John Coltrane – A Love Supreme
1964
The granddaddy of all modern jazz albums, we’ve decided to start the jazz retrospection with A Love Supreme. There is no reason not to own this album: it is a classic, the classic, and just owning it makes you more interesting. As Coltrane’s musical meditations on God, the master saxophonist started musing on math and the sciences, and here you can hear the sum product of all those mental wonderings and wanderings. It’s grand, eye-(or ear-) opening music that challenges the very reason that music is played. That said, A Love Supreme is complex, brilliant, too, and not easy to grasp in the first couple spins. But when you do get it, the payoff is enormous, better than winning the state lottery (we’ll give you a leg up: that last track is Coltrane’s poem in the liner notes). Seriously. Mega points if you own a vinyl of this one. A Love Supreme is The Jazz Album You Must Own.