9 December 1964, Van Gelder Studio. Four movements, recorded in a single day by four men who had played together so long the interplay was telepathic. The last movement is a prayer, and he does not sing it — he plays it, one note per word.
On the liner notes there is a poem. In the fourth movement, Psalm, every note of the saxophone solo corresponds to a word of that poem. There is no vocal. He is reciting it through brass, and if you follow the text while it plays you can read along with the horn. Most listeners go years without knowing, then find out, then have to sit down.
In Acknowledgement he takes a four-note motif and transposes it through all twelve keys — as if searching for God in every corner of the harmonic spectrum — and then overdubs his own voice chanting a love supreme nineteen times, until the phrase stops being words.
In 1957 he locked himself in a room in Philadelphia to come off heroin. His daughter believed he would die that night. He came out a week later not as a recovered addict but as a reconfigured instrument, and from that point until his death ten years later he flew a single line — Blue Train, Giant Steps, My Favorite Things, Crescent, A Love Supreme, Ascension, Meditations, Interstellar Space — each record further from the launch point, all on one vector.
Then the motor burned out and he was gone at forty. A Love Supreme is the apex of that arc, which is why it sounds like arrival rather than exploration.
You will put it on to check a fact and lose the whole thirty-three minutes, and then you will go and find the poem, and then the 1957 story, and then the Elvin Jones isolated drum track, and the evening is gone. It gives you nothing you can ship. It is one of the best things anybody on this planet has ever made, and most people have never sat through it once.
Recorded in a day. Sixty years and still not exhausted.