#reggie workman

JOHN COLTRANE - Spiritual

Village Vanguard (1961)

Personnel:

"A Love Supreme" - Alice Coltrane, Jazz Jamboree, Warsaw, Poland, October 23, 1987

Just about 60 years ago this week, John Coltrane, Jimmy Garrison, Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner went out to Van Gelder Recording Studio in Englewood Cliffs, NJ, to record A Love Supreme. Obviously, this record has become a monument over the decades — much more than just a record. But I always wonder whether the Coltrane Quartet thought of it as anything more than just another date, at least at first; after all, the group minus Coltrane also recorded McCoy Tyner Plays Ellington that week, too — a great, but very different vibe! "We didn't talk about a lot of things," Tyner said. "I mean, I didn't know what we were going to do. We couldn't really explain why things came together so well, you know, and why it was, you know, meant to be. I mean, it's hard to explain things like that."

Yeah it is! But here's the late/great Greg Tate doing a pretty good job of it:

"What the Coltrane quartet had was two of music's more elusive qualities in combination — namely, melody and gravitas. You can hear them in certain Black voices that came to fore in the '60s — Otis Redding, Nina Simone, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X — and in certain rappers today like Rakim, Nas, GZA. But the Coltrane Quartet, like King, also gave voice and timbre to their heaviest burden, a swollen, implacable compassion for the human condition that required that everything they had be laid on the line. You can't buy that level of commitment off a rack, download it from the Net neither, and you damn sure can't fake it. You can only deliver it from evil and maybe even bleed for it: Tyner has said he knew it was time for him to leave the band when he saw Trane bleeding from the mouth while blowing and not even seeming to care. That degree of indefatigable discipline and unbridled passion can still render so many fans of the quartet speechless, enchanted, focused, uplifted." 

1963 - Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers - Olympia - Paris

Freddie Hubbard (tp), Wayne Shorter (ts), Curtis Fuller (tb), Cedar Walton (p), Reggie Workman (b), Art Blakey (dr)