#coltrane

Listened to Coltrane's

A Love Supreme

again last night. Late. Lights off. Nothing but the speakers and the dark. Forty years I've been returning to this album, and it still catches me off guard—the way prayer can sound like this, all brass and breath and searching.

I first heard Coltrane's

A Love Supreme

during a rain-soaked November evening, the kind where the world feels suspended between waking and dreaming. The opening bass motif—those four notes cycling like a mantra—moved through me before I understood what I was hearing. This wasn't background music. This was Coltrane reaching toward something transcendent, using saxophone and rhythm section as vehicles for spiritual inquiry.

The first time I heard Coltrane's "A Love Supreme," I wasn't ready for it. The opening gong felt like a door opening to something sacred, something I didn't have words for yet. Now, decades later, that same recording still stops me in my tracks.

What strikes me most about Coltrane's spiritual period isn't just the technical mastery—though those cascading runs still make my heart race—it's the complete surrender to something larger than himself. You can hear him reaching, searching, sometimes stumbling toward transcendence. The imperfections make it more beautiful, more human.

This is what great art does