33 Minutes for Eternity
Sixty years ago, John Coltrane recorded his sky-high jubilant album ‘A Love Supreme.’ It hit the mood of the time between the civil rights struggle and hippie culture and still shines.
“They just went on stage and played,” Zane Massey recalls. The performance of John Coltrane's quartet in the church of St. Gregory the Great in Brooklyn took more than an hour. It was overwhelming: “They played so long that puddles of sweat formed.”
Zane Massey’s father, Cal—himself a musician—had enlisted several jazz legends for the concert to raise funds for the community. A photograph shows Coltrane with his eyes closed, playing the tenor saxophone; protruding from his tuxedo pocket is a slip of paper bearing the poem he is about to recite: “A Love Supreme.” He would also perform the first part of the eponymous suite. It was a precious moment: A Love Supreme, recorded 60 years ago, on December 9, 1964, is considered one of Coltrane’s most moving works and, indeed, one of the most significant musical recordings of the 20th century. Yet Coltrane very rarely performed the four-part composition or its individual movements live, as he did on that Sunday, April 24, 1966, in Brooklyn.
To this day, the album and its creator are surrounded by a sacred aura. John Coltrane may well be the only musician to have his own church dedicated to him: the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco. A Love Supreme, writes his biographer Peter Kemper, is one of those rare works of art that—like Bach’s St. Matthew Passion or the Sistine Chapel—are themselves akin to a spiritual experience. During Coltrane’s lifetime, hardly any musician dared to approach the pieces, and even afterward, a certain reverence remained. Even Coltrane himself did not want to present the “humble gift” of his album to God too often. Perhaps because it was also an intimate confession: With A Love Supreme, Coltrane thanked heaven for delivering him from the hell of his heroin addiction. “In 1957, by the grace of God, I experienced a spiritual awakening which led me to live a richer, fuller, more productive life,” he informs listeners inside the album’s gatefold. He had received the means and the privilege, he says, “to make others happy through music.”
How does one approach such a work?
It is available in every format, but it is not something to listen to casually. A Love Supreme demands quiet and concentration. The music begins with a gong strike. Immediately, Coltrane blows a fanfare that no one has ever described more aptly than his wife, the pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane: it is as if one were approaching “a most beautiful city,” though first “we must pass through the portals and the corridor.” That, at least, is how she perceives it: “It’s the very first invitation to this beautiful place—here, in our heart and in our mind.”
Thirty-three minutes later—after the majestic “Acknowledgement,” the swinging “Resolution,” the blazing “Pursuance,” and the hovering “Psalm”—it feels as if the space around you has expanded as if it were suddenly possible to feel, sense, and understand more than before. You need not be religious for this. And even those who do not feel any spiritual resonance within themselves must acknowledge what saxophonist Luise Volkmann remarks when discussing A Love Supreme: “This album is carried by the profound conviction that music means something.” For anyone who mistakes spiritual experience for a wellness exercise, a warning: Coltrane’s upward striving leads to rugged terrain. Here, one kneels, struggles, stretches, and ascends until sweat puddles form.
A Love Supreme is the culmination of Coltrane’s life and work: his unstoppable drive forward, onward, upward. At the same time, it is an uncharacteristic Coltrane album, a turning point, and a solitary gem. Never before had an artist so decisively lifted jazz from the smoke-filled cellar to a religious sphere. And for the first and only time, Coltrane planned one of his recordings so comprehensively.
“It was on a late summer’s day in 1964,” Alice Coltrane recalls, “When Trane came down the stairs in our new house like Moses descending the mountain, holding in his hand the fully conceived concept of a new suite.” The idea for A Love Supreme was born during a five-day retreat that Coltrane spent upstairs in their Long Island home while Alice took care of their daughter and baby son, John Jr., downstairs.
At that time, the saxophonist was nearing the pinnacle of his fame. Since 1961, he had been under contract with the style-defining Impulse! label, receiving five-figure annual advances and free rein. “The new wave in jazz is on Impulse! Coltrane leads the way,” the label advertised in 1963. Avant-garde as a selling point: with excessive solos, “Trane” divided the jazz critics; with Duke Ellington and the crooner Johnny Hartman, he charmed audiences; ever curious, he explored Oriental and African sounds. A Love Supreme sounded yet again different, unfamiliar tones. And in this new direction, it was also a return home.
John Coltrane was born on September 23, 1926, in Hamlet, North Carolina, in the American South. Both of his grandfathers had grown up as slaves—and both were preachers. The church was Coltrane’s musical cradle. At home, he listened to swing on the radio and blues on shellac records.
Then, around the turn of 1938/39, his world fell apart: first his beloved grandfather William Blair died, then his father, then his grandmother. At twelve years old, he sought refuge in music: “I think for a while he had nothing but his saxophone,” a school friend remembered. Soon, the saxophone became everything to him. He listened to Charlie Parker, who “knocked him out,” studied at a music school in Philadelphia, and played gigs here and there. In newspaper reports and on pay slips, he was listed as Coltome, Coltane, Coltrain, or Coaltrane—a nobody whose name no one bothered to spell correctly. In 1949, Dizzy Gillespie hired him for his big band. Now, Coltrane’s star began to rise. And to fall: Coltrane got into heroin.

“If you inhale the drug through your nose, you remain a gentleman,” Charlie Parker said in 1949. “If you inject it into your arm, you’re a bum despised by everyone.” It didn’t take long before Coltrane was using the needle. It was likely also because he suffered severe toothaches and constantly craved sweets. At the same time, he began taking an interest in yoga, the Quran, and the mysteries of mathematics—a junkie in search of meaning. Gillespie kicked him out; other bandleaders did the same. In 1954, his friend Eric Dolphy found him wandering broke and strung out in Los Angeles, a bum despised by everyone.
Finally, in 1955, came his breakthrough: the trumpeter Miles Davis brought the struggling Coltrane into his band. Originally, the job was supposed to go to Sonny Rollins, but Rollins was undergoing rehab.
Coltrane was high. At first, that worked out. “After we’d played together for a while,” Davis would later say, “I knew this guy was a damn motherfucker, exactly the voice I needed on tenor to bring out my own voice.” On stage, the introverted Davis reduced his playing to the essentials while Coltrane unleashed a barrage of notes from his saxophone. Off stage, next to the ultra-cool Davis, he seemed like a country boy. “He was so focused on the music,” the trumpeter recounted, “he wouldn’t have noticed if a naked woman had stood in front of him.” They complemented each other but did not understand each other. When Coltrane’s addiction spiraled out of control, Davis showed him the door.
For Coltrane, this was a moment of reversal: in 1957, he turned away from heroin and alcohol and found God. His family, especially his then-wife Naima—later honored with the piece “Naima”—helped him through the agony of cold turkey. This was the start of his journey to himself and beyond himself.
The pianist Thelonious Monk inspired him, as did Ornette Coleman, a pioneer of free jazz. He practiced obsessively, delved into non-European, especially Indian, music, and unleashed true cascades of notes, “sheets of sound.” For a while, he returned to Miles Davis and can be heard on Kind of Blue, the best-selling jazz album of all time. Then he forged his own path with McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums. Jazz historians call this Coltrane’s “classic quartet.”
On December 9, 1964, the four musicians drove from Manhattan to nearby Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. There, in the studio of sound engineer Rudy Van Gelder—who shaped the sound aesthetic of 1950s and ’60s jazz like no other—they planned to record A Love Supreme.
No photographs exist of the session, but jazz historian Ashley Kahn reconstructed the evening in 2002 from interviews with those involved. They started at eight o’clock; Van Gelder had dimmed the lights, surrounded by brick walls and a steeply rising wooden roof above. “The room was just perfect, it had perfect acoustics,” drummer Elvin Jones recalled, “and Rudy was the type who was exact about everything [...]. It was almost like he was doing eye surgery or something.”
In fact, Van Gelder was an optometrist. He began making jazz recordings in his parents’ living room in Hackensack, New Jersey (“One day I’d do eye examinations, the next I’d record Miles Davis”). To this day, his records' direct and lively sound remains unparalleled. “Ready, Rudy?” the musicians would ask when they arrived. That was a joke. Of course, Rudy had everything ready. And he likely put on gloves before touching his microphones while recording A Love Supreme. After that, Coltrane took charge of his telepathically interacting quartet. Producer Bob Thiele gave him free rein. By midnight, it was done.
The first and last movements of the suite are especially remarkable. On “Acknowledgement,” John Coltrane’s voice is heard for the first time on record. Accompanying the distinctive four-note riff that lends the solemn music its bluesy backbone, he intones: “A love supreme, a love supreme …” Before this, he repeated the mantra 37 times on his saxophone, cycling through all twelve keys. “He’s telling us that God can be found everywhere” is how biographer Lewis Porter interprets Coltrane’s exercise.
Melodically, harmonically, and even rhythmically free, Part IV—“Psalm”—flows like a prayer spoken through the saxophone. Syllable by syllable, Coltrane gives voice to his poem “A Love Supreme.” “Do not turn your eye away from God,” “All is connected,” “Hallowed be His name,” and at the end: “ELATION – ELEGANCE – EXALTATION.” “I believe in all religions,” Coltrane once said. In the language of music, echoes of the Bible, the sound of Black churches, and Eastern philosophy merge into a universal message.
And the world listened. When the album was released in early 1965, it inspired people far beyond the circle of jazz enthusiasts. Even the cover, with Coltrane’s resolute gaze into the distance, compellingly combines seriousness and coolness. Within its first five years, 500,000 copies of the LP were sold. A Love Supreme resounded in student dorms and tenement houses in Harlem and Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the San Francisco hippie scene. Everyone loved it, from Joni Mitchell to Carlos Santana.
Some understood Coltrane’s music as a political statement. In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. In 1965, in Selma, police beat peaceful demonstrators demanding the right to vote. Thousands protested against the Vietnam War, and riots broke out in the ghettos. In what “Trane” played, the drummer Max Roach said he heard “the cry and howl of the pain that society inflicts on people, especially Black people.”
As early as 1963, after a Ku Klux Klan bombing of a church in Birmingham, Coltrane had recorded his piece “Alabama.” But he did not view his instrument as a megaphone for the civil rights movement. The political struggle was alien to the gentle, brooding Coltrane, and when asked his opinion, he retreated into generalities: “I despise war.” Beyond that, he focused entirely on music as a force for good. “If one of my friends is sick,” he said in 1966, “I want to play a tune and he is cured. And if he’s broke, I’ll play another tune and he’ll immediately have as much money as he needs. But I don’t know which tunes they are or how I can learn of them. The true powers of music are still unknown.” The former junkie had become a vegetarian with a fondness for fresh juices and spiritual writings.
In his final months, he had a dream: to buy a loft in Greenwich Village in Manhattan where he could practice openly, a place for gathering without restrictions, apart from big stages and exclusive clubs, with free admission. The community concert in Brooklyn in 1966 came close to this vision. But time was running out for him. It almost seemed as if he sensed that cancer was destroying him from within, so tirelessly he threw himself into his work.
Coming from the blues and bebop, Coltrane had gradually left behind the shackles of traditional harmony. Now, through his discipline, he reached the greatest freedom in improvisation and expression. Some could not—or would not—follow him into his final ecstasies. Ascension, Meditations, Expression, Om: John Coltrane was in a state of utmost agitation and sometimes no longer of this world in the tumultuous years before his death. On July 17, 1967, he stood before God, only 40 years old.
Yet he has never truly died. An echo of his voice resonates in countless musicians, from Pharoah Sanders and Charles Lloyd to Kamasi Washington and Muriel Grossmann. We reach out to Evan Parker: “I remember buying A Love Supreme in 1965,” says the 80-year-old British free-jazz saxophonist. “How he translated the cadence of Martin Luther King’s sermons into music was the album’s greatest innovation. Coltrane still spurs me to work hard.” Johannes Schleiermacher, who was heard on saxophone by groups like Shake Stew, is half Parker’s age. Coltrane’s playing, he says, gives him courage: “It’s music from someone who transformed crises into insights and allowed us to share in them. It’s as if Coltrane were painting geometric figures in the air with his small motifs and saying: Come, this is the way!”
This guidepost, however, remained a seeker all his life. Just when you thought you knew where he was, he had already moved a few steps further on. He has left us the traces of his path in the open.