A Love Supreme Review

One session, 9 December 1964, four musicians who had been playing together long enough to stop negotiating. Acknowledgement opens on a gong and Garrison's bass figure, and near the end Coltrane puts down the horn and chants the four syllables of the title nineteen times, overdubbed, walking the motif through key after key until it stops being a phrase and becomes a fact.

Resolution is the closest thing here to a normal burner. Pursuance is Elvin Jones let off the leash, five minutes of drumming that should count as a composition in its own right. Then Psalm, where Coltrane plays a devotional poem printed in the sleeve note, syllable for syllable, without singing a word of it. Lewis Porter called it a wordless recitation and that is exactly what it sounds like: you can follow the text against the horn line and watch them match.

So the lyrics grade is not a courtesy. This is a record with a written text at its centre, and the argument it makes about gratitude and getting clean is legible whether or not you share the theology. Rudy Van Gelder's room does the rest, giving Garrison's bass body and letting Jones's cymbals ring without smearing.

It sold around half a million copies by 1970, an absurd figure for a spiritual jazz suite, and went into the National Recording Registry in 2015. If it sits a notch below the very top of this vertical it is only because Coltrane's own later records make the case that this was a doorway rather than a destination.