A Love Supreme: Dry and mid-range-y, sonically speaking.
Colombia Sierra Morena: Jammy and thick.
Both have much to say. An abundance. Maybe an overabundance. (Didn’t Miles tell Trane to play less?)
Both are bursting and intense. Urgent.
The coffee is a unique varietal, pink bourbon. A Love Supreme is also a unique varietal, a record like no other, a category unto itself. Jazz is kind of a silly word, not up to the impact of this music.
The record and the coffee both tell stories of agitation and conflict.
A Love Supreme: Elegant and chaotic all at once. How is that possible? It is one of the central mysteries of this recording.
Colombia Sierra Morena: Like A Love Supreme in that it’s pointed and pronounced but supported by body and substance. But this coffee is not elegant. It’s more rustic, or maybe even ragged, and feels somehow like a work in progress.
I taste the sugar now at the tail end of this coffee. Sugar is hard to come by on A Love Supreme.
This is an intense coffee, and I don’t think that intensity can be brewed away. You could mute it a bit with a coarser grind (a bit like turning down the volume on the record) but I think this coffee wants to be intense. Intensity is its intent. In that way, it is a perfect companion to A Love Supreme. You don’t listen to this record for a mellow vibe, just as you don’t drink a light roasted Colombian coffee for something easy and smooth.
I will not choose a winner here, nor would I say it’s a tie. I suppose someday, when I’m feeling bored and bleak, I’ll try to figure out how exactly coffee roasting relates to record making on a more granular level (is the roasting of coffee parallel to the mastering of a record? Discuss…) For today, at the risk of sounding diplomatic, I’ll say that, on the one hand, A Love Supreme is one of my all-time favorite records and, on the other hand, that I couldn’t be prouder of Wonderstate for being named Roaster Of The Year from their home base in beautiful Viroqua, WI. I’m proud to subscribe to Wonderstate, proud to support their way of business, excited like a little kid to receive the coffee they surprise me with every two weeks.
But coffee is ephemeral—a perishable produce item—and A Love Supreme is eternal; they are not competitors but collaborators. There is no winner, other than to say the winner is me, sitting in my chair, drinking coffee that I brewed with great care, listening to music too good for human ears, taking notes and enjoying the thinking, the analyzing, the tasting, the listening. The learning. I’ve long been intrigued by the notion of terroir, how a thing is shaped by its soil, its cultivation, the weather of its youth. I like considering the journey of this coffee, the miracle of it ending up in my cup, just as I like listening to this record made more than half a century ago and pondering how we still haven’t caught up to its beauty, its anger, its seriousness, its frustration, its artfulness. A Love Supreme is the sound of four candle flickers fusing into an inferno. It is the most visceral of works, the opposite of any version of the word “cool.”
In other words, it pairs well with this boisterous Colombian coffee.
THE OWL HEAD SHOE HORN 