Sacred tributes in S.F. to Coltrane’s 'A Love Supreme’

John Coltrane’s masterpiece “A Love Supreme” has been entracing listeners for half a century. John Coltrane’s masterpiece “A Love Supreme” has been entracing listeners for half a century. Photo: Impulse Records Photo: Impulse Records Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Sacred tributes in S.F. to Coltrane’s 'A Love Supreme’ 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

In the spring of 1965, the streets of Haight-Ashbury resounded with music that spoke to the momentous changes afoot in American culture. As Phil Lesh, the bassist in an acid-rock band soon to be rechristened the Grateful Dead, recalled to writer Ashley Kahn, “You’d be walking, and somebody’d be playing 'Bringing It All Back Home’ … and another time it was 'A Love Supreme.’ It was all just coming out of people’s windows.”

50th anniversary

Kahn, who collaborated on Carlos Santana’s new autobiography and wrote “A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album” (Penguin), will be on hand as part of SFJazz’s 50th anniversary celebration of Coltrane’s numinous masterpiece this week.

Recorded on Dec. 9, 1964, the four-part suite is “more than just a jazz album,” said Kahn, who leads a symposium Wednesday at the SFJazz Center including writer Ishmael Reed, Santana drummer Michael Shrieve, and Ravi Coltrane, John Coltrane’s son and a formidable tenor saxophonist who curated the SFJazz celebration.

The last recording to exclusively feature Coltrane’s epochal quartet with pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin Jones, “A Love Supreme” was “a communication of what a great musical spirit was trying to achieve through his music,” Kahn said. “What you have here is a message of universal love and divine connection, a personal philosophy encapsulated in this one moment when the message and music came together.”

St. John Coltrane

Since Coltrane’s death from cancer at the age of 40 in 1967, his message has continued to find particularly fertile ground in the Bay Area. By the end of the decade, saxophonist Franzo Wayne King and his wife, Marina King, had adopted “A Love Supreme” as an essential component of the liturgy in a congregation that officially took the name St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in 1982.

Now based at 1286 Fillmore St. in San Francisco, the church hosts weekly services featuring ecstatic musical worship centering on “Acknowledgment,” the opening movement of “A Love Supreme” that introduces the hypnotic four-note phrase echoed later by the titular chant. Coltrane would surely be pleased to know that his suite will bridge an almost century-old schism when the church celebrates the album’s 50th anniversary with a Mass at Grace Cathedral on Monday, Dec. 8.

Cornerstone

“What’s going to happen is what happens every week at the church, the John Coltrane liturgy where 'A Love Supreme’ is a cornerstone of the teaching and philosophy,” says the Rev. Max Haqq, a saxophonist who’s helped lead services at the church for more than two decades.

“The African Orthodox Church was founded as a result of racism in the Episcopal Church in the 1920s, and it’s really exciting to be collaborating with Grace Cathedral, to be welcomed back in a very dramatic way.”

SFJazz’s musical programming centers on 49-year-old Ravi Coltrane, a player who took his time finding his identity as an improviser, composer and bandleader while never exploiting the jazz scene’s reverence for his father (and mother, the late pianist Alice Coltrane). On Thursday, Dec. 11, he and saxophone master Joe Lovano, frequent partners in the supergroup Saxophone Summit, join forces with pianist Geri Allen, bassist Drew Gress and drummer Ralph Peterson.

Friday, Dec. 12’s concert, a double bill featuring Ravi Coltrane’s stellar quartet and the Turtle Island Quartet, directly addresses the suite. The innovative Bay Area string ensemble won a Grammy Award for the 2007 album “A Love Supreme: The Legacy of John Coltrane” (Telarc), and since then, violinist David Balakrishnan’s arrangement has become a pillar of the quartet’s repertoire.

“I had to go to the deepest part of what we do to figure out what the string quartet can offer that wasn’t there,” said Balakrishnan, who noted that the project received the blessing of Alice Coltrane, before her death in 2007. “We explore the implications of Coltrane’s melodic creativity and try to keep the feeling of his most intense concentration of spiritual feeling.”

All-star quintet

Saturday, Dec. 13’s program, “Ravi Coltrane & Special Guests,” features an all-star quintet that’s a family reunion of sorts. Electric bassist Matt Garrison is the son of Coltrane Quartet bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Marcus Gilmore is the grandson of drummer Roy Haynes, virtually the only drummer who subbed for Elvin Jones in the classic quartet.

SFJazz’s celebration closes next Sunday night, Dec. 14, with the first Bay Area performance by alto saxophone wizard Steve Coleman since the MacArthur Foundation awarded him a coveted “genius” fellowship in September. There’s no word on whether he’s planning on playing any of “A Love Supreme,” but his hyper-elastic band Five Elements, supremely versed in Coleman’s esoteric system of mathematics and mysticism, could uncover new revelations.

Original plan

“Purely on a musical level, it’s a suite that opens itself up to interpretation,” said writer Ashley Kahn. “Coltrane’s original structural plan was to augment the quartet with two more horns and three Latin percussionists. You could see that Coltrane looked at the music as a fluid thing.”

Andrew Gilbert is a freelance writer. E-mail: sadolphson@sfchronicle. com

A Love Supreme Mass: 7 p.m. Monday, Dec. 8. Grace Cathedral, 1100 California St., S.F. Free. www.coltranechurch.org.

John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” 50th Anniversary: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, Dec. 10-13, 1 and 7 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 14. $20-$70. SFJazz Center, 201 Franklin St., S.F. (866) 920-5299. www.sfjazz.org.