There is a recording that will make you feel like the walls of your house have quietly dissolved, and it is this one.
Coltrane made Meditations in November 1965, just months after A Love Supreme had been received like a benediction by the jazz world. He had already moved past it. The quintet he brought into Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs was not the same band that had recorded that masterpiece — it was something stranger, more turbulent, more insistent on its own discomfort.
The Double Drum Question
Rashied Ali was the new element, added alongside Elvin Jones in a configuration that made no logical sense on paper and made complete, devastating sense on tape. Two drummers, and not two drummers trading fours or politely sharing a kit — two drummers pulling in different gravitational directions simultaneously. Jones anchors, Ali spirals. The tension between them is the engine of this entire record.
Elvin was reportedly unhappy about it. He left the band not long after. You can hear that friction in the music, and the music is better for it.
McCoy Tyner is here too, though this would also be among his final recordings with Coltrane. He plays with the focused intensity of a man who knows the ground is shifting. Pharoah Sanders contributes a screaming, overdriven soprano and tenor that push the upper registers into something close to ecstatic pain. Jimmy Garrison holds the low end with the patience of a man who has seen everything.
What Rudy Van Gelder Captured
Van Gelder was meticulous about his room — the famous A-frame house in Hackensack, then the dedicated studio he built in Englewood Cliffs. He knew how to place Coltrane's horn, how to let the reed breath come through, how to keep the piano from crowding the drums. On Meditations, the task was impossible by conventional standards and he threaded it anyway.
The five movements — "The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost," "Compassion," "Love," "Consequences," "Serenity" — were composed by Coltrane as a suite, though suite feels too architectural a word for something this openly wounded. Bob Thiele produced the session for Impulse!, which in 1965 meant getting out of the way and running tape.
The opening track begins with what sounds like weather. Drums arrive like a pressure front. Then Coltrane's tenor enters and it is immediately, undeniably him — that particular reed weight, that phrase shape — but playing as if he has decided that melody is now a starting point rather than a destination.
"Serenity" closes the record and earns its title, barely. There is a stillness in those final minutes that feels won rather than given.
I have put on a lot of records in my life and I still don't fully know what to do with this one. That is not a complaint. Some recordings are not trying to be understood. They are trying to do something to you, and they succeed, and afterward you sit in the quiet and feel grateful that someone was willing to go that far.