John Coltrane’s Unearthed Live ‘A Love Supreme,’ and 12 More New Songs

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Impulse! Records revealed the existence a 56-year-old tape of John Coltrane performing “A Love Supreme” in fall 1965. It’s the only known recording of him playing it for a club audience.Credit...Adam Ritchie/Redferns

By Jon Pareles, Jon Caramanica, Isabelia Herrera and Giovanni Russonello

Aug. 27, 2021Updated 1:47 p.m. ET

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John Coltrane, ‘A Love Supreme, Pt. IV — Psalm (Live in Seattle)’

When John Coltrane recorded his masterpiece, “A Love Supreme,” in late 1964, he was demanding an escape from the confines of modern jazz. He was improvising on the level of sound, as much as notes, and he’d already started bringing in new, more freewheeling collaborators to join his quartet. Partly because of that shift, and partly because of how intimate the piece felt to him, he barely played “A Love Supreme” live. But this week, Impulse! Records revealed the existence a 56-year-old tape of him performing the suite in Seattle, in fall 1965, with an expanded version of the quartet. It’s the only known recording of Coltrane playing it for a club audience, and it will be out as a full album on Oct. 8. “Psalm,” the suite’s serene finale and the only publicly released track so far, is the most personal part: Coltrane had set “Psalm’s” melody to the cadence of a praise poem he wrote, and in Seattle he played it without either of the two other saxophonists in that evening’s band. More than an hour in, with the energy of the set suffusing the stage, he turns pieces of the melody into little incantations, coaxing a deep-bellied cry from his horn. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

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