A Love Supreme est un album-concept de John Coltrane enregistré en 1964. Il est considéré comme un album majeur du jazz, l'un de ses plus grands chefs-d’œuvre, l'un des plus connus et des plus accessibles.
Sommaire [masquer]
1 Historique
2 Enregistrements
3 Réception
4 Citations
5 Titres
6 Composition du quartet
7 Bibliographie
8 Hommage
9 Notes
Historique[modifier | modifier le wikicode]
Il s'agit d'une composition en quatre mouvements enregistrée en une seule séance le 9 décembre 19641 au studio de Rudy Van Gelder (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, USA) et produit par Bob Thiele pour le label Impulse!. L'album fait suite à Crescent, enregistré la même année, plus contemplatif mais qui déjà amorçait un virage dans la carrière de Coltrane.
Le quartet mythique de Coltrane, alors en pleine maturité, était sur le chemin d'une inéluctable séparation2. Deux autres versions de Acknowledgement ont été enregistrées le lendemain (le 10 décembre 1964) avec le saxophoniste ténor Archie Shepp et le bassiste Art Davis. L'unique version enregistrée en direct de la suite A Love Supreme date du 26 juillet 1965 lors du festival d'Antibes, et a été publiée officiellement par Impulse! avec l'album original3.
L'album marque le tournant spirituel de Coltrane. Par sa profonde sérénité et son mysticisme, c'est une ode à sa foi et à Dieu, celui des différentes religions : les quatre longues compositions forment une vaste prière. Il cherche à atteindre un certain niveau de transe pour s'approcher de Dieu. C'est l'œuvre la plus spirituelle de Coltrane4.
Les éléments de liberté harmonique, l'atonalité en particulier, sont précurseurs des changements à venir dans la musique de Coltrane et du free-jazz; avant-gardiste il pousse le jazz de plus en plus loin et atteindra les limites de l'improvisation sur une trame modale. John Coltrane exprime successivement l'inquiétude, la tension, l'exaltation et l'apaisement5.
Enregistrements[modifier | modifier le wikicode]
La première minute d' Acknowledgement débute par un coup de gong suivie d'une très courte intro au saxophone. Puis Garrison avec quatre notes à la contrebasse introduit le motif : chaque son cadence le titre A Love Supreme. Ce riff emprunté au blues est suivi par le piano de Tyner. À la fin du titre Coltrane reprendra l'air comme un leitmotiv et alignera ces mesures trente-sept fois de suite en alternant graves et aigus, puis dix-neuf fois en chantant "A Love Supreme". La voix est rajoutée en overdub après avoir été enregistrée le lendemain.
Alors qu'Acknowledgement est enregistré en une seule prise, Resolution nécessite six essais dont quatre interrompus avant la fin. Resolution est le mouvement le plus classique des quatre. À noter le solo de Tyner qui devient un modèle pour de nombreux pianistes.
Pursuance et Psalm auront été enregistrés d'une seule traite avec un solo remarquable du batteur Jones.
À la fin de Psalm intervient un deuxième saxophoniste auprès de Coltrane. Rudy Van Gelder se souvient que Coltrane avait enregistré ces notes lui-même en re-recording6. De même Garrison avec un archet sur la contrebasse et Jones à la batterie se rajoutent en overdub sur l'enregistrement initial créant ainsi un septet virtuel.
Réception[modifier | modifier le wikicode]
Même si à sa sortie l'album dérouta le public, il reste l'un des plus grands succès du jazz avec plus d'un million d'exemplaires vendus.
En 1965 l'album fut nommé pour deux Grammy et Coltrane sélectionné par les lecteurs de Down Beat comme étant le saxophoniste ténor de l'année.
En 2003, l'album est classé 47e des 500 plus grands albums de tous les temps par le magazine Rolling Stone7.
L'album marquera l'apogée commerciale de John Coltrane, les suivants jugés trop avant-gardistes seront progressivement délaissés par les fans.
Citations[modifier | modifier le wikicode]
Dans la note de pochette Coltrane écrit :
« Pendant l'année 1957, j'ai connu par la grâce de Dieu un réveil spirituel qui allait me conduire à une vie plus riche, mieux remplie, plus productive. À cette époque, en signe de gratitude, je Lui ai humblement demandé qu'Il me donne les moyens et le privilège de rendre les autres heureux à travers la musique. J'ai le sentiment que cela m'a été accordé à travers Sa grâce. Louange à Dieu !8 »
Et aussi:
« La dernière partie constitue la narration musicale du thème, "A Love Supreme", qui est écrit dans le contexte. 9 »
Titres[modifier | modifier le wikicode]
Tous les titres sont des compositions de John Coltrane.
Face 1
Part 1: Acknowledgement – 7:47
Part 2: Resolution – 7:22
Face 2
Part 3: Pursuance - 10:45
Part 4: Psalm – 7:08
Composition du quartet[modifier | modifier le wikicode]
John Coltrane : saxophone ténor et voix
McCoy Tyner : piano
Jimmy Garrison : contrebasse
Elvin Jones : batterie
Ce quartet (1962 à 1965) est l'un des plus célèbres de l'histoire du jazz. Il reste encore aujourd'hui la figure la plus emblématique du jazz modal.
Le pianiste McCoy Tyner habitait dans le même quartier à Philadelphie que Coltrane. Ils jouent ensemble depuis 1957 et il fait partie de la formation de Coltrane de 1960 à 1965.
Elvin Jones, à la batterie, accompagne Coltrane de 1960 à 1966 après avoir joué avec Sonny Rollins.
Jimmy Garrisson, ancien contrebassiste de Bill Evans et d'Ornette Coleman complète le quartet en 1962 en remplaçant Reggie Workman, il accompagnera Coltrane jusqu'en 1967.
Bibliographie[modifier | modifier le wikicode]
(en) Ashley Kahn, A Love Supreme: The Creation of John Coltrane's Classic Album, Granta Books, 24 octobre 2002, 256 p. (ISBN 186207545X)
Livre entièrement consacré à l'album (en anglais), avec une préface signée Elvin Jones.
Lewis Porter, John Coltrane - Sa vie, sa musique, Outre Mesure, coll. « Contrepoints », 30 mai 2007, 384 p. (ISBN 2907891596)
Un chapitre entier est consacré à l'album dans l'ouvrage.
Hommage[modifier | modifier le wikicode]
L'album This Is Madness des Last Poets fait de nombreuses références à l'œuvre de John Coltrane, et en particulier l'album A Love Supreme dans la chanson Black People What Y'all Gon' Do.
Notes[modifier | modifier le wikicode]
↑ Il est toutefois possible que certains des overdubs datent du lendemain. On distingue plusieurs voix lors du passage chanté de Acknowledgement et une autre partie de saxophone à la fin de Psalm
↑ Arnaud Merlin, 100 disques indispensables jazz, Télérama hors/série, juin 1994.
↑ A Love Supreme (Deluxe Edition), Impulse!, 2002
↑ Pacal Bussy, Coltrane, Librio musique, 1999.
↑ impulse! >la pulsion jazz; FIP, Fnac, 1999
↑ D'après Lewis Porter, Jazzman n°137 août 2007, p.81.
↑ (en) The RS 500 Greatest Albums of All Time [archive]
↑ Pacal Bussy, op. cit. p. 54.
↑ Cette indication cryptée signifie que le poème de Coltrane qui figure aussi dans la pochette de l'album est "récité" sans parole par son phrasé au saxophone. Lewis Porter, op.cit., p.80.
Modern Vampires of the City is the third studio album by American indie rock band Vampire Weekend, released on May 14, 2013, by XL Recordings. After releasing their 2010 album Contra, the band toured and wrote new material during sound checks. Following a period in which the quartet pursued different musical projects, they regrouped and began work on their third record in 2011. Working with no deadline in mind, the band brought in an outside record producer for the first time, Ariel Rechtshaid.
Recorded in various locations, including New York City, Los Angeles, Martha's Vineyard and apartments, Modern Vampires of the City is an attempt to distance the band from the sound they became heavily associated with following their 2008 debut and Contra. Broadly experimental, the sound featured on the record is the result of a variety of unconventional recording assets, including pitch shifting. The cover art is a 1966 photograph by Neal Boenzi of the smoggiest day in New York City history, on which the air pollution killed at least 169 people. Announced in a New York Times classified in February 2013, two singles have thus far been released: "Diane Young"/"Step", and "Ya Hey".
Modern Vampires of the City debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200 with first-week sales of 134,000 copies, becoming the band's second consecutive number-one album, and has been acclaimed by critics.
Contents [hide]
1 Background
2 Recording and production
3 Music and lyrics
4 Packaging and artwork
5 Promotion
6 Critical reception
7 Commercial performance
8 Track listing
9 Personnel
10 Charts
11 See also
12 References
13 Further reading
14 External links
Background[edit source | editbeta]
The success of Vampire Weekend's second album, Contra, in 2010 established the group as "one of the past decade's great indie-rock success stories."[1] By the time the band wrapped their world tour for Contra, they realized they had not taken a break in nearly five years.[1]
During the break, the band members pursued different projects. Baio performed DJ sets and scored the Bob Byington film Somebody Up There Likes Me,[2] Batmanglij recorded solo material and produced tracks for Das Racist and spent time traveling India with three friends,[3][4] and Koenig collaborated with Major Lazer.[5] Koenig had broken up with his girlfriend shortly before the release of Contra and subsequently moved out of their shared apartment in New York.[3] Feeling "weird and aimless", Koenig attempted a stay in Los Angeles but he lasted four months before heading back East.[1][3]
By the time the band eventually regrouped in 2011, the quartet had amassed plenty of material and made sure to take their time making a new record. Koening and Batmanglij met several times a week to write songs, some of which they'd later scrap.[3] The pair took a "writing retreat" to Martha's Vineyard, where they bore down and composed several new tracks.[3] Working with no deadline in mind, the band began work on Modern Vampires of the City.[2]
Recording and production[edit source | editbeta]
Modern Vampires of the City was recorded in a variety of locations: SlowDeath Studios in New York, Echo Park "Back House" in Los Angeles, Vox Recording Studios in Hollywood, Rostam Batmanglij's apartment and a guest house on Martha's Vineyard. Rostam and co-producer Ariel Rechtshaid used a pair of mirrored solid state macbooks with UAD-2 Satellite Firewire Cards so they could take their recordings anywhere and work on them from separate locations with maximum ease.[6] The band credits Vox Studios with defining spacial quality of the recordings, especially the use of their vintage analog tape machines, with Batmanglij remarking, "Much of the overall sound and approach to the album was being able to record the drums to tape on an old Ampex machine."[7] The band wanted a unique drum sound, and so they recorded in a room with high ceilings and had engineer David Schiffman use a "pretty non-conventional drum miking setup" in which a pair of Neumann U 47s were used as over head mics with RCA 77dx ribbon mics between the Neumanns and the drum kit for added texture. Tape recordings of the drums were then heavily treated and manipulated with Ableton Live plug-ins. Lastly, the band layered samples onto select portions of the drum recordings to accent or shape the finished tone.[7]
Co-produced by Rostam Batmanglij and producer Ariel Rechtshaid (best known for work with Justin Bieber, Haim and Kylie Minogue), Modern Vampires of the City is an attempt to distance the band from the sounds featured on their debut and Contra. "Whenever we came up with something familiar sounding, it was rejected", said Rechtshaid.[7] Pitch shifting was a major component of recording Modern Vampires of the City. For several tracks, such as "Step", drums were recorded on a Varispeed Tape deck set to a lower speed so that they would play back faster and more high pitched. Drummer Chris Tomson would then re-record the drums playing to the sped-up recording to get an uptempo live take.[7] This second recording was then slowed back down to original speed to create an "underwater" effect. The effect is featured prominently on vocals as well. Ezra Koenig's vocals were run through Eventide H949 and 910 on tracks such as "Diane Young", with both the pitch and formant shifted changed to create vocal "baby" or "old man"-sounding vocals.[7] Bass guitar was also recorded straight to tape "with a fairly ambient miking approach where the mic was three feet away from the cabinet". Vocals were recorded with Soundelux U99 Microphones, in combination with 1176 Classic limiter plug-in, Fairchild 670 Compressor and Elektro-Mess-Tehcnik 140 Plate Reverb, giving the vocals a quality Rostam describes as "buttery".[6] For guitar sounds, Rostam chose not to mic his guitar and instead plugged his Les Paul direct-in to ProTools through a SansAmp Amp Emulation Pedal, a technique used by Jimmy Page.[7]
The band's main mission was to give each recording warmth, feeling that modern digital recordings lacked the warmth of older records.[7] In an attempt to make the recordings less harsh, the band and engineers used a spectrum analyzer, Sonnox SuprEsser and heavily automated EQs to edit out harsher, colder frequencies and soften the mix. With the entire band enlisted, the quartet painstakingly listened to the record several separate times using technology from standard commercial iPod earbuds to professional equipment to ensure the record sounded nice regardless of equipment the listener owned.[7] Desiring to "check the relative warmth levels", the engineers would "go in and perform surgery and automate EQs" in order to make the mixes listenable. The band felt the finished product was something of a third chapter and a continuation of material explored in their previous two efforts. "We thought these three albums should look like they belong together on a bookshelf", said Batmanglij. "We realized that there are things connecting the songs across three albums, like an invisible hand was guiding us. It does feel like we've been able to create three distinct worlds for each album, and yet have them be interconnected."[7]
Music and lyrics[edit source | editbeta]
Modern Vampires of the City is indeed a deeply God-haunted work ... [Ezra] Koenig doesn't give any indication he himself is a believer (more often just the opposite), but there is a recurring sense of engagement with God throughout the album, a sense of wrestling with the implications and impossibilities of faith. By accident or, more likely, by design, this builds and builds until Koenig puts everything on the table and addresses God directly.
“”
— Barry Lenser, PopMatters[8]
Modern Vampires of the City is a departure from the percussive, African-influenced indie pop of Contra.[9] Batmanglij said that the album has a recurring tension that distinguishes it from the band's previous albums: "Even if the songs are mostly in a major key, there’s something that’s hanging out there that’s a little bit dark. And I think that’s reflective of the world."[10] According to Heather Phares of Allmusic, the album eschews the eclectic music of Contra for "a less audacious production style and smaller instrumental palette: guitar, organ, harpsichord, and the occasional sample combine into a rarefied sound that suggests a more insular version of their debut". She pointed to how the album is bookended by the stylistically narrow chamber pop on the songs "Obvious Bicycle" and "Young Lion".[11] "Step" was inspired by a lyric from Souls of Mischief's 1993 song "Step to My Girl", which sampled Grover Washington, Jr.'s cover of Bread's "Aubrey". The vocal melody of the chorus interprets the melody of "Aubrey" so close that the band had to clear it as a sample.[7] The chorus vocals were recorded in Ableton Live using the onboard microphone in Batmanglij's MacBook Pro.[7] Alexis Petridis viewed that some songs echo lesser known "musical tropes" from the band's previous albums—a mock Irish folk influence is heard on "Unbelievers", while "Step" features "Left Banke-inspired baroque pop".[12]
Much of the lyrics were composed by Batmanglij and Koenig in Batmanglij's apartment (a former factory building in Brooklyn) and at a rented cottage on Martha's Vineyard.[1] The lyrics explore more mature, world-weary themes such as growing old and disillusionment with American foreign policy.[9] The album eschews the theme of privileged youth from their first two albums for characters with adult responsibilities and reflections on the passage of time. Faith and mortality are recurring themes on songs such as "Unbelievers", "Worship You", and "Everlasting Arms".[10] Koenig likened their first three albums to Brideshead Revisited: "The naïve joyous school days in the beginning. Then the expansion of the world, travel, seeing other places, learning a little bit more about how people live. And then the end is a little bit of growing up, starting to think more seriously about your life and your faith. If people could look at our three albums as a bildungsroman, I’d be O.K. with that."[10] According to Brice Ezell of PopMatters, Modern Vampires of the City is "very much an indie rock record" because of Koenig's voice and diction, which reveals "the youth that he and his bandmates so often strive to shrug off." Ezell asserts that, on songs such as "Unbelievers", the "reckless abandon" expressed by the lyrics reveals "the group's grasp on the genuine rebellion that indie rock ought to strive for."[13]
Packaging and artwork[edit source | editbeta]
The album cover is an "almost dystopian shot" of a fog-shrouded New York City, taken by New York Times photographer Neal Boenzi looking south from the Empire State Building in November 1966. While New York's smog problem was subsequently resolved, the world's air has grown more polluted, which led the band to believe the image perhaps rendered "some kind of future."[3] Initially, an image purporting to be the record's cover—featuring an Instagram-filtered shot of a woman in a dress and the title Lemon Sounds—sent the Internet abuzz in January 2013.[3]
Promotion[edit source | editbeta]
The band announced a new album would be due on May 6 via XL Recordings on their website in January 2013. The bottom of the image featured the initials for the album, sparking speculation for fans and critics.[14] Following a tweet from the band's official Twitter account that read "NYT Classifieds…" the album's title and release date were confirmed in the February 4 edition of The New York Times. The sole entry in the "Notices & Lost and Found" column of the daily newspaper read: "Modern Vampires of the City, May 7, 2013".[15] The band updated their official website with the track listing and several tour dates shortly thereafter.[15]
Critical reception[edit source | editbeta]
Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
Allmusic4/5 stars[11]
The A.V. ClubA[16]
Robert ChristgauA+[17]
The Guardian4/5 stars[12]
The Independent4/5 stars[18]
NME7/10[19]
Pitchfork Media9.3/10[20]
Rolling Stone4.5/5 stars[21]
Slant Magazine4.5/5 stars[22]
Spin8/10[23]
Modern Vampires of the City received universal acclaim from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 84, based on 50 reviews.[24] In his review for The Independent, music critic Simon Price called it Vampire Weekend's "most outwardly straightforward" and "most cohesive and convincing effort yet."[18] Robert Christgau, writing for MSN Music, said that the songs have several "twists" in their "boy-to-man themes" and that, like the Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, each lyric and musical element is "pleasurable in itself and aptly situated in the sturdy songs and tracks, so that the whole signifies without a hint of concept."[17] Nathan Brackett of Rolling Stone said that the album has a "precise craft and soul that speaks to the heart of city life."[21] Ryan Dombal of Pitchfork Media wrote that the "vocals and music interact with each other in an effortless flow" and that "there's more air in these songs, more spontaneity, more dynamics."[20]
Although he called it a "gorgeous album", John Calvert of NME felt that the band sacrificed "the sonic smarts that made them."[19] By contrast, Alexis Petridis of The Guardian believed that Vampire Weekend succeeded in "shak[ing] off the shtick that made them famous" with music devoid of musical "novelty" and lyrics that replace their previous "arch depictions of moneyed young Wasp lives" with more "heartfelt" themes of mortality.[12] Slant Magazine's Jesse Cataldo said that, although the songs may be dense and wordy, they are also "immediately potent on a purely visceral level, striking a perfect balance that makes for what's perhaps" the best album of the year.[22] Mike Powell of Spin felt that the ambiguity of Koenig's lyrics is more than made up for by "the clarity of the music" and found the songs "sad" but catchy.[23]
Commercial performance[edit source | editbeta]
Modern Vampires of the City debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with 134,000 copies sold in its first week, becoming Vampire Weekend's second consecutive number-one album, as well as the nineteenth independently-distributed album to top the chart in the Nielsen SoundScan era.[25] The album entered the UK Albums Chart at number three with first-week sales of 27,805 copies, earning the band their third consecutive top twenty album in the UK.[26]
