(Re-)Writing Jazz: The Manuscripts of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme

Abstract

Jazz is generally viewed as the opposite of a musical genre fixed in a score, thus assuming that manuscripts do not play an important role in jazz history. After an overview of manuscripts in early jazz emphasizing the importance for obtaining copyright, the autograph manuscripts of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme are examined. By comparing the different takes of the recording session and a concert registration to these manuscripts and the liner notes of the album, the role of manuscripts in performances is questioned. For the fourth part of A Love Supreme it is most likely that in the recording session – in contrast to the concert in Antibes – Coltrane had a manuscript of the so-called poem or prayer in front of him, but this cannot have been any of the extant ones. Because of its reliance on improvisation, jazz is generally viewed as the opposite of a musical genre fixed in a score. To the best of my knowledge, there is no history of jazz in which any manuscript plays an important role. There are several reasons for this: First, it is variety in the actual performance – due to jazz’s emphasis on improvisation – and not the score that is considered as the art of jazz. Second, recordings are traces of musicians as originators of jazz and these recordings are regarded as originals; autograph music manuscripts are only appreciated as devotional objects. Third, notated music, either printed or in manuscript form, is considered only an aid for teaching, learning, analysing (transcriptions of recordings, so-called descriptive notation), or preparing a performance (scores, master rhythm parts, lead sheets, and parts, all types of so-called prescriptive notation). Writing jazz history, therefore, is writing the history of albums and recorded concerts documenting the state of the art in performed jazz. However, there are also valid reasons for Robert Witmer’s rejection of this view as the ‘common misconception that jazz is an unwritten music’. From the perspective of jazz as unwritten music, which must be revisited on the grounds of both ontology and methodology, John Coltrane’s major contribu|| 1 See Witmer and Finaly 2002, 168: ‘prescriptive notation for performance; descriptive notation for the teaching and learning of jazz; and descriptive notation for transcription and analysis’. 2 Witmer and Finaly 2002, 168.