Content area
Full Text
Beyond A Love Supreme: John Coltrane and the Legacy of an Album . By Tony Whyton . New York : Oxford University Press , 2013. 132 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-973324-8
Reviews
Tony Whyton's Beyond A Love Supreme: John Coltrane and the Legacy of an Album investigates the legacies of Coltrane's album A Love Supreme (1964, hereafter ALS), which was released with his Classic Quartet by Impulse in 1965, to commercial and critical acclaim. The author explores the album's legacy for jazz musicologists (Chapter 1), showing how the latter's customary 'formalist' models of analysis (p. 15) tend to downplay 'experiences of structure', for example, how the CD (including the deluxe edition) provides a different experience from the LP (pp. 18-20). Here and throughout, ALS's status as a 'work' and as a recording are accorded similar status (pp. 3-5). Jazz musicologists are enjoined to note how ALS as work and object challenges and neutralises (20) the binaries we employ in our interpretations of jazz, to question lingering dependence on the composition/improvisation antonym (pp. 21-8), drugs/spiritual enlightenment (for biographies) and live/recorded jazz (for recordings).
Beyond this call for 'critical listening', Chapter 2 considers how sources that constitute 'Coltrane studies' (p. 7) have ensconced the saxophonist in a jazz canon that has contributed to his deification, with A Love Supreme as his sacred text. Whyton contends that this process is more subtle than the observable rituals of the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco. The chapter shows how diverse actors have invested in a populist canonisation with creative fervour.
Coltrane's later recordings also 'challenge established musicological methods and problematise dominant representations' (pp. 8-9). Discussed in Chapter 3, they show the saxophonist's embrace of the New Thing and the dissolution of the Classic Quartet. If A Love Supreme has been understood as a representation of transcendent experience, Ascension (1965), Interstellar Space (1967) and The Olatunji Concert (1967) have been received as 'abstract and remote' portraits of the same...