If you haven’t heard the 1965 live recording of John Coltrane playing A Love Supreme in a Seattle club, you’re in for a treat. Released in 2021, if provides a fascinating perspective on that iconic album—as you can hear below…
For more than half a century, A Love Supreme existed in two forms:
the 1964 studio recording and a single live version recorded at Antibes in July 1965. That was the entire known performance history of Coltrane’s most famous suite.
Then, in 2021, something extraordinary happened.A fully recorded live performance of A Love Supreme from Seattle, dated 2 October 1965, was released by Impulse! — captured by Seattle musician and educator Joe Brazil, and discovered five years after his death.
It shifted the understanding of Coltrane’s late period, the scope of the suite, and the direction his music was taking in the final years of his life.
This is the story of that recording, how it was found, and why it matters.
The Seattle residency: an expanded band
When Coltrane arrived in Seattle in late September 1965, he was performing with an expanded ensemble. Across the Penthouse residency, alongside his core quartet of McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, the group also featured appearances from:
- Pharoah Sanders – tenor saxophone, piccolo, percussion
- Donald Garrett – bass clarinet, bass
- Joe Brazil – flute
- Carlos Ward – alto saxophone (heard on the Live in Seattle recordings from 30 September and 1 October)
This broader group gave Coltrane’s music a thicker, more textured sound. So much great music, of course, but it was the full performance of A Love Supreme which captured the attention of jazz historians…
Joe Brazil’s tapes
Joe Brazil was a central figure in Seattle’s jazz scene — a saxophonist, teacher, organiser and trusted collaborator. When Coltrane came to town, Brazil recorded parts of the residency on a reel-to-reel machine.
No commercial plan, no project in mind — simply a document of a special week.
Brazil died in 2008. Five years later, in 2013, Seattle saxophonist and historian Steve Griggs began cataloguing Brazil’s archive. Inside one box he found reels labelled with dates matching the Coltrane residency. When he played them, he realised what he had discovered:
A complete live performance of A Love Supreme — the only known recording of the suite performed with Coltrane’s expanded 1965 ensemble.
What makes this version different
The Seattle performance is more open, more turbulent, and more exploratory than the 1964 studio recording. The four-movement structure remains, but the journey through it is radically different.
This is A Love Supreme reimagined onstage, not as a fixed suite but as a living piece of music influenced by the personnel surrounding Coltrane. Take a listen here:
Critical reception
When Impulse! released the recording in 2021, critics responded with admiration and a sense of discovery.
Relix described the performance as “a 75-minute journey through free-jazz heaven,” whilst Pitchfork drew attention to its intensity. Elvin Jones is portrayed as “both deeply complex and also strikingly coherent,” while Pharoah Sanders “delivers a flurry of smeared tones and growls—he sounds possessed.”
These reactions underline how significant the Seattle recording is — not as a replacement for the studio version, but as essential context.
A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle adds to our understanding of Coltrane’s relationship to the suite. Instead of treating it as a finished devotional statement, he continued to reshape it as his band expanded and his ideas evolved.
It documents a moment where the Classic Quartet sound overlaps with the freer, larger-ensemble approach that would define Coltrane’s last two years. Few recordings from this transitional period exist in such complete form.
That the tape survived at all — thanks to Joe Brazil’s instinct to record, and Steve Griggs’s work to unearth and identify it — feels remarkable.
Looking for more? Check out our round up of Coltrane’s greatest albums, or a dive into the great ‘lost’ jazz albums from history.