There are those who say Jim­my Page’s gui­tar play­ing went into decline near the end of the 70s for rea­sons that are in dis­pute, whether drugs, ten­donitis, or a bro­ken ring fin­ger dur­ing a 1975 tour. (Thir­ty-two years lat­er, he broke his pinky and had to delay a Led Zep­pelin reunion.) Every musi­cian goes through slumps. Page talked in a 1977 inter­view about an ear­li­er such episode, dur­ing his ses­sion work in the six­ties when horns and orches­tras began to eclipse gui­tars, and he found him­self “tak­ing a back seat with just the occa­sion­al riff.” The expe­ri­ence made him reeval­u­ate his career. “I didn’t real­ize how rusty I was going to get until a rock and roll ses­sion turned up from France, and I could hard­ly play.”

One thing that sus­tained Page in those low times was his acoustic play­ing. As a ses­sion play­er, he tells the ‘77 inter­view­er, “I had to do it on stu­dio work, and you come to grips with it very quick­ly too, very quick­ly, because it is what is expect­ed. There was a lot of busk­ing in the ear­ly days, but as I say, I had to come to grips with it, and it was a good school­ing.”

Though Page first start­ed out play­ing in acoustic skif­fle bands, he says his first gui­tar was a Grazz­ioso, “which was like a copy of a Stra­to­cast­er,” his next instru­ment a real Fend­er Strat, and his third, the “Black Beau­ty” Gib­son Les Paul that he played on Zeppelin’s ear­ly stu­dio ses­sions before it was stolen. It was his ear­li­er ses­sion work that trained him as a dis­ci­plined, and under­rat­ed, acoustic player—and at times a pro­found­ly inspired one.

When, after almost ten years, Page reunit­ed with Robert Plant in 1994 for a series of MTV Unplugged ses­sions (top), his acoustic play­ing was top notch. In oth­er acoustic ses­sions from just a few years ear­li­er (the 1989 video fur­ther up) a slight­ly out-of-it Page plays with quite much less sub­tle­ty and restraint, though he’s cer­tain­ly still got the skill. But care­less per­for­mances like these are not char­ac­ter­is­tic of Page’s true tal­ents as an acoustic play­er. Ignore the poor video qual­i­ty and lis­ten to his incred­i­ble pick­ing above on a 1970 broad­cast of The Julie Felix Show in Eng­land.

Page could show­case his lead play­ing, adapt­ed to a folk idiom, on the acoustic gui­tar, but he has always excelled as a rhythm play­er as well. Just above, in an out­take from the 2008 doc­u­men­tary It Might Get Loud—while still recov­er­ing from that bro­ken pinky finger—Page plays what Gui­tar World iden­ti­fies only as “an uncred­it­ed instru­men­tal” on a gui­tar that “appears to be in an open tun­ing, pos­si­bly C.” What­ev­er this com­po­si­tion, we can hear in these broad strums a whole rhyth­mic arrange­ment, with drum and bass parts and neg­a­tive space drawn around the hints of melody. Page has always had one of the most thor­ough­ly imag­i­na­tive gui­tar styles in rock and roll, and when he steps back from his blues-based elec­tric play­ing and embraces the acoustic gui­tar, he show­cas­es how much the influ­ence of var­i­ous acoustic world and folk musics “gave Led Zep­pelin a rich­ness,” writes Stephen Erlewine at All­mu­sic, “unheard in their heavy rock peers.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jim­my Page Tells the Sto­ry of “Kash­mir”

Jim­my Page Tells the Sto­ry of “Stair­way to Heav­en”: How the Most Played Rock Song Came To Be

13-Year-Old Jim­my Page Plays Gui­tar on TV in 1957, an Ear­ly Moment in His Spec­tac­u­lar Career

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Click the image above to view it in a larg­er for­mat.

The great jazz sax­o­phone play­er John Coltrane was born 87 years ago today. To mark the occa­sion we present this rare doc­u­ment from the Smith­so­ni­an’s Nation­al Muse­um of Amer­i­can His­to­ry: Coltrane’s hand­writ­ten out­line of his ground­break­ing jazz com­po­si­tion A Love Supreme.

Record­ed in Decem­ber of 1964 and released in 1965, A Love Supreme is Coltrane’s per­son­al dec­la­ra­tion of his faith in God and his aware­ness of being on a spir­i­tu­al path. “No road is an easy one,” writes Coltrane in a prayer at the bot­tom of his own lin­er notes for the album, “but they all go back to God.”

If you click the image above and exam­ine a larg­er copy of the man­u­script, you will notice that Coltrane has writ­ten the same sen­ti­ment at the bot­tom of the page. “All paths lead to God.” The piece is made up of a pro­gres­sion of four suites. The names for each sec­tion are not on the man­u­script, but Coltrane even­tu­al­ly called them “Acknowl­edge­ment,” “Res­o­lu­tion,” “Pur­suance” and “Psalm.”

In the man­u­script, Coltrane writes that the “A Love Supreme” motif should be “played in all keys togeth­er.” In the record­ing of “Acknowl­edge­ment,” Coltrane indeed repeats the basic theme near the end in all keys, as if he were con­scious­ly exhaust­ing every path. As jazz his­to­ri­an Lewis Porter, author of John Coltrane: His Life and Music, tells NPR in the piece below:

Coltrane more or less fin­ished his impro­vi­sa­tion, and he just starts play­ing the “Love Supreme” motif, but he changes the key anoth­er time, anoth­er time, anoth­er time. This is some­thing very unusu­al. It’s not the way he usu­al­ly impro­vis­es. It’s not real­ly impro­vised. It’s some­thing that he’s doing. And if you actu­al­ly fol­low it through, he ends up play­ing this lit­tle “Love Supreme” theme in all 12 pos­si­ble keys. To me, he’s giv­ing you a mes­sage here.

In sec­tion IV of the man­u­script, for the part lat­er named “Psalm,” Coltrane writes that the piece is a “musi­cal recita­tion of prayer by horn,” and is an “attempt to reach tran­scen­dent lev­el with orches­tra ris­ing har­monies to a lev­el of bliss­ful sta­bil­i­ty at the end.” Indeed, in the same NPR piece which you can lis­ten to below, Rev. Fran­zo Wayne King of the Saint John Coltrane African Ortho­dox Church in San Fran­cis­co describes how his con­gre­ga­tion one day dis­cov­ered that Coltrane’s play­ing cor­re­sponds direct­ly to his prayer at the bot­tom of the lin­er notes.

In addi­tion to Porter and King, NPR’s Eric West­er­velt inter­views pianist McCoy Tyn­er, the last sur­viv­ing mem­ber of Coltrane’s quar­tet. The 13-minute piece, “The Sto­ry of ‘A Love Supreme,’ ” is a fas­ci­nat­ing overview of one of the great mon­u­ments of jazz.

Note: This post first appeared on our web­site in 2013.

Relat­ed con­tent:

John Coltrane Draws a Pic­ture Illus­trat­ing the Math­e­mat­ics of Music

The Secret Link Between Jazz and Physics: How Ein­stein & Coltrane Shared Impro­vi­sa­tion and Intu­ition in Com­mon

John Coltrane’s Hand­writ­ten Out­line for His Mas­ter­piece A Love Supreme

John Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’ Ani­mat­ed