The John Hanrahan Quartet Performs “A Love Supreme”
LowDown
May 4, 2024
The liner notes to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme are sublime. Coltrane describes his album as a “humble offering” to God and references the “spiritual awakening” that some view as his impetus for a movement away from heroin and alcohol addiction. The notes end with a simply-worded prayer, confessing to the omnipotent nature of God and the beauty of his will.
The notes must have given John Hanrahan his own spiritual awakening when, 20 years ago, drummer Elvin Jones (who played on the album) suggested Hanrahan read them. From there, Hanrahan says, he had his own sort of conversion: He became a devotee of A Love Supreme.
He’s discovered quite an interesting niche, he told us from the stage at LowDown. A rock drummer by trade, he recorded himself covering the album with friends and it caught the ears of some jazz club owners and festival runners. Now, Hanrahan finds himself doing a traditional cover of A Love Supreme in different cities, with different musicians each time (under the banner of The John Hanrahan Quartet, or sometimes The Love Supreme Ensemble, which does more unique, contemporary interpretations), multiple times a year. Tulsa’s particular iteration of The John Hanrahan Quartet included locals Scott McQuade on piano, Stephen Schultz on bass and Mike Cameron on saxophone.
Considering the first half of the show was a series of the late saxophonist Wayne Shorter’s tunes, and the second half was A Love Supreme in its entirety, one of the most famous pieces for jazz saxophone ever made, Cameron had some big shoes to fill. If he was nervous, he didn’t show it. He fluttered and screamed through those rough Coltrane lines with confidence and grace alongside McQuade and Schultz’s complementary and tasteful solos and shading.
Yet I found the premise of the whole night a little confounding. Hanrahan is a drummer giving his name to a quartet playing a night of saxophone songs. And yet, nearly all of the attention throughout the night was laser-focused, rightly, on Cameron instead of Hanrahan.
For the most part, Hanrahan played like a rock drummer playing jazz (which is what he is), with more power than grace, although in moments he demonstrated stunning flashes of finesse and inspiration. While at times he executed his fills in just the right way, he tended to take up what seemed to me too much of the musical space — I suppose that was his right, as the person putting together the act. And if I myself weren’t a drummer, it’s likely that I wouldn’t have noticed or cared.
After a gorgeous encore of “Naima,” Coltrane’s ode to his wife, we were out into the cool May night. As a show, it was well-executed and enjoyable. As renditions of Coltrane and Shorter, the pieces stood on their own and delivered what they promised. And as an opportunity for the crowd to see an admirable recreation of one of the greatest jazz albums ever recorded, it was an experience few get to have. After all, Coltrane himself only performed the album live three times (one imagines that Hanrahan has leapfrogged Coltrane ten times in that respect), and it’s not an easy piece to pull off, much less to the high level of quality these four musicians did.
Coltrane was called “anti-jazz” by the press of his time. Obviously in hindsight we can see how untrue that is. I might gently suggest — and possibly I’ll be proven wrong in the same way — that it’s not terribly jazz to cover the same album over and over; it seems to me the preoccupation of the student (or, indeed, the convert or devotee). That said, had I walked in with no idea what was on the bill, I’d be thrilled.
And in a way I was thrilled, and I wasn’t alone. There was a group of old men in the back talking hushed and excitedly the entire time, following the performance like basketball junkies watching the Final Four, cheering at favorite passages. And ultimately that’s the beauty of this whole music thing: however you want to do it, as long as you do it well (and the Quartet did) there’s probably somebody who digs it. Sometimes that person is God. Sometimes it’s an old man in the back of a Tulsa jazz club. Spiritual awakenings, after all, come in all shapes, sizes and sounds.
Next at LowDown: Blue Whale Comedy Night featuring Gavin Matts, May 17
