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"Few albums in the canon of popular music have had the influence, resonance and endurance of John Coltrane's 1964 classic A Love Supreme - a record that proved that jazz was a fitting medium for spiritual exploration, and for the expression of the inexpressible."
- Ashley Kahn, from the liner notes to "A Love Supreme, the creation of John Coltrane's classic album"

THE PREMISE
What can you say about John Coltrane's A Love Supreme that hasn't already been said? It stands as one of the finest recorded acheivements of 20th Century music, capturing as it does, a musician and a quartet at the peak of their respective abilities. It is 32 minutes of musical magic, a four-part suite shorn of all unnecessary padding-out, leaving a work with such an intensity of emotion that its like has rarely been matched before or since in the history of recorded music.

Time marches on, and on December 9th 2004 it was 40 years since the creation of this seminal recording. To mark this auspicious occasion I decided to re-arrange the entire four-part suite. The work is scored specially for piano trio plus vocalist. The vocalist sings the Psalm section of the suite (the poem printed inside the original album, declaimed by Coltrane's saxophone on the 1964 recording).

THE WORK
I first heard A Love Supreme whilst still at school. I came across a very poorly recorded Italian issue of the (only) Live Version from the Antibes Jazz Festival 1965. At the time I didn't realise what an important musical document had come into my possession. For quite a while I was bewildered by its full-frontal emotional assault, and to me at that time it sounded like music from another planet.

It was a few more years before I heard the Studio Version, by which time I was ready for it, being deeply engrossed as I was in Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew and the Second Quintet albums and just discovering Ornette and the Free movement. Even though I was expanding my listening and musical influences in many different directions, I still found myself relating all these schools of musical thought to A Love Supreme, and the live version in particular, since it was my first encounter with the piece.

I feel I have benefited from being aware of both versions (unlike most people who I assume would be familiar with the studio version alone) and I believe this has helped me to overcome the (surprisingly widespread) fear of ‘tampering’ with the hallowed work. At the end of the day, A Love Supreme is a four-part suite scored for jazz group with deeply spiritual overtones, particularly in the last movement. By taking this as a starting point I found it much easier to work on the arrangement from a purely musical angle, and interestingly enough I found that the spiritual side of the work manifested itself through the actual performance, much to my surprise (and delight) at the time.