John Coltrane – Love Supreme- Live In Seattle (2LP)

2 x Vinyl, LP, Album, Stereo

This recently discovered private tape, from 1965, shows the saxophonist and his band at the breaking point of avant-garde inspirations.

“A Love Supreme Live in Seattle” catches Coltrane and his longtime bandmates—the pianist McCoy Tyner, the bassist Jimmy Garrison, and the drummer Elvin Jones—in a time of tempestuous flux. In June of 1965, he assembled eleven musicians in the studio—the quartet, another bassist, and five more horn soloists, including a twenty-four-year-old tenor saxophonist named Pharoah Sanders—for an album called “Ascension.” It was an experiment in high-energy and clamorous collective improvisation, interspersed with individual solos. For the West Coast tour that brought Coltrane and his group to Seattle, he turned the quartet into a quintet, bringing in Sanders, who performed in something of an Ayler-ish style, as a regular member. For this club date, Coltrane also added the young alto saxophonist Carlos Ward and the bassist Donald Rafael Garrett.

Because of the size of the group and the many soloists in it, there actually isn’t all that much of Coltrane’s playing in “A Love Supreme Live in Seattle”—about twenty minutes of the seventy-five-minute concert. But what there is of it is extraordinary (even if the sound quality is less than optimal—Coltrane’s saxophone is particularly deep in the mix, behind the piano and drums). “A Love Supreme” is a suite in four movements.