Two landmark albums, recorded without a single rehearsal

It began with something nobody had arranged. During a Butcher Brown show, trumpeter Nicholas Payton stepped up and started playing along with a band deep in a house-inflected groove. Into that groove he dropped “Acknowledgement”, the opening figure of “A Love Supreme”. The clip landed on Instagram under the hashtag #AHouseSupreme. That night Payton texted drummer Corey Fonville: “Yo man, we gotta do a record.”

The record is called “A Supreme Blue”. It arrived digitally on 24 July via Concord Jazz, with vinyl to follow on 14 August as a double LP limited to 1,500 copies. Nine tracks. The first five follow the exact running order of Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue”; the last four are John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” suite. Both men would have turned one hundred this year.

They cut it at Spacebomb Studios in Richmond. There were no rehearsals — not for lack of time, but on purpose. Engineer Alex de Jong worked his dub-leaning effects in while the band played rather than afterwards, which means some of those decisions can no longer be undone.

The line-up runs longer in instruments than in people. Payton on trumpet and Rhodes. Tennishu on tenor and voice. Morgan Burrs on guitar and MPC. DJ Harrison on keys, piano and percussion. R4ND4ZZO on bass and synth bass. Fonville on drums.

Fonville talks about what the originals’ authors might think without any reverent hush. He reckons they would have liked hearing their music this way, rather than still hearing it played as they played it in 1959 or 1963. It is 2026. The argument is simple to the point of cheek, which is exactly why it is hard to argue with.