It’s been fun to listen to this and “Kind of Blue” back to back. Both do a fantastic job of immersing the listener in mood, albeit two very different ones. While Mile’s David opus was the perfect album for a dreary rainy day, Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” is pumping with nighttime energy, capturing both the swaying shadowy figures in the corners of a nightclub and the glare of the spotlight on the warm metal of a saxophone. At times loud, at times chaotic, at times reflective, this album has a little bit of everything. It pulses with energy; a testament to a musician’s newfound sobriety and his faith and surrender to a higher power.
Again, I find myself struggling to put a hard ranking on this album, despite a weekend of repeated listens. There’s so much I don’t grasp, and yet I already find myself pulling his “Love Supreme” poem melody from multiple parts, and instruments. And unlike the previous album, I find myself needing to sit down and focus on it, having put it on in the background multiple times only to switch to something else because I felt like I wasn’t being fair to it. This isn’t to say that it should be considered automatically superior to something that doesn’t require the listener to sit down with it intentionally, but I do feel like it rewards more because of it. Or maybe I’m just putting jazz on a pedestal. It is, after all, just music.
My rating: 3.5/5
The Word and The Song 