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Saxophonist Branford Marsalis said recently that jazz musicians are scared of playing John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. 

Coltrane’s most sacred work, Supreme is deceptively simple sounding music, and, of course, therein lies its power. It has the power to move listeners (“dear listeners” as Coltrane begins the liner notes, the word “dear” clearly meant to be taken in its dual role as both a salutation and an endearment) to tears of acknowledgment, resolution, pursuance and praise (psalm). 

It also has power to move most musicians aspiring to play it scurrying to the woodshed for cover, daunted and haunted by the demands of this composition. What is demanded of listener and performer alike is an application of the heart. 

For musicians the dual threat of either sounding too corny or too abstract looms large over any attempt to re-create this unique masterpiece. Coltrane wanted any intellectual approach to Supreme to be gotten out of the way (hence “Acknowledgment,” the name of the first movement) so that all may begin absorbing Supreme through the core of every soul: the heart. 

Fine for the listener, for the heart’s ears are always more in tune than the mind’s ears. But for musicians, listening and learning with the heart requires a discipline that is foreign to their training. For the Branford Marsalis Quartet, including the leader on tenor sax, Joey Calderazzo ( piano), Eric Revis (bassist), and Jeff “Tain” Watts (drums), the challenge on opening night of the 2005 spring season of San Francisco Jazz’s concert series was to touch all the right keys, strings and skins in an even more organic way than they are used to, that they might convert a captured audience into an enraptured congregation. 

As evidenced by the constant standing ovations throughout followed by the beatific quiet of the exiting human flow, the Branford Marsalis Quartet ultimately touched hearts, sending the “dear listeners” away in silent contemplation of the remainder of San Francisco Jazz’s Coltrane tribute concert series. The band’s approach was successful because they achieved a perfect balance of rhythmic groove and compelling free jazz. The solos and accompaniments often settled into comforting gospel-like sways. Yet, also offered at subconsciously appropriate moments was the liberating abandonment of each musician’s Coltrane-inspired (but not Coltrane-imitated) speaking in tongues. 

In the early to mid-1960s the language of the “new thing,” supported by releases on Bernard Tollman’s appropriately named ESP label (short for esperanza), such as Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity, Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz and the spiritually toned compositions of Charles Mingus (Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting) and Sun Ra (and Ra Arkestra saxman John Gilmore who initially inspired Coltrane’s forays into out playing) had begun to take on biblical proportions among black jazz artists. 

In this atmosphere, John Coltrane recorded jazz’s holiest of the holy. The careful griot-like passage of this music and its type through the hands of artists like Branford Marsalis continues in all its permutations, surfacing March 12 at the Masonic auditorium to attract and keep a multitude looking for a source of lasting warmth. 

The San Francisco Jazz Spring Festival opened March 12 and continues through June 26, comprising 42 concerts and more than 200 musicians. For schedule and ticket information, call (415) 788-7353 or see www.sfjazz.org.