John Coltrane
A Love Supreme

The divine lightning is not so much a peace, but rather a silent stillness and, at the same time, an ardor. It burns, with a purifying fire that consumes and thins everything, the seraphic Trane: with a stillness that is silence and face-to-face vision of the unspeakable, and with a fire that becomes a word of wisdom and narrative.

The divine lightning is an asceticism, a becoming a moth consumed in ash and flame, and a return wishing to express the unspeakable with burning words. The supreme love is the approach to silence and the transformation of it into words.

During the year 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music. I feel this has been granted through His grace. ALL PRAISE TO GOD. As time and events moved on; a period of irresolution did prevail. I entered into a phase which was contradictory for the pledge and away from the esteemed path; but thankfully now and again through the unerring and merciful hand of God, I do perceive and have been duly re-informed of His OMNIPOTENCE, and of our need for, and dependence on Him.

Between the recording and publication of this record, the Detroit Red, Malcolm X, died with lead in his body yet fulfilled by the vision of the sacred as community and human voice, a voice broken by burning passion. Burning passion and burning intimate transformation will be lived and died by, in those same years, John William Coltrane. The flame, moving now hyperbolically now parabolically, flickers alight, flickers consumed, flickers declines, gradually. Thus, a journey of ascent and oblivion, the tale of a flickering light named A Love Supreme speaks what words cannot say.

A disordered order and an ordered disorder: this was already under the skin, since the Monk of the Five Spot and the rebirth of 1957, its own, only its own, brass voice that was not caged yet not fragmented. Neither a servant nor a master, but free, with a freedom measured and unmeasured at once. Now, in the science of balanced fury and drunken calmness, in paradoxical longing, the pacing becomes a wandering. And the wandering, step by step, parabola: an ascent a frenzy a lull. It progresses, sure of its direction, between staggering and resumption, in a dizziness and in a thousand wild dizzies.

Then again, from the beginning.

Solemnly (and sadly) rewound and reinvigorated, in a tonal bath, it burns without consuming itself like the four intertwined cords of an eternal wick soaked in the wake of a towering flame, the quartet that lives -wild harmony- on a single heated breath. And the fire, which in flickering balance now lives and tosses, will soon be extinguished.

But not immediately.

There will be time, with a broken chest and a broken voice, a cinder too quickly calmed, to explore territories that no map can ever circumscribe.