IN ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS, it was beginning to look a lot like Christmas on the evening of Dec. Amid Santa displays and nativity scenes, holiday lights festooned homes to create a festive atmosphere in the small Bergen County borough. After a day of work and school, residents settled in for a night of television.

Among their choices were the musical-variety series “Shindig!” featuring Chubby Checker and the British band Manfred Mann, and “The Danny Kaye Show,” with guest star Tony Bennett. Inside his recording studio on Sylvan Avenue, engineer Rudy Van Gelder was focusing on a different type of music — jazz — as saxophonist John Coltrane and his three-piece supporting band set up for a recording session with producer Bob Thiele. Before the night ended, Coltrane would create “A Love Supreme,” a milestone recording in the history of jazz whose themes of spiritual rebirth and uplift fit in with the hope and optimism of the holiday season. John Coltrane, photographed in the Van Gelder Studio with wife Alice, completed 'A Love Supreme' in about four hours. Chuck Stewart “A Love Supreme,” released in early 1965, is presented as a suite in four parts: “Acknowledgement,” “Resolution,” “Pursuance” and “Psalm.” Led by Coltrane’s tenor saxophone, the music is, by turns, soaring and solemn, soulful and searching. The album clocks in at just under 33 minutes.

This upward emotional spiral directly contrasts with the limiting, downward, and survival-based thoughts and behaviors associated with negativity. With Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become, Fredrickson brings her talent as a researcher and writer to bear on love, what she.

In his 2008 book, “1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die,” Tom Moon, a Haddonfield resident, saxophonist and recording artist, calls “A Love Supreme” “devotional music of the highest order. Which aims to brings listeners to a higher state.” “A Love Supreme” was a key part of Coltrane’s spiritual journey after overcoming problems with drug and alcohol abuse. “During the year 1957, I experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening, which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life,” the saxophonist, then 38, wrote in the album’s liner notes. “At the time, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music. This album is a humble offering to HIM.” Lewis Porter, author of “John Coltrane: His Life and Music” (2000), and a jazz pianist and professor of music at Rutgers University in Newark, says Coltrane closely oversaw all facets of “A Love Supreme.” “This album was a special one for him.

He got involved with writing the liner notes and the poem (‘A Love Supreme’) that goes with ‘Psalm.’ He picked the cover photograph and painting (a portrait of Coltrane, by Victor Kalin) that appears inside the album cover. It’s the only time he got involved to that extent.” The choice of Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs was no accident.

Coltrane, who began working with the engineer in the mid-1950s as a sideman with Miles Davis, enjoyed recording with Van Gelder. “Coltrane had very strong feelings for Van Gelder,” says Ashley Kahn, author of the 2002 book “A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album.” “He brought his abilities, talents and dedication to the music,” Kahn adds, of Van Gelder. In Englewood Cliffs, Van Gelder had constructed a studio in his home and began recording there in the summer of 1959. Earlier sessions were done at a studio set up at his parents’ home in Hackensack. Rudy Van Gelder, seen in a 2000 photo, oversaw John Coltrane's 1964 recording at his studio.

Star-Ledger file photo Van Gelder says the studio was an ideal setting for “A Love Supreme.” “While I was building the new studio (in Englewood Cliffs), the neighborhood had no idea what kind of structure it was,” Van Gelder recalls. “As it came together, everyone assumed it was going to be a church with a peak in the center of the room. The look and feel was very church-like,” he adds.

Brutha Lynch Hung Lynch By Inch Rarest. “As I look back and realize where his music was going, I can see his music had a spiritual quality, which matched perfectly with the atmosphere of the new studio,” says Van Gelder, 90, who still holds an occasional session at his studio but has cut back on working due to his health, advanced age and, he says, the changing nature of the music business. While Coltrane had enjoyed success with Atlantic Records, recording “Giant Steps” and “My Favorite Things” in New York, he welcomed the chance to return to Van Gelder’s studio after signing with Impulse! Records, according to Kahn, of Fort Lee.

“For many jazz musicians, such as Coltrane, it was a home away fromhome,” Porter says of the studio. “He felt comfortable in it.” Van Gelder Studio was noted for its acoustics, which included the nearly 40-foot-high ceilings.

The engineer also brought an attention to detail when recording, Kahn says. “It was his near geek-like dedication to his craft, always upgrading his equipment, trying out new ideas, approaches to get the best sound possible, and taking it to the very end as far as mastering his own session recordings,” Kahn says in describing Van Gelder’s strengths in the studio.

“My goal is to make the musicians sound the way they want to be heard,” Van Gelder told The New York Times in 2005. The album was a commercial and critical success.

The recording of “A Love Supreme” went smoothly for Coltrane, who elevated the performances of his supporting cast. “What the rest of us contributed (to ‘A Love Supreme’) was because of his leadership, example and stature as an artist. He created that impulse to excel,” drummer Elvin Jones wrote in the introduction to Kahn’s book. Coltrane added instruments to his sonic palette for the recording.

The album opens with the sound of a gong, instantly capturing the listener’s attention. “It was like a benediction, an announcement that something important was about to begin,” says Kahn. “Acknowledgement” also features Coltrane chanting the album’s title for just over half a minute, reinforcing the spiritual theme. It would be the only time he featured his voice in a studio recording.

Coltrane was a democratic bandleader, sharing the spotlight with his fellow musicians, who included Jones, bassist Jimmy Garrison and pianist McCoy Tyner. Garrison’s subtle, heartbeat bass at the end of “Acknowledgement” recalls a supplicant at prayer, while Tyner’s brisk piano work lets the music take flight on “Pursuance.” Jones uses tympani to create a dramatic mood on “Psalm,” which features Coltrane expressing the words of the poem “A Love Supreme” through his saxophone.

While artists can spend months or, in some cases years, laboring over an album, “A Love Supreme” was recorded in about four hours. “That’s a jazz thing,” says Porter.

Sendblaster Pro 3 1 6 Multilingual Keygen Generator. “It was typical to finish a recording in one day.” The album was a commercial and critical success for Coltrane. It has been certified gold (sales of 500,000 copies) in Japan and the United States. “A Love Supreme” was selected as Record of the Year in 1965 in the Readers Poll of DownBeat magazine. Coltrane also was named Tenor Saxophonist and Jazzman of the Year, and was inducted into the magazine’s Hall of Fame. In the passing decades, the impact of Coltrane and “A Love Supreme” has only deepened, says Moon, who does musical commentary for National Public Radio. “Anyone who studies improvised music finds their way to that record (‘A Love Supreme’).

No one who picks up a saxophone escapes Coltrane’s shadow,” Moon adds. LISTEN UP • John Coltrane had strong ties to the Garden State.

The North Carolina native worked at the Campbell Soup Company in Camden before joining the U.S. Navy in 1945. • Coltrane did more recording in New Jersey than in any other state, according to Lewis Porter, author of “John Coltrane: His Life and Music.” He recorded at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs and earlier in Van Gelder's first studio space in his parents' Hackensack home. • Coltrane was considering a move to Teaneck at the time of his death on July 17, 1967, Porter says, and the saxophonist also considered opening a club in the Garden State.

Van Gelder says Coltrane’s artistry is more evident today than during the recording in 1964. “At the session, I was so involved in other matters concerning the mix and the overall sound and the sheer mechanics of getting the music on tape, I really had no awareness of the music itself,” he admits. “That came years later, when I was remastering it. That’s when I realized how great it was, and I thought, ‘They can only do that once. They can never do it that way again.’ ” While Coltrane died of liver disease at age 40 in July 1967, “A Love Supreme” lives on. Kahn is no fan of listening to the album on an iPod because of the sound quality. “It’s like looking at the ‘Mona Lisa’ with sunglasses,” says Kahn, who estimates he listened to “A Love Supreme” hundreds of times while researching and writing his book.

Instead, he suggests “a good sound system or headphones — but the mastery will get through no matter the hardware.”.

When Sigmund Freud wrote The Interpretation of Dreams, he took a familiar phenomenon and looked at it through a more discerning lens. In doing so he changed forever the way we think about this natural and common wonder.

Now, Barbara Fredrickson may have done for love what Freud did for dreams. At the core of her is that by understanding what love is — and isn’t — we can endeavor to experience more of it in our lives. Fredrickson, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is one of the leading researchers in positive emotions. She is well qualified to discuss the relevant research on love. Her earlier work on positivity and her “broaden and build” theory of positive emotions has advanced our understanding of how the form and function of positive emotions increases our awareness.

In so doing, it also encourages novel thoughts and behaviors while building skills and developing resources. This upward emotional spiral directly contrasts with the limiting, downward, and survival-based thoughts and behaviors associated with negativity. With Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become, Fredrickson brings her talent as a researcher and writer to bear on love, what she refers to as our supreme emotion. Fredrickson notes that love is indeed an emotion. By definition, no emotion is designed to last, but love is renewable. She focuses on the body’s perspective of love, not simply the romantic view.

The mutual caring that underlies love is identified as “positivity resonance,” which involves micro-moments of shared positive emotion. It is the confluence of biochemistry and behavior, particularly initiated through the eyes, Fredrickson maintains, that gives us these micro-moments.

In this way, Fredrickson is proposing a general theory of love rather than how love might be specifically experienced within a domain. This is a bold and radical approach. Fredrickson believes that love, as defined by these moments of positivity resonance, is the same whether the moments occur between parent and child, friends, lovers, or total strangers. Without a doubt, Fredrickson believes these experiences are, in her words, “virtually identical.” The scaffolding of theory and research findings to reach this conclusion begins with the view that evolution has designed us to love as a means for survival. Fredrickson then builds on work and research from developmental psychology. She starts with attachment theory, infant bonding, and the understanding of synchronization and desynchronization, specifically that positive emotions breed synchrony and does not.

This idea of attunement and being in sync is central to the understanding of positivity resonance, and Fredrickson makes her case from three primary perspectives: oxytocin activation, vagal tone, and mirror neurons, or what has been called “brain coupling.” She cites research by Uri Hasson at Princeton and his colleagues, who examined people engaged in conversation while their brain activity was monitored by an fMRI. Synchronization, or brain coupling, happens during communication. The communication improves based on the degree to which the brain synchronizes. Apparently, when a conversation is being enjoyed, the brain does more than listen and respond. It seems to actually forecast and anticipate what the other person will say. The research shows that when brains are in sync, the neural coupling allows us to really understand someone else. This, along with other studies Fredrickson quotes, supports the notion that positivity resonance generates reciprocal empathy, which then becomes a mutually shared physical phenomenon in the brain.

In other words, two brains are having one experience. Fredrickson then draws on her own research with colleagues, showing that people with higher vagal tone experience more moments of positivity resonance. The vagus nerve connects our brain to our heart. It is integrated in everything from the physiognomy of our smile and eye contact with others to monitoring the middle ear muscles so we can focus on another person’s voice. Vagal tone is the term given to the association of heart rate to breathing rate.

The higher the vagal tone the better. People with high vagal tone typically have more and better positive connections and are more loving. This is possible because they can focus better, manage their feelings better, and have higher social intelligence.

Vagal tone once was thought to be as stable as one’s height and not directly alterable. Fredrickson’s own research on vagal tone and love was so important she was invited to present it to His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, in 2010 — it is perhaps the most dramatic feature of her work.

Her research showed there is an evidence-based reason for hope: She was able to prove that mind training can improve vagal tone. In her Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology (PEP) lab she randomly assigned subjects to engage in loving-kindness meditation (LKM), the ancient Buddhist practice of fostering positive feelings toward the self and others. There are many variations, but the practice involves an intention to become aware of others by hoping for them to experience the feelings of loving kindness, to feel safe and protected, to be healthy in mind and body, and to be at ease and happy. The participants practiced less than an hour a week. Their vagal tone compared to a control group soared after a few months of this daily practice.

Those who had the largest increases in vagal tone had the most frequent positivity resonance experiences with others. This is a game changer. Fredrickson has demonstrated that love isn’t something we just fall into: We can make it. Add to this the research on oxytocin, also known as “the great facilitator of life” because of its role in mother-infant bonding, social connection, and lovemaking. This neuropeptide is released during heightened engagement with another and is part of our response to “calm-and-connect” with others.

It makes us more trusting and open to others. Fredrickson discusses research that demonstrates that people under the influence of oxytocin attend more to people’s eyes and smiles and cues that are associated with positive social connections.

This means that positivity resonance lasts only as long as people are engaged. In other words, while reading this review you are not in love. Herein lies the most troublesome feature of Fredrickson’s thesis. She does not discuss by way of extension or refute other theories of love such as Robert Sternberg’s work on passion, intimacy, and commitment. Most notably missing is A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, & Richard Lannon. In the latter, they used a term — limbic resonance — to describe the activation of the brain during a love connection.

Positivity resonance has a broader meaning, but a nod to the earlier theorists would have been appropriate. The confusion comes when “love” is lumped together with a glance or a conversation with a person on line at Starbucks and staring into your lover’s eyes while you are naked. Here Fredrickson would have done better to label it Love 2 because in promoting a general rather than domain-specific theory, the intimacy dimension gets lost. A Gallup poll done last year identified that most people are looking for a special person to love, and that most people who have one say that person is the top source of happiness in their life.

Fredrickson’s response to this? In the book she says it is a “worldwide collapse of imagination.” It will be a hard sell to lump all love in the same basket for most people. Even after reading all the evidence, this reviewer is left with the sense that love is likely to be distinguished by levels of intimacy — at least a Love 1, the kind people are talking about looking for, and Love 2, of the Starbucks variety.

But reviewer bias aside, the truth is that Fredrickson’s work is more detailed and anchored than anything that has come before it, and what I’ve learned from all of it is that our body was designed for love. Just as flowers’ heliotropic nature bends them toward the sun, we need nourishment and are drawn to love. And like Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, my guess is that Fredrickson’s view of love will evolve as more research is done, and along the way it will stimulate great discussion and debate: exactly what good science — and a good scientist — is supposed to do. About Daniel Tomasulo, Ph.D. Dan Tomasulo Ph.D., TEP, MFA, MAPP teaches Positive Psychology in the graduate program of Counseling and Clinical Psychology at Columbia University, Teachers College and works with Martin Seligman, the Father of Positive Psychology in the Masters of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) program at the University of Pennsylvania.

He is Director of the New York Certification in Positive Psychology for the Open Center in New York City and on faculty at New Jersey City University. Sharecare has honored him as one of the top 10 online influencers on the topic of depression. For more information go to:.

He also writes for Psych Central's column and the.