Picture
Sunday mornings are a strange limbo.  The weekend is over, you’re probably hungover.  You still have the entire day to take advantage of – or to not take advantage of.  Mostly you’re sitting around, enjoying the fact that you’re still far enough away from Monday and the inevitable painful trudge back to the weekly cesspool.  Another way to think about Sunday morning is that it’s a good time to think, a good time to consider what in the fuck you’re doing with your life.  Or to drink Bloody Marys.  Or both. 

This will (hopefully) be a recurring segment – with ideas on who you should be spending your time with on the strangest day of the week.  And, this being the first entry – we’ll start with the record that inspired the idea. 

John Coltrane.  A Love Supreme.  It’s a campy and overdone statement – but A Love Supreme is really less music, more art.  Beautiful.  Intense.  Joyful.  Coltrane’s four-part masterpiece covers the full range of pain and pleasure and comes out the other end.  It’s the sound of a man who’s been through hell and found his own personal version of salvation.  Hell, even the song names read like steps in some lost Christian-Buddhist path to enlightenment – Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance, Psalm.   

The liner notes have this quote from Coltrane’s wife describing when the album was written…

“It was like Moses coming down from the mountain, it was so beautiful.  He walked down and there was that joy, that peace in his face, tranquility.  So I said, ‘Tell me everything, we didn’t see you really for four or five days.’  …  He said, ‘This is the first time that I have received all of the music for what I want to record, in a suite.  This is the first time I have everything, everything ready."

I started listening to A Love Supreme on Sunday mornings a long time ago.  There will be other entries to this segment - but this one will be the best.  Enjoy.  Bloody Marys optional.
mp3: Acknowledgement
mp3: Resolution
mp3: Pursuance
mp3: Psalm
 


Comments




Leave a Reply