Beyond a Love Supreme by Whyton Tony;

Author:Whyton, Tony;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2013-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

3. Spirituality, Social and Political Contexts

Although Ascension can be seen as mirroring A Love Supreme in its spiritual themes and conceptual organization, the challenging of musical convention and overt statements of collective practice served to promote a different form of spirituality that was more closely aligned with the politics and social context of the mid-1960s. In his book Mercy, Mercy Me, James Hall describes the way in which, unlike Ascension, the themes of love and spirituality in A Love Supreme are treated as detached from the social and political context of the time. Although it can be argued that the embracing of religion can be viewed as a form of political statement in its own right, adhering to a different mode of existence that is beyond the influence of dominant American culture and politics, Hall suggests that the accessibility and widespread appeal of A Love Supreme resulted in any potential political or social subtext being lost. He states, “The expansiveness of Coltrane’s ‘love ethic’ is potentially swallowed up by the tendency of consumer culture to sentimentalize love or to seek to define it only in terms of the popular romance.”32 A Love Supreme’s ability to appeal to different groups results in the album being presented as an offering of universal love. Hall argues that the use of the concept of love as a source of power and direct action, as expressed in the speeches of religious leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., is lost within readings of A Love Supreme and, instead, interpretations of the album are limited to sentimental readings.

With this in mind, A Love Supreme can be understood as a work that does not resonate with the social and political sentiment of the times. From 1965, race politics became all the more prevalent in the United States, particularly in cities such as New York. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leadership moved from being integrationist in nature to more nationalist and confrontational, and writers such as Amiri Baraka moved to Harlem to pursue a more aggressive form of political activism and writing. Placed in its broader context, at a time when the war in Vietnam was beginning to escalate, A Love Supreme offered a message that was bound up with a spirit of universalism. Hall continues: “So while critics and celebrants have largely endorsed A Love Supreme’s spirituality without question, there is that sense that the recording and composition is just slightly behind the social relevance curve.”33 I would argue that A Love Supreme’s detachment enabled the album to be freed from its social context and to be perceived as promoting enduring values of love and universal spirituality.

The works post–A Love Supreme, on the other hand, became much more explicitly tied to the social and political context of the time. In his outstanding book Blowin’ Hot and Cool, John Gennari discusses the context within which albums such as Ascension were created and points to the underlying racial anxieties and crises of identity that were felt by many jazz critics of the 1960s.

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