A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle is a live album by Jazz great John Coltrane, released on October 22, 2021, by Impulse! Records. It was recorded on October 2, 1965, at the Seattle jazz club The Penthouse, by saxophonist Joe Brazil. The tape recordings were found five years after the death of Brazil in October 2008 by the saxophonist Steve Griggs. It is one of only two recorded live performances of Coltrane's 1965 iconic album A Love Supreme, the other being a July 1965 recording from a performance in Antibes, France and released in 2002 as part of the deluxe edition of A Love Supreme.
Through most of 1965, Coltrane was working with the classic quartet that recorded the studio album of A Love Supreme — Coltrane on tenor sax, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums but here the band is expanded with three additional musicians. Pharoah Sanders on tenor sax, multi-instrumentalist Donald Garrett plays second bass, and Carlos Ward, a member of Brazil’s band on alto sax. Both Sanders and Coltrane are also credited with percussion. The addition of another bass and extra layer of percussion turns the larger band into a polyrhythmic machine.
Compared to the studio version of A Love Supreme, it lasts for 75 minutes, more than twice the length of the studio recording. That extra runtime is because of lengthy solos noted on the track list as Interludes. The ensemble pieces are also significantly longer, the opening track Acknowledgement represents the most drastic expansion, extending to 22 minutes from the studio version’s eight. The album is a hypnotic and enveloping piece, and the added length allows the listener to slip deeper into the music.
A Love Supreme isn’t an ordinary Coltrane composition, and uncovering a new rendition of it is no small thing. Coltrane wrote the piece in tribute to God, to thank the creator for he's own religious awakening. The suite sits at the center of his recorded work and has become Coltrane's own expression of spirituality in jazz.
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