Perhaps it's the color of sun cut flat & covering the crossroads I'm standing at, or maybe it's the weather or something like that, but I've been thinking a lot about my mother lately. She & I loved a lot of the same things, but not in the same ways. She loved movies, but she didn't want to watch anything with a downbeat ending. She loved books: potboiler mysteries & romance novels. Most importantly, she was a pious Christian & loved sacred music.
I don't think I ever played A Love Supreme for her. My guess is that it would have been a little challenging to her sensibilities--her appreciation for jazz began & ended with Dixieland. But once, when I was in a particularly dark place & she was telling me it would be okay, I told her "I wish I had your faith." I think she misunderstood what I meant. She responded that to wish for faith is to acknowledge that it exists, so wanting it is as good as having it. That's why I think of her when I listen to this album. Coltrane seems to feel the same way about his god, whom he fills the liner notes with all-caps devotions to, including a direct quote from the gospel of Matthew: "seek and ye shall find." In the sequence of the album, "Pursuance" comes after both "Acknowledgement" & "Resolution." The line between cause & effect feels blurred, with the track titled "Acknowledgement" filled with the tentative outreach of Trane's restless searching horn, trying out ideas in different keys, different combinations, whatever gets him closest to god, until finally resolving in the album title chant. Subsequent solo sections from each member of the combo (McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, & Elvin Jones on drums) have the same feeling of reaching & striving until it all culminates in the grand yet tearful serenity of the album closer, the timpani-accompanied "Psalm," played with full-hearted conviction but ending on an uncertain cadence, acknowledging that this love is too big to be contained or even described in one album.
Despite the mystical ambiguity of its execution, there is an underlying serenity on this album that belies the furious twists & turns his music would take in subsequent years. This is a serenity of the beautiful but mature variety, a serenity that admits the limits of human perspective, that allows for an expansive unknown. The album title lets us know: "supreme" is a superlative, & as imperfect humans we cannot create something supreme, only seek to describe it. Trane has made peace with the idea that the most any bit of art can achieve, sacred or secular, is an imperfect, grossly incomplete sketch of something inconceivably vast. If I had explained it that way, I bet my mom would have understood.
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