John Coltrane - A Love Supreme

Recorded in a single session on December 9th, 1964, A Love Supreme is Coltrane's account of a spiritual re-dedication he underwent seven years earlier, after getting clean. Released on Impulse! in January 1965, it arrived as Coltrane was already reshaping what a saxophone quartet could sound like, and became the record most credited with pulling jazz toward explicit spirituality — a lineage that runs directly through Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane and, decades later, Kamasi Washington. Structured as a four-part suite rather than a set of songs, it asks to be heard in order and in full. Over sixty years on, it remains the reference point almost every spiritual jazz record gets measured against, not because it was first, but because it committed so completely to what it was trying to do.

John Coltrane spent the early 1960s pushing further past the conventions of hard bop, and by the time he recorded A Love Supreme with his classic quartet — McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, Elvin Jones on drums — he'd already redefined what modal jazz could do. He kept moving after this record too, into the freer, more abstract territory of Ascension and Meditations, right up until his death in 1967 at just 40. Few musicians changed the vocabulary of their instrument as completely, and fewer still did it while sounding this urgent every time.