A Suite Recorded in One Session

John Coltrane recorded A Love Supreme in a single session at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, on December 9, 1964, with his working quartet: McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. Impulse Records released the album in January 1965. Coltrane had spent much of 1957 working through addiction to heroin and alcohol, and he later described what followed as a spiritual awakening, a debt he set out to repay in sound. The album is a single continuous suite in four movements, Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance and Psalm, tracing an arc from gratitude through struggle to a closing movement built, unusually for jazz, as a wordless setting of a devotional poem Coltrane printed in the liner notes rather than sang. The album's cover carried that poem in full, along with Coltrane's own note dating his spiritual turn to 1957 and calling the record a humble offering to God. Critics received it immediately as a departure from Coltrane's earlier hard bop and modal recordings toward something closer to prayer, and it has never been out of print. Ashley Kahn's 2002 study of the album's making treats the December session itself, drawing on studio outtakes and interviews with the surviving musicians, as the clearest surviving record of how the quartet built the suite's four movements in a single afternoon.