A Love Supreme
February 2, 2020•188 words
My favorite album of all time is A Love Supreme by John Coltrane. This is the perfect album to listen to on a Sunday morning with a cup of coffee and I've done this for the past 20 years. A small moment of reflection after a busy week. The album was recorded on December 9th, 1964 at the studio of Rudy Van Gelder at Englewood Cliffs in New Jersey. Gelder had a busy week recording two sessions a day leading up to the Love Supreme session. Coltrane's sessions started late - around 7pm - to save money. Coltrane gave very little instruction to Elvin Jones (drums), McCoy Tyner (piano), and Jimmy Garrison (bass). It was just a simple melody and a few sentences of description. No one knew if the songs were going to be 5 minutes or 30 minutes. By the end of the night they had recorded the four pieces that would make up the suite of A Love Supreme. It took less than an hour of tape to record the whole album and for his time Coltrane was paid $284.66 or $2347 in 2020 dollars.