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All About Jazz
AllMusic
Down Beat
Encyclopedia of Popular Music
MusicHound Jazz	5/5
The Penguin Guide to Jazz
PopMatters	10/10
Q
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
Rolling Stone Jazz Record Guide

A Love Supreme is a 1965 studio album by American jazz saxophonist and bandleader John Coltrane. He recorded the album with his quartet—featuring pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones—in one session on December 9, 1964, at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.

A Love Supreme was released by Impulse! Records in January 1965 and became a top-selling album for Coltrane, as well as one of jazz's most critically acclaimed recordings. Since then, it has often been viewed as one of the greatest albums of all time, a deeply spiritual work, and Coltrane's masterpiece.

A Love Supreme is a four-part suite, broken up into tracks: "Acknowledgement" (which contains the mantra that gave the suite its name), "Resolution", "Pursuance", and "Psalm". It is intended to be a spiritual album, broadly representative of a personal struggle for purity, and expresses the artist's deep gratitude as he admits to his talent and instrument as being owned not by him but by a spiritual higher power.Coltrane's home in Dix Hills, Long Island, has been suggested as the site of inspiration for A Love Supreme. His exposure to Ahmadiyya Islam has also been suggested as a source of influence. Coltrane plays exclusively tenor on all parts.

The album begins with the bang of a gong (tam-tam), followed by cymbal washes. Jimmy Garrison follows on bass with the four-note motif which structures the entire movement. Coltrane's solo follows. Besides soloing upon variations of the motif, at one point Coltrane repeats the four notes over and over in different transpositions. After 36 repetitions, the motif becomes the vocal chant "A Love Supreme", sung by Coltrane (accompanying himself via overdubs).

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