THE SUPREME TEAM

Ronan Guilfoyle on the enduring beauty of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, coming to The Whale on Friday, November 29th

Recorded in one session on December 9th 1964, A Love Supreme is regarded as jazz saxophonist John Coltrane’s masterpiece.

And it’s certainly his most spiritual, described by one critic as ‘an epic aural poem to man’s place in God’s plan’.

More importantly, it’s a beautiful through-compose suite in four parts that would make a young Van Morrison swoon.

On Friday, November 29th, four musicians – Eric Ineke on drums, Michael Buckley on tenor saxophone, Leopoldo Osio on piano and Ronan Guilfoyle on bass – will perform A Love Supreme at The Whale, paying home to this jazz classic having become something of an annual ritual for the foursome.

Just what it is about this album that keeps drawing them back in, we decided to ask the Guilfoyle lad to explain…

I first heard Coltrane’s A Love Supreme when I was in my teens. My father was a devotee of jazz and played a lot of jazz records, and I’d heard a lot of recordings and various jazz musicians in my childhood. But I’d never really heard anything like this…

The first thing that struck me about it at the time was the difference in atmosphere from the music that my father listened to. You could hear the roots of jazz’s dance origins in the modern jazz he listened to. It was swinging, peppy, bouncy and resonant of the blues, but this album was different.

The atmosphere of A Love Supreme itself, is one of seriousness and power, and, I think it would be fair to say, spirituality. There was a declamatory kind of singing style to the way that Coltrane played, and it comes as no surprise when you look at Coltrane’s biography to find that his father was a Baptist preacher and that this church element definitely inhabits Coltrane’s style.

At first glance, the album seems explicitly religious, and Coltrane explains very clearly in the liner notes that the music is in praise to God. But although it is religious, it does not describe any particular religion, so I think it’s probably more accurate to say that it is a spiritual recording rather than a religious one.

The music itself is very powerful. It’s in four movements, and the opening movement sets the tone for this piece –  showing a sense of power, a sense of drama, a sense of energy and a sense of purpose.

The atmosphere on the record is definitely different to the kind of atmosphere that typified jazz playing in earlier periods. It was the kind of emotional atmosphere that pervaded a lot of music that emerged in the very turbulent 1960s  – a product of a different time to the ‘40s and ‘50s, and Coltrane was definitely at the forefront of bringing this new atmosphere into the music.

It is an atmosphere which could also be heard in early 20th century classical music such as Bartók and Prokofiev, and Stravinsky. The music doesn’t sound like those composers,  but it shares a similar emotional worldview to some degree.

The piece itself is constructed from classic jazz tune structures. The first tune, Acknowledgement, is based on a simple motif, the Love Supreme motif. The second piece, Resolution, is a 16-bar blues, and the third piece, Pursuance,  is a 12- bar blues. The final piece, Psalm, is based on a poem that Coltrane wrote, which is reproduced in the liner notes to the album, and the saxophone melody explicitly follows the words of that poem.

Myself and my colleagues play A Love Supreme about once a year and it’s always a tremendous experience for us as musicians, and it is a privilege to play this iconic piece in front of a live audience.

Hearing this extraordinary music live is quite different from hearing it on record – its unfolding drama is writ large in the live performance environment.

We don’t have Coltrane with us anymore but every time we play this, we do our best to recreate his sense of purpose, his devotion to the music, to spirituality and to jazz.

Eric Ineke, Michael Buckley, Leopoldo Osio and Ronan Guilfoyle play John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme at The Whale on Friday, November 29th at 8pm. Waiting list here: https://whaletheatre.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/873648871