Tony Whyton's Beyond A Love Supreme: John Coltrane and the Legacy of an Album investigates the legacies of Coltrane's album A Love Supreme (1964, hereafter ALS), which was released with his Classic Quartet by Impulse in 1965, to commercial and critical acclaim. The author explores the album's legacy for jazz musicologists (Chapter 1), showing how the latter's customary ‘formalist’ models of analysis (p. 15) tend to downplay ‘experiences of structure’, for example, how the CD (including the deluxe edition) provides a different experience from the LP (pp. 18–20). Here and throughout, ALS’s status as a ‘work’ and as a recording are accorded similar status (pp. 3–5). Jazz musicologists are enjoined to note how ALS as work and object challenges and neutralises (20) the binaries we employ in our interpretations of jazz, to question lingering dependence on the composition/improvisation antonym (pp. 21–8), drugs/spiritual enlightenment (for biographies) and live/recorded jazz (for recordings).

Beyond this call for ‘critical listening’, Chapter 2 considers how sources that constitute ‘Coltrane studies’ (p. 7) have ensconced the saxophonist in a jazz canon that has contributed to his deification, with A Love Supreme as his sacred text. Whyton contends that this process is more subtle than the observable rituals of the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco. The chapter shows how diverse actors have invested in a populist canonisation with creative fervour.

Coltrane's later recordings also ‘challenge established musicological methods and problematise dominant representations’ (pp. 8–9). Discussed in Chapter 3, they show the saxophonist's embrace of the New Thing and the dissolution of the Classic Quartet. If A Love Supreme has been understood as a representation of transcendent experience, Ascension (1965), Interstellar Space (1967) and The Olatunji Concert (1967) have been received as ‘abstract and remote’ portraits of the same (p. 71). As scenes of musical transcendence, they capture the socio-cultural context of America's counter-cultural 1960s and its concerns with transcending political, social and musical barriers.

Whyton poignantly observes that these late recordings’ potential to challenge established categories and ‘to celebrate different subject positions’ was undermined by the more urgent ‘need for a type of political essentialism’ (p. 91). Chapter 4 celebrates ALS’s continuing and ‘polysemic’ significance (p. 123 and 39) despite these developments, and richly explores its importance as ‘a vehicle to promote both authenticity and universality’ (p. 104) for its varied audiences since the 1970s: in literature and the ‘Coltrane poem’, in films and advertising, in jazz and popular music, and beyond the USA.

As a ‘New Jazz Studies’ scholar, Whyton is vigilant in discerning the workings of ideology, but this vigilance is inconsistent. The reader is warned of an ‘externally imposed ideological agenda’ (pp. 16–17) and of a ‘master narrative at play’ (p. 18). The culprit is formalist musicology (Chapter 1), canons (pp. 43, 70, 85, 87), ‘the dominant Coltrane narrative’ (pp. 46, 125), the ‘ideological control of the Coltrane narrative’ (pp. 9, 49–50, 131), ‘the neo-traditionalist agenda’ (pp. 9, 73, 74, 75, 99, 114), ‘the continuum of black African influence’ (pp. 95, 107, 109) and Branford and Wynton Marsalis’ covert ideological control along with Stanley Crouch (pp. 114, 124–5, 44). Whyton little explains what he means by ideology or its workings in jazz. These phrases suggest some ideology as a working phenomenon, but surely not in the same way or for the same reasons.

Whyton's acknowledges canons’ cultural work (p. 43) and that ‘the challenge is to understand the need for political essentialism as a strategy to combat racism but not to let readings of African American music be limited to essentialist paradigms’ (pp. 91–2). This book makes modest gains on this challenge. It often reads as if acknowledgement of Coltrane's importance to African Americans inevitably constricts plural legacies, in part because Whyton's targets remain unnamed and decontextualised. Surely, earlier readings that emphasise Coltrane's importance to African Americans perform different ideological work to contemporary readings. If not, then the continuity needs explanation, beyond the predictable charges levelled in Beyond A Love Supreme. Absence of scrutiny undermines Whyton's recourse to Jacques Derrida's argument that mere reversal of privileged poles of binaries is unhelpful, because one pole of the antonym motivates its ‘other’ and because the terms do not exist on an equal plane (pp. 27–8). We may well ask, then, if the hegemony of conservative readings implies that black jazz musicians face similar obstacles today: recognition that ‘within today's cosmopolitan world, the boundaries of race are continually blurred and problematized’ (p. 13) does not mean they are no longer problematic for black people globally. Popular culture's appropriations of A Love Supreme celebrated in Chapter 4 could have been read more trenchantly (capitalism is also an ideology) to ask if strategies of resistance (not containment) could be strengthened by readings of the album's polysemy.

Whyton's presumption that his cast of antagonists is known is uncomfortable. My unease may be compared with his with Leonard Brown (Reference Brown and Brown2010), whom he charges with essentialism (p. 143, n. 44; cf. pp. 12, 104). Brown references ethnomusicology to argue for an insider perspective and to explain transmission of musical knowledge ‘shared between certain old indigenous civilisations and the relatively new Black American culture’: the Haudenosaunee adage, ‘you have to be invited’, ‘does not imply that knowledge is secret’ and is far less stringent than requirements for canon-formation (Brown Reference Brown and Brown2010, p. 7).

As a South African, I enjoyed Whyton's critique of narratives that downplay jazz's relationship with contemporary Africa (pp. 119–21). Whyton, however, employs only Steven Feld (Reference Feld2012), to propose that ‘Coltrane's music is translated back into African life, encouraging African musicians to feel more African … to envisage a future for their own creativity and to celebrate their place in the world’ (p. 122). How one may ‘feel more African’ needs some explanation. The cultural transfer described may have worked this way in Accra, but certainly not on the whole continent. Coltrane has been crucial in elaborations of jazz's importance in South Africa's racist past (Ansell Reference Ansell2004, p. 339). The tenor saxophonist Winston Mankunku, in his 1968 album Yakhal’ Inkomo, delivered a caustic anti-apartheid message that doubled as an elegy to Coltrane, for Mankunku ‘Daddy Trane’. I recalled Mankunku during Whyton's African interlude:

Thanks to Whyton, I understand this conversation anew (see his pp. 61–2). Whyton's rich book contains all the faults expected from the best tradition of revisionist history that ‘advocates complexity, contradiction, and an acknowledgement of the different ideological perspectives at play’ (p. 131). He might have been more forward with his own ideological position and how this motivates his choices. The book deserves further engagement and discussion, for music and cultural studies scholars. If ‘research into Coltrane's music should be provocative, experimental, and multidimensional’ (p. 131), his book is just so.