The Church That Made It Liturgy

In San Francisco in 1965, Franzo and Marina King heard John Coltrane play live and described the experience afterward as a direct religious conversion. They founded a congregation around that experience, built from the start around A Love Supreme rather than a conventional hymnal. In 1982 the congregation formally joined the African Orthodox Church and became the Saint John Will-I-Am Coltrane African Orthodox Church, a parish that worships Jesus Christ while venerating Coltrane as a canonized saint whose music it treats as revealed sound. Sunday liturgy at the church opens with a conch shell, moves into a saxophone rendering of the album's four movements, and reaches its center when the choir recites Psalm 23 over the track Acknowledgement while the congregation answers in call and response. Scholars of American religion, including Tony Whyton's 2013 study of the album's afterlife, treat the church as one of the best documented cases anywhere of a recorded work becoming, for a real congregation, an actual liturgical text rather than a devotional inspiration once removed. That distinction matters: most listeners who call A Love Supreme spiritual mean it moves them; this congregation built its entire order of worship on the record itself, an act with almost no parallel in twentieth century recorded music of any genre.