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YMMV / A Love Supreme

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  • Broken Base:
    • A mild case with this album over whether the studio album or the live album is better, as well as whether some of the alternate takes are better. There have been a lot of different releases of the album over the years (as seen on the main page), and some listeners have preferences for different versions. However, perhaps due to the nature of modern jazz audiences, it's rare to see contemporary discussions over this get too vitriolic.
    • It also has occasional detractors, though it should be emphasized that they are very much in the minority, and it's rare to see anyone call this a bad album outright; in fact, every single review of this album listed on Wikipedia's page for the album gives it a perfect score. Nonetheless, jazz critic Martin Gayford wrote that if you're "in the mood", A Love Supreme is "majestic and compelling; if you're not, it's interminable and pretentious," and that it "marked the point at which jazz—for good or ill—ceased for a while to be hip and cool, becoming instead mystical and messianic."
  • Once Original, Now Common: A listener coming to this album in 2019 or 2020 might have a difficult time seeing what was so innovative about the album when it came out, simply because its DNA is all over popular music of the last 50 years. At the same time, despite being frequently categorised as Coltrane's masterpiece, it's simultaneously less "out there" than his later free jazz experiments such as Ascension, which still sounds radical today; and yet less accessible than his earlier records such as Blue Train, Giant Steps, and My Favorite Things. It's fairly common for listeners to report needing several listens before the album "clicks" for them.
  • Sacred Cow: Despite the occasional detractors, this album, more than any other album except perhaps Kind of Blue, stands above criticism for most jazz listeners.

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