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A Love Supreme in the Time of Pandemic

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Posted on March 15, 2021 at 13:28:05
JimC
Audiophile

Posts: 94
Location: Portland OR
Joined: October 4, 2003
 This article appeared in today's LA Times, describing Coltane's A Love Supreme as a source of inspiration and solace in this time of pandemic. It also provides some history about the music:

http://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=d831f7d6-a2e8-4780-8893-bf085b1181ad

Sorry, I don't know how to make that url a link. If you cut and paste the address into your browser, you should be able to access the article.

Jim

 

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RE: A Love Supreme in the Time of Pandemic, posted on March 15, 2021 at 17:07:51
stringplay
Audiophile

Posts: 125
Location: So. California
Joined: March 22, 2005
 I read it this morning, as I'm a LAT subscriber. I appreciate the obsession of the article's author with the album/tune,-- a lot of people agree with him. But It's always been one of my least favorite Coltrane albums. I find the over and over repetition of those four notes (duh-duh-duh-duh,etc.), that make up the title, to be dull and plodding, at least to me. I much prefer his more lyrical albums of versions of melodic standards. --Just my opinion. --Whatever.

 

RE: A Love Supreme in the Time of Pandemic, posted on March 15, 2021 at 20:23:10
tweaker456
Audiophile

Posts: 7715
Location: SF Bay Area
Joined: June 20, 2020
 This seems to be working.






So let us stop talkin' falsely now, the hour's getting late --
Robert Allen Zimmerman

 

Cool... howzabout a version with a bit more..., posted on March 15, 2021 at 21:37:52
musetap
Audiophile

Posts: 31872
Location: San Francisco
Joined: July 8, 2003
Contributor
  Since: January 28, 2004
 bite?

String play indeed!








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"Once this was all Black Plasma and Imagination"-Michael McClure



 

RE: A Love Supreme in the Time of Pandemic, posted on March 16, 2021 at 09:52:07
Palustris
Audiophile

Posts: 2408
Location: Cape Cod
Joined: September 12, 2008
 In the late 1970s I worked at a print shop in NH making plates for magazines. All those who worked in the shop putting together the magazines were on one floor and "relaxing" music piped in during the day from some radio station. Montovani and Laurence Welk were typical of the musical offerings.

So one morning I arrive at work early for a change and go to the break room where my fellow workers are gathered over coffee. I immediately recognize something totally weird and bizarre is happening: John Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme' is playing over the PA system throughout the plant!

After the normal musical pablum I associate with work, this is astonishing. However, as I start to tune in to the mood in the break room, I detect some dissention in the ranks, mutiny even. All of a sudden someone bellows, "Who put on this hate music!" At clock punching time, the music goes back to Montevani and as I head to my plate making machine, I reflect on the irony of this statement...

 

RE: A Love Supreme in the Time of Pandemic, posted on March 16, 2021 at 10:30:54
brusson
Audiophile

Posts: 17
Location: Portland, OR
Joined: November 8, 2005
 I wouldn't swap the original version for this one, but it's still interesting...to hear it played by a "Jazz Orchestra".
https://wyntonmarsalis.org/discography/title/a-love-supreme

 

RE: A Love Supreme in the Time of Pandemic, posted on March 16, 2021 at 12:38:29
rivervalley817
 just think of the poor retail worker forced to hear David Bowie & Bing duet on the 'The Little Drummer Boy' 30X a day during the Christmas shopping season ... though you 'boyza andah girlz' have my sympathies on the Lawrence Welk toonage

regards,

 

RE: A Love Supreme in the Time of Pandemic, posted on March 17, 2021 at 08:57:32
Palustris
Audiophile

Posts: 2408
Location: Cape Cod
Joined: September 12, 2008
 Yes, it's true: I worked in retail for a year and the noise coming through the ever present radio was appalling. It was the same songs every hour for eight hours! It was truly torture.

I started off my electronics career in manufacturing passing and rejecting PC boards and fixing the "dogs" once the rack had been cleared. I had to endure the same top 50 radio station cranked up to 11 on the manufacturing floor. I begged the VP of manufacturing for a different job and he sent me to engineering. It was bliss: the engineers were not into top 50 radio.

 

RE: A Love Supreme in the Time of Pandemic, posted on March 17, 2021 at 09:28:24
rivervalley817
 I've had jobs where I longed for the 'sweet release of death' for similar reasons so I quit ... hard work and long hours are acceptable, constant assaults on the senses and sensibilities are not ...

boundaries are important!

regards,



 

RE: I Saw Mommy . . ., posted on March 18, 2021 at 09:16:59
belyin
Audiophile

Posts: 1285
Location: New Orleans
Joined: November 1, 2003
 In the mid eighties I worked in a restaurant which used a tape recorder for background music when there was no piano player. Normally the tapes recycled in around 3 hours, but there was only one Christmas tape and it was only 45 minutes long, so every 45 minutes we heard Michael Jackson and the Jackson Five sing "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus." I suppose it helped the turn-over (when a customer heard a song three times it signaled it was time to go,) but it sure drove us crazy. Fortunately the restaurant was an early adapter to the cd carousel players so our Christmas misery was reduced.

 

RE: I Saw Mommy . . ., posted on March 18, 2021 at 10:19:48
rivervalley817
 sounds like a Twilight Zone episode or 'G' rated Saw movie

my wife had a SONY CDP-CX235 200 disc player when we first met

I was impressed [expensive!] and it actually sounded pretty good

you'd load discs into these cartridges and those into the CD jukebox

they didn't call it that, it was the 'Explorer' ...

man that thing was rough on the media, maybe 30 > 40 plays per CD

they looked like someone tried to clean them with a 'Scotch Brite' pad

I made her ditch it ... Ebay wasn't really a thing to trust yet back then

and ... this sure went off on a tangent, sorry

regards,

 

Tales from the front...., posted on March 18, 2021 at 19:35:17
D Harvey
Manufacturer

Posts: 5563
Location: SE Michigan
Joined: May 30, 2001
 I'm rather enjoying this tangent....

My own experience in trying to introduce music to a work environment years ago was not encouraging. Lots of people wanted music in the workplace, but there were a few different opinions on what kind of music it should be. A few relatively narrow options were tried. Country and classic rock went first. While both options were by far the most popular of all possible options, each generated massive complaints and unhappy, agitated people. Those two options lasted a week each. Then they put on the muzak. Nobody liked it, but the complaints to management and overt agitation in most people also stopped. It seemed the only music everyone could bring themselves to agree on was the stuff they knew nobody else was enjoying either. After a few weeks of Muzak, a few of us who found all of the options given to be....not much enjoyable, pointed out that nobody liked this stuff so it wasn't really the mood boost (on a 12-hour shift) that those of us who had driven this effort were after in the first place. So they went back to playing nothing at all. Myself, I was able to tolerate the classic rock OK, though 12 hours day after day got to be a long time. I did not like the muzak, but I struggled with entire days of "modern" pop country. Sometimes I wanted to hit people. It was a truly visceral reaction at times. This was the late 90's, so streaming didn't really exist at the time. It would be interesting to try something like this again today with truly random and wide-ranging program material being rotated all day long. Maybe the masses could deal with it if they only got annoyed for little bits of time in exchange for hearing something they like regularly. Then of course, you have the people who don't like music at all....

Years before, the summer after my freshman year of college I drove an ice cream truck, which I figured would be a fun summer gig. It was, but the music was a 40-minute loop of really bad synth versions of Disney tunes. That music kept me up at night for about three weeks. After that, I just didn't hear it anymore. Later on, I snuck in a tape of Charlie Parker playing Chi-chi and a few other tunes for a day or two. The kids didn't dig it. One girl of 7 or so said to me "That's fancy music!" Her connotation was not positive and she was not alone. People on the route were even less receptive to Steve Reich's "Tehillim" (yes, I really did do that) which lasted less than a day. The boss got wise to my game and told me I had to stop messing with the music, and I knew he was right from a business perspective. Years later I found out that little kids by and large actually like Monk's music quite a bit. Seriously, put him on and watch the kids dance. It would have been a better choice, but I'm not sure how much better that might have gone with adults mixed in the crowd.

Both of these experiences were dispiriting at the time, but are oddly fun to talk about today.




dh

 

RE: A Love Supreme in the Time of Pandemic, posted on March 18, 2021 at 20:44:17
fantja
Audiophile

Posts: 15518
Location: Alabama
Joined: September 11, 2010
 Thanks! for sharing.

 

RE: A Love Supreme in the Time of Pandemic, posted on March 18, 2021 at 23:39:06
fantja
Audiophile

Posts: 15518
Location: Alabama
Joined: September 11, 2010
 Jim-
I have always found "Kind of Blue" and "A Love Supreme" to be flip-sides.

 

Then of course, you have the people who don't like music at all...., posted on March 19, 2021 at 06:07:58
dancingseamonkey
Audiophile

Posts: 3455
Location: New Orleans, birth place of jazz.
Joined: May 1, 2006
Contributor
  Since: November 24, 2009
I have a friend that doesn't like music, I could never figure that one. I don't like music at work and the company I work for doesn't allow it, eventually a fight breaks over musical choice out or you have radio wars, where one employee is trying to drown out another. I couldn't imagine working retail, when I go in a store I imagine working there and being forced to listen to whatever they are playing and I either see myself running out screaming or going on a violent rampage.




"Trying is the first step towards failure."
Homer Simpson

 

RE: Tales from the front...., posted on March 19, 2021 at 09:25:43
Palustris
Audiophile

Posts: 2408
Location: Cape Cod
Joined: September 12, 2008
 Since we are continuing with this tangent, I should complete my story about the NH printing company playing Muzak, or whatever it was.

So one Friday we were told we could each have a meeting with our supervisor to give our recommendations as to how to improve the plant. When it was my turn, I suggested that the Muzak they were playing was the same music that they played in insane asylums to keep the inhabitants docile and pliant and that the entire atmosphere of the plant could be improved with better music.

Monday morning I show up for work and was told to see my supervisor immediately. He told me that I had a "bad attitude" and even though I had never screwed up a single plate, even those with complex four color screens, I was fired. Also, since I had been fired, there was not going to be any workman's compensation.

That was the best thing that could have happened to me: I left Suncook, NH; moved to Cape Cod and started a career in electronics.

 

Wow, what an a-hole company (not to mention stupid). Glad getting away from them turned out well for you. nt, posted on March 19, 2021 at 09:35:08
Rick W
 nt

 

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