle swing. Archie Shepp squonks and squeals, also obliterating delicacy. The result is still impactful, the droning waves of thump are more powerful, but the spiritual contemplation gets lost in the deluge. The bass solo at the end turns into a game of cat and mouse between the two basses, and Garrison brings it home.
Take 2. The opening drone is more clarified, the drums kick off more relaxed, the ensemble’s edge has been worn off from the exercise of the first take. Still, more quonks from Shepp. Coltrane is pushed to the margins here, trying to find a complementary counter-melody to Shepp honking the main riff.
The material begins to coalesce during Shepp’s solo, he squeaks and shreds as each wave crashes behind him, and Coltrane slots in with chord overlays and high-register duotones. The band almost veers into straight Latin for a cycle before pulling back. Coltrane isn’t functioning as an arranger in the usual sense on this take. He’s a situational improviser, setting up the pieces and letting them fall as they decide.
Take 3. The opening wash pulls back on Shepp, then the take breaks down.
Take 4. Same wash opening. The Love Supreme groove is completely changed here, from three notes to six, and it sounds peculiar. The band vacillates between both versions before settling on the original, as Shepp shreds his best Coltrane. Then Coltrane steps up and scrambles his own eggs, though it feels like ensemble playing rather than a testament. Shepp interjects, the tide rises then recedes. Elvin’s playing throughout this take is spectacular, particularly in the transition to the bass solo, where he reduces dynamics without sacrificing intensity.
Take 5. Shepp stomps on the wash, and the take quickly stops.
Take 6. The most effective of the wash. Elvin takes off with the groove, and the modified bass riff sits better this time around. Shepp works a counter figure to the opening melody that it clearly doesn’t need. He takes the first solo, impatient from the jump, veering into big bluesy bordello blasting before breaking into blurts and bleeps.
Coltrane takes over and sticks to the script while exploring the depth of the characters he’s created. There’s fun call and response between the two saxes as the rhythm section cycles through the chord planes, and Coltrane’s countermelody is finally starting to work. Elvin drives the bus under the bass solo, light, dense, incredible. This is the longest of the six takes, and the most cohesive. It’s hard not to wonder, hearing it, what if Coltrane had gotten the chance to rearrange and reinvent these pieces for different ensembles across a long career.
What The Two Sessions Say
Listening to the original LP before and after the bonus takes makes something clear about the A Love Supreme session as a whole: Coltrane and the quartet knew this piece, and its spiritual dimension, through rehearsal and group dynamics, long before the tape ever rolled on December 9. The sextet session, by contrast, was a real experiment, but the new players didn’t have the situational awareness the core band had built. Shepp and Art Davis were there to blow with Coltrane on what may have been the biggest recording date of their careers. High stakes, unfamiliar terrain.
It took all day to get a good take of just the first track. Continuing at that pace would have taken a week. Knowing what he already had in the can from the day before, stopping the sextet exploration and moving forward with the ALS sessions as recorded must have been an easy call.
That’s intuition on my part, not documented fact, but the tape backs it up: six takes of searching next to one performance that sounds like it always knew where it was going.
The Records
Everything referenced from this A Love Supreme session:
- John Coltrane — A Love Supreme (1965, Impulse! A-77, original stereo LP)
- John Coltrane — A Love Supreme: The Complete Masters (2015, Impulse!/Verve, deluxe box set; source for the sextet session, alternate takes, and undubbed Psalm)
The System
All listening sessions on a Fisher 400 stereo receiver (1963) into Klipsch Heresy IV speakers via a Rega Planar 6 turntable fitted with a Rega Nd5 MM cartridge. Records cleaned in a Humminguru ultrasonic record cleaner before critical listening sessions.
About Spacefuzz
Spacefuzz is the recording project of Charles Morogiello, a composer, artist and guitarist based in Phoenix, AZ. He has studied, performed or recorded with Mel Powell, Morton Subotnick, Terry Riley, Wadada Leo Smith, Lou Harrison, Don Preston (The Mothers of Invention/Frank Zappa), Billy Martin (Medeski Martin & Wood), Mark Karan (The Dead, The Other Ones) and many more. His latest album, Crush Depth: A Dub-Sonic Submarine Symphony in Four Sides, is out now on vinyl and digital via Bandcamp. Explore the Spacefuzz discography or read more about the project. Stream on Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, and Qobuz.