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Download It #6: Acknowledgement

May 5, 2008

A Love Supreme

“Acknowledgement” by the John Coltrane Quartet. Album: “A Love Supreme” (1964).

Up until the summer of 1993, I was a rock & roller to the depths of my soul. I lived, ate, and drank those Chuck Berry chords, as filtered through The Beatles, The Stones, Dylan, Springsteen, and a slew of others who began joggling my mind back when I was 15 years-old. But I eventually knew so much about rock, it got to the point where I could tell you the best album by artists I didn’t even care to listen to (Eric Clapton— “Slowhand,” unless you count that Derek and Dominoes thing), so I finally set my sights on other forms of music.

I worked in a huge cd store here in Manhattan at the time, and, with horizon-broadening on my mind, I had myself transferred to the jazz department. Then I bought a couple of jazz encyclopedias, and set about becoming at least moderately fluent in the music's history.

I read up on the most important artists, determined which of their recordings are considered the most significant, then hit the store early each morning, where I ripped open any cd I wanted to hear and played it at top volume before the manager showed up. Then I snuck in back, re-sealed the disc with the shrink-wrapper, marked it down a couple bucks, and dropped it in the “used” bin.

Shhhhhhhh. Don’t tell anybody.

I wasn’t really sure at first if jazz would get its hooks into me, but shortly after I began my systematic self-tutoring, it did. I remember the exact tune that flipped the switch, too. I was in bed with the headphones on one night, when I thought I heard two men playing drums at the same time, a swirling, popping, vaguely surreal swing that rose and fell like the tide crashing on rocks, spinning into little whirlpools of sound, and crashing down again.

This continually rolling wave of polyrhythm wasn’t played by two men, though. It was one guy, named Elvin Jones, and he was the single most amazing drummer I had ever heard. He still is, by a mile.

“Acknowledgement" is the first track on John Coltrane’s widely-acclaimed 1964 masterpiece, “A Love Supreme.” A lot has been made of the spiritual aspects of this particular album, and who am I to argue? Certainly, there’s a searching tone to the music, a sense that Coltrane and his band members are tearing at the fabric of every preceding development in jazz, from Louis Armstrong all the way through to Charlie Parker and his fleet-fingered progeny. LSD wouldn’t be hitting rock & roll in a big way for several more years, but Coltrane - who had already overcome the requisite heroin addiction - was using his tenor sax to sonically push into the psychological unknown.

There are many jazz albums that I listen to more often than “A Love Supreme.” But none of them generate such a clear sense of adventure, a feeling that the men playing the music have entered a realm lying beyond the reach of those who haven’t learned how to pick up an instrument and turn a melody inside-out and then some. Take that hit of acid, in other words, and maybe you do sense a shaman when you listen to this.

Coltrane, of course, is Coltrane. Complaining about his expansiveness is akin to suggesting the Grand Canyon is just a big ditch. Personally, I’ve always felt he delivered his most enjoyable work under the watchful eye of Miles Davis, whose sense of structure - at the time Coltrane played with him, anyway - always kept his band members from swimming too far from shore when it was their turn to cut loose. (Miles, the famous story goes, once asked Coltrane why his solos were always so long, and the saxophonist said, “Because I can’t figure out how to stop.” Miles responded, “Try taking the horn out of your mouth.”)

“A Love Supreme,” though, is a soaring experimental work that somehow still connects with unschooled listeners. Hundreds of thousands of people who won’t get near Ornette Coleman, myself very much included, manage to find the unearthly hooks in “A Love Supreme.” Coltrane bleats and growls and sways, but in the service of a greater good than just seeing how many math problems he can solve by reconfiguring the changes. The album, from beginning to end, sounds as if it’s sprouting out of the ground, a flower nurtured by flashing lightning and rolling thunder.

That’s where Jones comes in. The John Coltrane Quartet is, without a doubt, one of the three or four most significant bands in jazz history. McCoy Tyner, along with the far more ethereal Bill Evans, is the most influential piano player to hit his stride in the 1960s, a genius of pianistic high drama. And bassist Jimmy Garrison could find rock-bottom in wildly obscure settings, the aural equivalent of pouring a building foundation in a mud slide.

As a group, these guys were remarkable, almost telepathic in their ability to raise a cathedral of sound on that foundation. But it simply wouldn’t have worked if Jones hadn’t been there to keep it all swinging so miraculously. He was a metronome from a different dimension, a player who could find the unheard groove in a team of police sirens, if that’s what was needed. But he had a hell of a lot more to work with than that. The closest thing rock has ever had to Elvin Jones is Mitch Mitchell, the dynamic, muscular drummer of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. But Mitchell, and I have nothing against him, is practically a frat house bongo player when compared to Jones.

"Acknowledgement"

On “Acknowledgement,” Jones starts off with a prayerful clash of a gong, then washes into the tune on his cymbals. Then comes a series of rim-shots and bass drumbeats that establish an overriding, dark-hued drama. Once Coltrane enters, Jones accelerates the beat while maintaining the continually-ringing cymbal. But that’s just part of it.

Max Roach, one of the founding fathers of bop drumming, was known for “dropping bombs” while he played— that is, periodically stomping down on the pedal to keep the tune moored in the most basic of drumbeats while he tirelessly worked the cymbal (“tick-tick-tick-tick-BOOM-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-BOOM”). Here, Jones practically reinvents the concept, as he carpet-bombs Coltrane with a rolling series of rim-shots and tom-tom beats, all while double and even triple-timing the cymbals (“tick-tick-BALOOM-BALOOM-tick-tick-BALOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-tick-tick-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM”). I defy anyone to listen to it for the first time and not be astonished by what they hear.

Wynton Marsalis has said it’s incredible that Jones could imagine playing like this, let alone actually sitting down and doing it flawlessly. Once, when an interviewer asked Jones how he and the other members of the quartet could endlessly expand on Coltrane’s outre concepts with such focused intensity, he answered, “You’ve got to want to die for the motherfucker.”

Download “Acknowledgement,” bask in the hard beauty of the John Coltrane Quartet, and live a little more than you normally do. Even if you listen just once, artists this profound deserve your undivided attention.

Paul Tatara

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