A Love Supreme; John Coltrane

Synopsis

Acknowledgement: Open on the beautiful swell from A Love Supreme. John Coltrane was born to a family of preachers in 1926, in Hamlet, North Carolina. He discovered the clarinet when he was very young. He became obsessed with it. He would just play all of the time. Then his father and grandfather died within a very short span of each other. To deal with this pain, he poured himself even more into his music. When he turned 18 he went into the Navy for a short time and joined a band there.

Resolution; After the Navy, he got hooked on heroin by spending a lot of time with other musicians and being on the road for long periods of time. He felt a lot of guilt about this and sometimes he would try to get off of it by switching to alcohol, but he always came back to it. Due to his drug problems, he got fired from several jobs. He got fired by Dizzy Gillespie. He got fired by Johnny Hodges. He got fired by the legendary Miles Davis, 2x. Miles actually recruited him and let him come back because he could hear the brilliance in John Coltrane’s playing. His wife supported him through these periods and tried to get him off of the drugs, too.

Pursuance; John Coltrane could see what his drug habit was doing to his career and his relationships and asked the Lord for help. 1957 He locked himself into a room in his house in Philadelphia and would not allow himself to come out until he had kicked his drug habit. During that time, he fasted and prayed. And the Lord came to him. He recalls how he asked God for the gift to give people pleasure by playing music. He also acknowledged that God could take his musical instrument away, permanently.

Psalm: After that experience, much of Coltrane’s work was centered around Godly themes. In 1965 he put out what is considered his masterpiece, A Love Supreme. He dedicated the entire album to God’s glory. With the Lord first place in his mind from there, he went on to do other albums called Ascension and Om andExpression. He died in 1967 of liver cancer at the age of 40.