This was his spiritual manifesto, his most personal statement, and it was clearly very important to him. He selected the cover photo (published in Impulse! ads in advance, and also used inside Crescent), and chose the drawing of himself for the insert. Equally uncharacteristically, he selected the artwork for the album, inside and out (it was a fold-open album cover). (Updates to that volume can be found here.) And of course, my recent research on Coltrane and others has been published at WBGO under the banner of Deep Dive.Ī Love Supreme marked the only time that Coltrane wrote album notes. Since then, I also assembled a great team of researchers who completed The John Coltrane Reference, a big day-by-day chronology and discography. Most of the book is entirely new, so I always urge people not to seek out the dissertation anything that was worth saving from it appears, in improved form, in the book.Ĭredit courtesy of the artist Lewis Porter directing a graduate jazz seminar at Rutgers in the early 2000s. The chapter on A Love Supreme in my book is updated from that 1985 JAMS article. (I think they had been!) It was published that fall. But I thought of that invitation again in January 1985, and when I finally sent the article to JAMS, it was as though they’d been waiting for it. Meanwhile, I finished my coursework and wrote the rest of the dissertation in 19, at which time I graduated from Brandeis. (Even ethnomusicology at the time was not open to jazz.) So I didn’t submit it, and kind of forgot about that idea. But I couldn’t believe that any of the scholarly journals, which at the time were overwhelmingly classical in orientation, would be interested. The audience - music professors from all the major New England colleges - was enthusiastic, and I was urged to send it for consideration to the Journal of the American Musicological Society (JAMS). He became another key mentor for me and gave me valuable feedback as I pushed to finish that chapter in time to present it at a musicology conference in late September 1979. Joshua Rifkin, renowned for his performances of Scott Joplin but also an expert on early jazz (he was called “Little Jelly” by Clarence Williams and Zutty Singleton!) - not to mention Bach, Schubert, etc. I had been accepted at Brandeis, and I was lucky that my advisor was Prof. I started writing the chapter about A Love Supreme first, in the late summer of 1979. Anderson), Bud Powell, Paul Bley, Earl Hines and others.īut once you get into the world of Coltrane, it becomes all-encompassing.
Up to that time I loved his music, but not as much as I loved Sonny Rollins, Lester Young (about whom I’d already written a master’s thesis under Dr. So I knew I wanted to do my dissertation on Coltrane.
Credit courtesy of the artist Lewis Porter directing the concert band at Tufts University in the early 1980s.Īt the time I was directing the jazz band at Tufts University, and just applying to doctoral programs in musicology at the urging of my mentor, the music chairperson, composer T.J.