A Love Supreme

Believe it or not, I still have a pile of CDs, and up until a few days ago, they were sitting in their clunky plastic jewel cases.

So I was separating liner notes and tossing plastic, when I came across John Coltrane's A Love Supreme in its artsy cardboard cover.

When I bought that CD I was in the middle of, let's call it "independent research" on the tenor saxophone player (this is how egghead, world-class procrastinator undergrads get down;)

Obsessed with Coltrane (1926-67), I sought out the details of his creative process but learned a lot more about him personally along the way.



Over the course of many months and biographies, I learned that after 8 years, he'd grown apart from and left wife Naima, the namesake for his classic composition. He met pianist Alice McLeod (above) the same year at Birdland.

Alice introduced him to mystical spiritual texts like the Bhagavad Gita and he took her into his quartet and as his wife. It's not a conscious thing, but I was probably looking for proof that this kind of union existed, one that was equal parts attraction, intellectual, spiritual...going behind the music inadvertently offered something up.