Coltrane’s A Love Supreme: Mediations of Immediacy in Jazz Ritual and Recitation

This paper explores the ritualized performance ethic of John Coltrane’s later career, which is charged with a determined exploration of freedom and spiritual ascendance through participative and gestural immediacy. Conceiving of this music as a spiritual and political tool for embodied transformation, this paper traces this ethic at play in Coltrane’s iconic 1965 album A Love Supreme, identifying ways the work effects a mediation of immediacy. Through focus on the album’s closing “Psalm” recitation, its parallels in Coltrane’s other works, and their analogue in traditions of ecstatic liturgical and political oratory, this paper demonstrates the consistent priority Coltrane gives to a recitation’s expressive sounded performance over its underlying textual references. Considering these various facilitations of immediacy against conceptions of the ideal of “liveness” in jazz reception, the album’s portrayal of its ritual occasionality is explored as a mediatized conceit. This paper concludes by considering what affordances the evolution of digital music culture offers to interpreting Coltrane’s work as here accounted: in reconceiving “liveness,” in the evolving mediations of listening in a digital world, and in the interruptive potential of ritual encounter.