A Love Supreme Pt. 2: Resolution

"A Love Supreme, Pt. 2: Resolution" moves the suite's emotional arc from acknowledgement into surrender, the music finding a melodic clarity that functions as relief after the searching quality of the opening movement. Coltrane's tenor saxophone sings here in its most lyrical register, the phrases longer and more resolute, the intervals chosen conveying a quality of having arrived somewhere after difficulty. McCoy Tyner's piano playing reaches perhaps its most beautiful expression in this movement — the left hand's voicings providing harmonic depth while the right traces melodic lines that feel like answers to the questions posed in Acknowledgement. There is a quality of prayer to this movement in the structural sense of the word: address followed by silence followed by more address, a rhythm of speaking and waiting. Elvin Jones maintains the rhythmic density that characterizes his work throughout the suite, but here it feels less oceanic and more like a steady heartbeat, the pulse of a body at rest after exertion. The movement resolves without resolving in the conventional harmonic sense — Coltrane's modal approach means that the "resolution" is emotional rather than theoretical, a state of being rather than a chord. This is music that understands how religious experience functions as argument: not through logic but through the direct impact of beauty on a consciousness open to receiving it, the aesthetic overwhelming the analytical and making the claim by other means.