A Love Supreme Music Cd

Supremes - A Love Supreme

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A Love Supreme      Artist : John Coltrane      List Price : $15.98 USD        Your Price : $15.18 USD      ProductGroup: Music      Release Date : 1995-06-20      Studio : Impulse Records      Label : Impulse Records      Avg. Customer Rating : (131 reviews)

Reviews Customer Reviews for A Love Supreme      This could be it...      Rating:      I know that everyone has, at one point or another, opened a review with the words "arguably the greatest album ever" or "It changed my life" or something similar. I will be no different. This is certainly the best John Coltrane album, though there are plenty of competitors, and it might be the best jazz album ever. I'll stop short of "best album", because it would be impossible for me to go that far. In a way, it also changed my life, or at least the way I thought about music. Before I bought it, my musical tastes were mostly confined to classic rock. After I bought it, and the only reason I did was because I enjoyed the Greatest Hits album of his I owned (which at the time was one of my four or five jazz albums), it opened my mind to all kinds of music. Soon not just jazz but funk, R&B, blues alternative rock, and some reggae caught my attention, and began to assimilate themselves into my daily listening diet, so to speak. It is more or less solely responsible for making me realize just how much there is to music. More than the DJ's at your local classic rock station want you to believe, that's for sure. So, how about the music? That's a good question. Like most of Trane's other dates recorded after he signed with Atlantic and began to make some of the best music known to mankind, the band is a quartet, this time consisting of Trane on tenor and soprano saxes plus McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums, a group better known as the "classic quartet". A little note on Tyner: he's a brilliant pianist, at least as good as Trane's previous cohort Tommy Flanagan, and maybe even better. It's a four-part suite devoted to God, and it's a gripping, emotional work of art. The album grips you right from the first part, subtitled "Acknowledgment", where Trane unleashes a cascading sax solo. When this ends, Garrison states the brilliantly simple theme, and Trane forgets all about convention and swoops right in on a solo. It's not just sheets of sound, it's also sheets of rising and falling emotion, tension being built up and released over the course of my favorite eight minutes in John Coltrane's entire career. The title is also chanted almost religiously near the end. This blends seamlessly into "Resolution", which is brilliant as well. Trane's interest in Indian culture and religion is made rather obvious by the piece's melody, and McCoy Tyner's piano solo is even more impressive than Trane's, which is really saying something quite impressive. The captivating third part bookends intense soloing with a rhythm section double-feature, and then it's onto the sweeping fourth movement, where Coltrane "reads" a poem he wrote with his saxophone. That is, he ignores all conventions of melody, and just plays the meter of the poem, offering a preview of where his music was about to go. You see, this marked the end of Coltrane's period as a universally respected musician. Soon it was free jazz time, and we all know what that means. Controversy. I like the free jazz a lot, though. Even if you don't think you like jazz, it may change your mind. It's a must-own release!     Customer Reviews for A Love Supreme Cd      masterpiece      Rating:      For those that get this album it is nothing short of a masterpiece. For those that don't it is anything but a masterpiece. Before judging this album one way or the other I recommend multiple listenings over a fairly extended period of time. Try listening to it 8 or 9 times over the period of a couple of weeks. I've actually known people who at first thought this album was awful, but after a while their ears opened up to it and they absolutley loved it.