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~music Listening Club 5 - A Love Supreme
Hi everyone, glad to see you here in week number 5! It's time for another classic record discussion: John Coltrane's A Love Supreme!
Here's the place to discuss your thoughts on the record, your history with it or the artist, and basically talk about whatever you want to that goes along with A Love Supreme. Remember that this is intended to be a slow moving thing, feel free to take your time and comment at any point in the week!
If you'd like to stream or buy the album, it can be found on most platforms here.
Don't forget to nominate and vote for next week's obscure record in response to this comment!
Definitely a desert-island album for me. Never gets old. Might get my vote for greatest album ever recorded. It's the album that introduced to the spiritual aspect of jazz music and, to some extent, of music in general..
If you've never seen it, check out this video which plays the opening Psalm synced with Coltrane's own handwritten lyrics.
Imagine the stuff that was going on in that man's head while he played.
Not sure what to say about this album that hasn't already been said. It's a masterpiece of modal jazz and a precursor of the spiritual jazz movement that blossomed in the late '60s and '70s. It's a concept album that preceded Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper's by two years. It is one of the most important and influential jazz albums ever made and deserves every accolade it has received.
One thing I can add is that I didn't "get it" when I first heard this album as a new jazz listener. Others may disagree, but I don't think A Love Supreme is a good introductory album. It took me a lot of time to get used to the different rhythms and harmonies and forms and textures of jazz before I was ready to jump into the deep end of the pool. I had to hear some of Coltrane's earlier work (along with Miles, Mingus, Monk, etc.) before I was really ready for A Love Supreme.
Please reply to this comment with all nominations for Week 6 of the listening club then vote on submissions you would like to see chosen. Votes and nominations will still count until minutes before the fourth week's thread is posted.
Feel free to "sell" your nominated record in your comment. By the nature of obscure nominations, there probably won't be many others who are familiar with what you mention. Tell us why you think we should hear it, if you'd like! If your record is picked, this will be included in the OP of the next listening club.
Please make sure your record includes a freely available stream or download. Probably your best bet is asking yourself "is this on Spotify or YouTube?" Other platforms work too, but I doubt too many winning nominations would be DatPiff exclusives.
Remember: Your record should not be certified Gold or higher by the RIAA. Here you can check the certification status of your nomination, if you're unsure.
I'm going to suggest Postcards by Meadowlark again. I'm not great at describing why music is good, so I will just leave the music video of the title track.
I'm gonna nominate Mr. Bungle - California.
It's like taking a bunch of pieces of different kinds of Californian music culture and jamming them all together to make a totally new thing.
I'm going to come in a bit late and repeat my nomination that I made on week 0:
All I'd add to the pitch is that @arghdos' comparison between this and Nilsson is very accurate and I imagine there would be a lot of common fans between the two.
Listening to this again, I'm reminded that my appreciation for jazz is mostly just surface-level aesthetics. My favorite jazz records tend to be ones like this or Sun Ra's Space is the Place because at the moment I latch onto exploring cool sounds more than what you're "supposed" to get from this kind of music.
Still, I really enjoy this record on those grounds. There's a reason it gains so much traction even outside of circles that care about jazz. It just fuckin sounds cool. The bass is cool. The chanting is cool. Drum solo: also cool. The whole atmosphere is cool. As much as jazz nerds like to make fun of people who only like this and a couple Miles Davis records, I think there's something to be said for a record that both satisfies the purists and blows away outsiders. People more familiar with rock music can listen to this and love it in much the same way they love a good prog record, and many of us do exactly that. It's cool shit. Great record.
As someone who has never really listened to jazz before, I did enjoy it from that outsider's perspective. One thing that I thought was interesting was that there were sections that sounded... discordant, if that's the right word, but those sections never sounded bad. Even if they seemed a little off from what I expected, they still worked in the context of the particular part of the music.