Alice Coltrane (1937-2007): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, arranger, orchestrator, ensemble leader, producer, and teacher

SOUND PROJECTIONS

AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE

EDITOR:  KOFI NATAMBU

WINTER, 2018

VOLUME FIVE     NUMBER TWO

GERI ALLEN

 

Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:

TOMEKA REID

(January 27--February 2)

FARUQ Z. BEY

(February 3--9)

HANK JONES

(February 10--16)

STANLEY COWELL

(February 17–23)

GEORGE RUSSELL

(February 24—March 2)

ALICE COLTRANE

(March 3–9)

DON CHERRY

(March 10–16)

MAL WALDRON

(March 17–23)

JON HENDRICKS

(March 24–30)

MATTHEW SHIPP

(April 1–7)

PHAROAH SANDERS

(April 8–14)

WALT DICKERSON

(April 15–21)


https://www.allmusic.com/artist/alice-coltrane-mn0000006143/biography

Alice Coltrane

(1937-2007)

Artist Biography by Chris Kelsey

 

Alice Coltrane was an uncompromising pianist, composer, and bandleader who spent the majority of her life seeking spiritually in both music and her private life. Music ran in Coltrane's family; her older brother was bassist Ernie Farrow, who in the '50s and '60s played in the bands of Barry Harris, Stan Getz, Terry Gibbs, and Yusef Lateef.

Alice McLeod began studying classical music at the age of seven. She attended Detroit's Cass Technical High School with pianist Hugh Lawson and drummer Earl Williams. As a young woman she played in church and was a fine bebop pianist in the bands of such local musicians as Lateef and Kenny Burrell. McLeod traveled to Paris in 1959 to study with Bud Powell. She met John Coltrane while touring and recording with Gibbs around 1962-1963; she married the saxophonist in 1965, and joined his band -- replacing McCoy Tyner -- one year later. Alice stayed with John's band until his death in 1967; on his albums Live at the Village Vanguard Again! and Concert in Japan, her playing is characterized by rhythmically ambiguous arpeggios and a pulsing thickness of texture.

Subsequently, she formed her own bands with players such as Pharoah Sanders, Joe Henderson, Frank Lowe, Carlos Ward, Rashied Ali, Archie Shepp, and Jimmy Garrison. In addition to the piano, Alice also played harp and Wurlitzer organ. She led a series of groups and recorded fairly often for Impulse, including the celebrated albums Monastic Trio, Journey in Satchidananda, Universal Consciousness, and World Galaxy. She then moved to Warner Bros, where she released albums such as Transcendence, Eternity, and her double-live opus Transfiguration in 1978.

Long concerned with spiritual matters, Coltrane (whose spiritual name was "Turiyasangitananda") founded a center for Eastern spiritual study called the Vedanta Center in 1975. She began a long hiatus from public and recorded performance, though her 1981 appearance on Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz radio series was released by Jazz Alliance. In 1987, she led a quartet that included her sons Ravi and Oran in a John Coltrane tribute concert at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Coltrane returned to public performance in 1998 at a Town Hall Concert with Ravi and again at Joe's Pub in Manhattan in 2002. 

She began recording again in 2000 and eventually issued the stellar Translinear Light on the Verve label in 2004. Produced by Ravi, it featured Coltrane on piano, organ, and synthesizer, in a host of playing situations with luminary collaborators that included not only her sons, but also Charlie Haden, Jack DeJohnette, Jeff "Tain" Watts, and James Genus. After the release of Translinear Light, she began playing live more frequently, including a date in Paris shortly after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and a brief tour in fall 2006 with Ravi. Coltrane died on January 12, 2007, of respiratory failure at Los Angeles' West Hills Hospital and Medical Center.

During her long time away from the spotlight, Coltrane spent her time and effort on her Vedanta Center. By 1983, she had expanded it to become the 48-acre Sai Anantam Ashram in the Agoura Hills, outside of Los Angeles -- home to a spiritual community. Though she was not active in the jazz world, Coltrane quietly recorded music at the ashram and distributed it to her community's members on four privately pressed -- but professionally recorded -- cassette tapes from the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s: Turiya Sings, Divine Songs, Infinite Chants, and Glorious Chants. The cassettes represented the expressive side of Coltrane's practice, displaying an intensely original sound inspired by the gospel music from the Detroit churches she grew up in, Indian devotional music and chants, and of course, improvisation, played on harp, eastern percussion, synthesizers, organs, and strings (she wrote the arrangements) accompanied by the Sai Antaram Ashram Singers and membership. They also display Coltrane singing for the first time. Luaka Bop sought out the original masters, assisted by Coltrane's children. Enlisting original engineer Baker Bigsby, the label assembled a compilation from the four tapes. Entitled World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, it was released in May of 2017 to commemorate both her 80th birthday and in remembrance of the tenth anniversary of her death. The package included a lengthy liner essay by jazz historian Ashley Khan, Mark "Frosty" McNeil's Master's thesis, interviews with family, ashram members, and colleagues, and a remembrance by Surya Botofasina in conversation with Andy Beta. 

https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/alicecoltrane  

Alice Coltrane

• Biography
• Articles
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For more than five decades, the Coltrane name remains at the forefront of modern music. It is lauded throughout the United States as well as internationally where it has received great acclaim. The musical offerings cover an eclectic variety of artistic expressions recorded on ABC Impulse, Warner Bros., and Impulse- Universal.

She was born and raised in the religious family of Solon and Anne McLeod in Detroit, Michigan, once hailed as a major musical capitol. Alice became interested in music and began her study of the piano at the age of seven. She consistently and diligently practiced and studied classical music. Subsequently, she enrolled in a more advanced study of the music of Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Stravinsky and Tschaikowsky. She once said: “Classical music for me, was an extensive, technical study for many years. At that time, I discovered it to be a truly profound music with a highly intellectual ambiance. I will always appreciate it with a kind remembrance and great esteem. Subsequent to the completion of her studies, she said, “The classical artist must respectfully recreate the composer's meaning. Although, with jazz music, you are allowed to develop your own creativity, improvisation and expression. This greatly inspires me.”

She graduated from high school with a scholarship to the Detroit Institute of Technology; however, her musical achievements began to echo throughout the city, to the extent that she played in many music halls, choirs and churches, for various occasions as weddings, funerals, and religious programs. Her skills and abilities were highly enhanced when she began playing piano and organ for the gospel choir, and for the junior and senior choirs at her church. In later years, she would further her musical attributes by including organ, harp and synthesizer to her accomplishments.

After moving to New York in the early sixties, Alice met and married John Coltrane, the great creator of avant-garde music and genius and master of the tenor and soprano saxophones. His parents were very spiritual, and dedicated to service in the church in which his father faithfully served. John's mother, Mrs. Alice Coltrane, Sr, was a fine singer. He was blessed to have them as his parents.

The innovative, futuristic sounds of the Coltrane musical heritage have set a new pace for modern music that sounded the unstruck chord throughout the world. And it resounded in the hearts of many people creating a legacy that will not soon be forgotten. The vision they shared became a bright effulgence from the lighthouse of polyphonic, ethereal, universal sound, bringing clarity and understanding of the music and enhancing appreciation of it to the people. 

https://pitchfork.com/features/from-the-pitchfork-review/10009-transfiguration-and-transcendence-the-music-of-alice-coltrane/

Transfiguration and Transcendence: The Music of Alice Coltrane

On the 10th anniversary of the jazz icon’s passing, an exploration of her many lives—and how her art continues to live on

Illustrations by Laura Callaghan

• by Andy Beta
  Contributor

From the Pitchfork Review

• Jazz

January 12, 2017

A respected yet divisive figure who was scorned by the jazz mainstream for most of her life, Alice Coltrane was one of the most complicated and misunderstood of all 20th-century musicians. In this century‚ however‚ her music has grown in stature‚ and one can now hear echoes of her influence everywhere‚ from Björk’s juxtaposition of timbres and textures to Joanna Newsom’s harp playing to the twisted astral beats of her great-nephew Stephen Ellison, aka Flying Lotus. While her late husband John Coltrane’s discography remains titanic in modern jazz, Alice’s own albums are equally compelling and mysterious, suggesting a musical form that moves away from jazz and into a unique sonic realm that draws on classical Indian instrumentation, atonal modern orchestration, and homemade religious synth music. The adventurous nature and spiritual import of her work continues to resonate through New Age, jazz, and experimental electronic music of all stripes. 

Alice used a number of names throughout her career, and collectively they chart a path of self-realization. The names she adopted demarcate radical shifts in her life and her work, serving effectively as chapter headings in the story of how a bebop pianist from Detroit evolved into one of jazz’s singular visionaries, ultimately walking away from public performance to become a guru and beacon of enlightenment for others.

Alice McLeod

Alice McLeod was born on August 27, 1937, in Alabama, though her family soon relocated to the rough east side of Detroit. The two World Wars solidified Detroit’s position as a manufacturing powerhouse and by 1959 it was the industrial center of the country. It had also gained renown as a bebop hot spot and was home to future jazz players like Cecil McBee, Donald Byrd, Paul Chambers, Milt Jackson, Yusef Lateef, Bennie Maupin, and Elvin Jones.

The McLeods were a musical family—Alice’s mother, Anna, played in the church choir, her half brother Ernest Farrow was a prominent jazz bassist, and her sister Marilyn went on to be a songwriter at Motown—and Alice took up piano and organ at a young age. As a teen she accompanied Mt. Olive Baptist Church’s three choirs, and at 16 she was invited to perform with the Lemon Gospel Singers during services at the more ecstatic Church of God in Christ. In Franya J. Berkman’s biography Monument Eternal: The Music of Alice Coltrane, Alice remembers those formative services as “the gospel experience of her life,” an instance of devotional music that gave her teenage self “the experience of unmediated worship at the collective level.”

Encouraged by her half brother Farrow, Alice continued to pursue music. She formed her own lounge act, performing gospel and R&B—with touches of blues and bebop—around Detroit. The young McLeod soon became a fixture of the city’s jazz scene and found herself involved with Kenneth “Poncho” Hagood, a scat jazz singer who’d recorded with Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis. The young couple were wed and relocated to Paris in the late ’50s. 

Alice gigged regularly around Paris, befriending other musicians like fellow pianist Bud Powell. In 1960, she gave birth to a daughter, Michelle—the joyousness of which was tempered by Hagood’s burgeoning heroin habit. It wasn’t long before she returned to Detroit as a single mother, moved back in with her parents, and started picking up gigs to support her daughter. Once again immersed in the bustling Detroit scene, McLeod began to contemplate jazz beyond the dizzying array of chord changes, scales, and standards that were fundamental to the bop era. One album in particular spurred her creative contemplation: John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass.

While known to be a junkie early in his career, by 1957 tenor saxophonist John Coltrane had kicked his habit and begun his musical ascent in earnest. He was a sideman for Thelonious Monk and in 1959 appeared on Miles Davis’ modal masterwork, Kind of Blue. Coltrane was already an accomplished bandleader, releasing a slew of records from Blue Train (1957) to My Favorite Things (1961). Firmly established as one of the greatest tenor saxophone players of his generation, he signed an exclusive recording contract with Impulse Records—the brand-new jazz imprint of producer Creed Taylor.

Coltrane’s new deal allowed him the creative control and artistic freedom necessary to push jazz’s boundaries and imagine new musical vistas. Africa/Brass was his first album for Impulse and featured a 21-piece ensemble that included the preeminent reedman Eric Dolphy backed up by the rhythm section of pianist McCoy Tyner and drummer Elvin Jones. Cuts like “Africa”—an expansive suite augmented by birdcalls and jungle sounds—announce Coltrane as a tireless innovator, using Davis’ modal template as the launching pad for new explorations.

Alice went to see John and his new quartet when they played Detroit’s Minor Key club in January of 1962. She didn’t speak to him that night, but an opportunity to play piano in vibraphonist Terry Gibbs’ ensemble brought her to New York City in the summer of 1963, where Gibbs’ group opened for John’s quartet during an extended engagement at Birdland. When her group wasn’t on the bandstand, Alice tried to work up the nerve to talk to the saxophonist.

She describes her initial impressions in Berkman’s book: “I had an inner feeling about him. ... I was connecting with another message that I had perceived as coming through the music. At Birdland, that same feeling would come back, something that I comprehend was associated with my soul or spirit.” The two musicians barely spoke, though Alice described John’s silence as “loud.” A few days later, still having exchanged very few words, Alice heard him playing a melody behind her. She turned and complimented him on its beautiful theme. He said it was for her.

 
Alice Coltrane

John and Alice’s relationship began in July of 1963 and they were married in Juarez, Mexico, in 1965. They remained together until his death from liver cancer two years later. Alice gave birth to their three sons: John Jr., Ravi, and Oran. While the couple only began to record together in February 1966, their musical relationship spanned the duration of their romantic relationship, both predicated on mutual inspiration and spiritual elevation.

Alice had felt limited by the rigidity and orthodoxy of bebop throughout her career and, as her relationship with John bloomed, she found his influence on her musical explorations to be profound. The couple used musical innovation as a path toward personal enlightenment: “You heard all kinds of things that would have just been left alone, never a part of your discovery or appreciation,” she said. It’s difficult to gauge the degree to which her approach to the piano changed once she met John, as aside from a few Terry Gibbs albums released in 1963 and 1964, few if any recordings of Alice’s early performances exist.

John Coltrane’s discography from 1963 until 1967 demonstrates a restless urgency to expand every aspect of his horn and his music. Two Impulse albums from 1963 find him exploring ballads and collaborating with Duke Ellington and vocalist Johnny Hartman. While some critics see these albums as a response to being labeled “anti-jazz” by DownBeat in the early ’60s, in hindsight they seem to serve as a reset and resting place—a last look back toward jazz history before John and his group forged ahead into an exploration of innovative new sounds.

At the end of 1964, Coltrane entered engineer Rudy Van Gelder’s Englewood Cliffs studio in New Jersey with his classic quartet—pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and thunderstorm drummer Elvin Jones—to record a four-part suite documenting a spiritual conversion. “This album is a humble offering to Him,” Coltrane wrote in the liner notes to A Love Supreme. “An attempt to say ‘THANK YOU GOD’ through our work.” It’s the summation of the quartet’s lyrical, evocative, and dynamic power.

Within that same year the quartet would both expand, with the addition of second saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and second drummer Rashied Ali, and fray, with Tyner and Jones leaving. “All I could hear was a lot of noise,” Tyner said in one interview. “I didn’t have any feeling for the music.” Starting in 1965, Coltrane embraced fiery free jazz, a sound that sought freedom from meter, chord changes, harmonies, and whatever else had previously defined and codified jazz. The influence of younger horn players like Sanders, Archie Shepp, and Albert Ayler on John is well documented, but very little has been said of the musician who replaced Tyner on the piano bench: Alice Coltrane.

Biographies of John Coltrane often reduce his marriage to a relationship between mentor and disciple, with John as the musical guru and Alice as the initiate. “Many of John Coltrane’s fans viewed her as accomplice to the so-called anti-jazz experiments of his final years,” Berkman writes, a sentiment that stemmed from “the controversial role she assumed when she replaced McCoy Tyner as pianist in her husband’s final rhythm section.” (Years later, Alice Coltrane contributed harp to Tyner’s 1972 album Extensions.) Four years before Yoko Ono allegedly broke up the Beatles, thereby earning the scorn of all future generations of rock fans, Alice was accused of breaking up the greatest jazz group of the mid-’60s.

But Alice, if anything, was the catalyst for Coltrane’s greatest music, abetting and inspiring his spiritual quest to realize a universal sound. When the couple met in 1963, Coltrane was still working within the framework of modal jazz. Soon after Alice entered his life, he started to push beyond the conventions of modern jazz, freeing himself from meter and steady tempo, fixed chord changes and melody. A Love Supreme was composed and realized after their relationship began. Seen in that light, the questing Coltrane albums Ascension, Om, Meditations, and more all stem from this relationship. Without Alice’s own roots in the ecstatic spirit of the Church of God in Christ services and a shared interest in a less dogmatic and more universal understanding of God—to say nothing of their love and devotion to each other—would Coltrane’s own spiritual transformation have occurred?

The Coltranes’ spiritual study did not take place in a vacuum, but amid a broader religious upheaval and restructuring of the ’60s. New forms of Afrocentric spirituality ranged from a renewed interest in Egyptology and the rituals of Santeria to Ron Karenga’s creation of Kwanzaa and the rise of the Nation of Islam. But Alice herself acknowledged that the new couple’s pursuit intensified soon after they came together. “What we did was really begin to reach out and look toward higher experiences in spiritual life and higher knowledge,” she told Berkman. Despite Alice’s history in the church and her subsequent life as a swamini, she still receives little acknowledgment in biographies and jazz history as catalyst for her husband’s spiritual rebirth.

Alice herself didn’t do much to correct these accounts. As the decade rolled along and music—as well as societal roles—became increasingly radicalized and questioned, Coltrane embraced her role as wife and mother. In a 1988 radio interview, she said of her marriage, “I didn’t want to be equal to him. I didn’t have to be equal to him and do what he did. That, I never considered. I don’t think like that. And whatever in the women’s liberation—that’s what they want. I didn’t want to be equal to him. I wanted to be a wife. ... To me, as a result of that association, it fully manifested. There was no more question about direction.”

Once Alice joined her husband on the bandstand, they toured the world, the music going further and further out, with standards like “My Favorite Things” pushing toward the hour mark. Not that critics always noted her. In a February 23, 1967, DownBeat review of Live at the Village Vanguard Again!, Alice warrants but a single line in a 15-paragraph review: “Mrs. Coltrane’s piano support is always firm and appropriate, never overbusy or obtrusive.”

And then, in May of 1967, John Coltrane complained of abdominal pain that was soon revealed to be liver cancer. By summer, he could no longer eat, and he left his earthly body on July 17, 1967.

Alice Turiya Coltrane

In quick succession, Alice suffered the loss of both her husband and her half brother Ernest. Her account of her spiritual awakening between 1968 and 1970 in her self-published tract, Monument Eternal, is harrowing: her weight plunged from 118 to 95 pounds, and her family worried for her well-being. In her telling, her weight loss was not the result of grief and depression but due to extreme austerities undertaken for spiritual advancement. It leads to detached remembrances, like: “During an excruciating test to withstand heat, my right hand succumbed to a third-degree burn. After watching the flesh fall away and the nails turn black, it was all I could do to wrap the remaining flesh in a linen cloth.”

The rainbow-covered booklet makes no mention of her jazz music career, her husband, or her travels to India. Instead, she matter-of-factly details making a doctor recoil in horror at the sight of her blackened flesh, what occurs when one experiences supreme consciousness, the nuances of various astral planes, her ability to hear trees sing, and scaring the family dog with her astral projections. Amid this, her family feared for her sanity: “My relatives became extremely worried about my mental and physical health. Therefore they arranged for my return to their home for ‘care and rest.’” Later she adds: “Communicating with people was found to be like suffering judgment. In fact, it was almost impossible for me to dwell upon earthly matters, and equally impossible for me to bring the mind down to mundane thoughts and general conversations.”

Deep in this quest, Alice assumed control of her husband’s formidable estate and released his first posthumous album in September 1967, Expression. And while DownBeat gave it four stars, Don DeMichael wrote: “Mrs. Coltrane, while sounding somewhat like McCoy Tyner, does not have her predecessor’s physical or musical strength.” She released her first album as leader, A Monastic Trio, the following year. On it, she referred to her husband by her spiritual name for him, Ohnedaruth (“compassion”), and sought to follow his example to create a music that was free, open-ended, and spiritually questing. The album features late-period quartet bandmates Pharoah Sanders, Jimmy Garrison, and Rashied Ali, with Alice on piano as well as a new instrument for her, harp.

Alice’s self-taught playing style on harp—ordered for her by her husband, who didn’t live to see its arrival— was full of glissandi and accentuated arpeggios and took cues from another Detroiter, Dorothy Ashby, but Coltrane’s playing was decidedly more abstract. She compared the piano to a sunrise and the harp to a sunset, marveling at “the subtleness, the quietness, the peacefulness” of the latter instrument. It would figure prominently in her future albums. Such subtlety was lost on critics at the time, with DownBeat’s review of A Monastic Trio labeling Alice’s playing as “a wispy impressionist feeling without urgent substance.”

Fans and critics expecting the strength and urgency in her husband’s music were befuddled by Alice’s approach as a bandleader. DownBeat wrote of one album: “It seems incredible that a group so heavily stamped by the late John Coltrane would not be able to pull off an album, but that’s just what happens here.” As more posthumous John Coltrane albums came to market, some featuring Alice’s own harp and string arrangements on top of previously recorded sessions, critics were enraged by the perceived blasphemy.

“Black female musicians have been quintessential others, overlooked because of … gender, race and class,” Berkman writes. “Black female musicians rarely transcend difference and obtain the status of artist.” In the context of such overt racism and sexism, Alice’s early solo albums were at odds not only with jazz’s “New Thing”—chaotic free-blowing sessions that roared and shrieked for entire sides of vinyl—but also with late-’60s radicalism and black power. At a time when African American female artists from Abbey Lincoln to Nina Simone were growing more and more politically outspoken, when riots and protests were roiling the inner cities of America, Alice’s music was the diametric opposite of such trends: introspective and contemplative, gentle and impressionistic.

Cecil McBee, a jazz bassist who played with Alice at the turn of the decade, says of her position and approach: “Where we were trying to come from [as free jazz musicians], with the loudness and bombast of our music, she made these statements in a more delicate, graceful, articulate, and uniform way.” She was intentionally making something softer than protest music; she wasn’t demonstrating on the bandstand. In an era when national, racial, and gender identity were highly contentious, Alice Coltrane was aiming for transcendence.

The Coltranes’ universalist view, which dates back to A Love Supreme, came into focus for Alice Coltrane in 1969, when she was introduced to a figure who clarified her spiritual path and resolve, Swami Satchidananda. Invited to New York City by film director Conrad Rooks, Satchidananda came to visit in 1967 and began to lecture at the Unitarian Universalist Church in the Upper West Side, soon establishing the first Integral Yoga Institute on West End Avenue. Within a few years, Satchidananda made the spread in Life magazine’s “Year of the Guru” issue and then sold out Carnegie Hall. He later opened the ceremonies at Woodstock. Alice gravitated to his Eastern philosophy of self-knowledge and became close friends with the Swami.

Anticipating a trip to accompany the Swami through India, Alice Coltrane entered the studio in 1970 to record what is arguably the most sumptuous spiritual jazz album of the era, Journey in Satchidananda. The liner notes speak of that upcoming voyage, but the music itself reveals that a stunning internal shift has already occurred, fitting for the cryptic title, in that “Satchidananda” is not an external destination to be journeyed to, but rather a place to be discovered within. Augmented by oud, tamboura, Sanders’ soprano saxophone, and McBee’s bowed bass, Alice’s assured harp playing takes on a Technicolor vibrancy, entwining with Indian overtones to create a divine music that transcends not only the limitations of jazz but of both Eastern and Western music, and anticipates the rise of New Age music at its most resonant.

McBee described the sessions to Berkman as intimate: “It was very, very spiritual. The lights would be low and she had incense and there was not much conversation ... about what was to be. The spiritual, emotional, physical statement of the environment, it was just there. You felt it and you just played it.” The month after Satchidananda was released, Alice accompanied the Swami to India for a five-week trip, visiting New Delhi, Ceylon, Rishikesh, and Madras. She brought her harp with her, an exotic sight to most Indians, and also began to learn Hindu devotional hymns.

Alice returned from the pilgrimage and recorded her next album, Universal Consciousness, shortly thereafter. It deftly mixes orchestral strings, Indian timbres, harp, and the Wurlitzer organ, an instrument Alice said had been revealed to her in a vision. It was a music she described as a “Totality concept, which embraces cosmic thought as an emblem of Universal Sound.” And while a fellow devotee of Indian music, George Harrison, might have set Hindu chants to folk-rock arrangements, Alice saw in them something both avant-garde and transcendent. One won’t mistake her version of “Hare Krishna”—with a harp and orchestral arrangement that could levitate mountains—for what you hear chanted in Union Square. Even DownBeat couldn’t deny its majesty, calling Universal Consciousness a “paragon of the new music. … [Alice] emerged as the strongest of Coltrane’s disciples. Her leadership affects everyone, consequently producing a stunningly beautiful result.”

That adoration was short-lived in the press, with her last two albums for Impulse getting dismissive reviews. World Galaxy earned two and a half stars, lambasted as “super-saccharine, often corny and terribly repetitive,” while Lord of Lords was described as being “not much more than pretty music … made up of little more than strung-together arpeggios and glissandi … a massive swaying smear.”

For Alice’s great-nephew, Flying Lotus, the turbulent and beautiful Lord of Lords goes far deeper: “For me, that record is the story of John Coltrane’s ascension. It’s her understanding and coping with his death. In particular, ‘Going Home,’ that’s a family song. When someone passes, that’s the song we play at the funeral. When my auntie passed, we played that one. When my mom died, we played it for her.”

Swamini A.C. Turiyasangitananda

In 1976, Alice received a divine message to start an ashram and renounced the secular, beginning her new life clad in the orange robes of the Swamini. And while there were a few more studio albums for Warner Bros., for the most part, her music no longer consisted of original compositions but rather iterations of Indian hymns. Beginning on her first trip to India, Alice began to adapt bhajans—the Indian hymns associated with the Bhakti revival movement of India—to be sung at worship services at the ashram. Her last two Warners albums, Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana and Transcendence, both released in 1977, comprised such devotional music, and soon after, she no longer performed in public or recorded for a label. A few years later, a series of four albums was self-released on cassette: Turiya Sings (1982), Divine Songs (1987), Infinite Chants (1990), and Glorious Chants (1995). The music within reveals a private universe of cosmic contemplation, the Swamini accompanying herself on electric organ, sometimes with her students chanting along with her. It’s a disarming music, both solemn and celebratory, haunting yet joyous.

When she removed herself from the material world to devote herself to more spiritual matters later that same decade, writing four books about her divine revelations, she was called Swamini Turiyasangitananda by her devoted students, an eight-syllable name that translates from Hindi as “the Transcendental Lord’s highest song of bliss.” Coming into prominence in an era when almost every rock star and jazz musician dabbled in Eastern mysticism and wrapped themselves in spiritual clothing only to drop them later, Alice embodied that change wholly, turning away from public acclaim and becoming a Hindu swamini and teacher.

As a child, Flying Lotus visited Alice at the ashram every Sunday: “It’s a very beautiful place, very musical. After my aunt would speak, she would play music. She’d be on the organ and people would bring instruments and there would be singing and chanting. The sounds Auntie would get out of that organ were crazy. I still never heard anyone play like that. It was super funky. As a kid, I didn’t have an appreciation for it. Now I have a different perspective on it.” Ellison told me that as a young teenager, he traveled to India with his aunt and witnessed strangers on the street drop to their knees to kiss her feet, realizing her divine presence.

To get to the Sai Anantam Ashram, one must drive through the entire length of the San Fernando Valley, toward the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains, before turning down a road that winds through Agourra Hills, the land brown and red with tufts of white and green brush. Past a vineyard and an equestrian center, there is a dirt road to the ashram’s gate, which is open to the public for only four hours each Sunday. The grounds are almost silent.

On a bright Sunday afternoon, there are only eight people at the Vedantic Center’s service. Plastic patio chairs line the walls of the unadorned room and marigold throw pillows are scattered throughout atop plush royal-blue carpet. The devotees, clad all in white, sit still yet sing with great fervor. Music fills the room; led by an organist situated between garlanded portraits of Sai Baba and Swamini Turiyasangitananda, the gathered sing more than a dozen hymns, accompanied by organ and the hand drums, bells, and rattles that the devotees play themselves. The bhajans segue into one another, and, curiously, these Indian hymns have a Pentecostal gospel feel to them, the blues coursing through each mesmerizing movement to suggest a place where Southeast Asia and the Deep South of America meet.

After the two-hour service is concluded, the small congregation gathers for fellowship. Since the Swamini’s passing on January 12, 2007, only seven people live at the ashram. Over carrot-raisin bread and a paper cup of strawberry lemonade from Trader Joe’s, the remaining devotees of Turiyasangitananda discuss the upcoming anniversary of their Swamini’s passing. The word death is not used. One member says that they should no longer call it a “memorial,” as that word lingers on the past. Another offers up a suggestion: The anniversary should be called an ascension, as a way to keep the blessed Swamini Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda forever in the present.

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This story originally appeared in our print quarterly, The Pitchfork Review. Buy back issues of the magazine here.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/may/05/alice-coltrane-turiyasangitananda-higher-state-of-consciousness

Higher state of consciousness: how Alice Coltrane finally got her dues 

A reissue of her rarest work is helping to shine a light on one of jazz’s most overlooked figures, who is rightfully emerging from the shadow of her husband

by Geeta Dayal

16 Nov 2017

The Guardian  (UK)

Alice Coltrane … ‘She never compromised her music. Ever.’ Photograph: Courtesy of the Sai Anantam Ashram 

Alice Coltrane’s ashram can still be found at the end of a winding road, in the California town of Agoura Hills. The Sai Anantam Ashram – a spiritual retreat and monastery, of sorts – is spread over dozens of wooded acres that are dotted with small buildings. At its center is a surreal sight that seems to emerge fully formed from the verdant landscape, like a desert apparition: a striking white building where services are held.

The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitanada review – numinous energy 

 

Coltrane – who took on the name Swamini Turiyasangitananda after her spiritual transformation – died in 2007, and the property that the ashram is on may be sold soon. But in the white building, for right now at least, services still take place, and the ashram is still filled with her old friends and disciples. Inside the white building, adorned with flowing gold curtains and bright blue carpet, beatific images of her are laden in flower garlands, nestled near portraits of the Indian spiritual leader Satya Sai Baba. Members of the ashram, many of them African-American, and wearing saris and other traditional Indian clothes, still gather to sing bhajans – traditional Hindu devotional songs, in arrangements written by Coltrane.

A new reissue of her devotional recordings from the 80s and 90s, World Spiritual Classics: Volume I: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, is being released by Luaka Bop, the label established by David Byrne and best known for re-releasing William Onyeabor’s Nigerian electro-funk. It collects devotional music from the ashram albums that were issued on cassette tape via the Avatar Book Institute in the 80s and 90s – recordings that were previously known only to ashram denizens and serious Alice Coltrane aficionados.


In the music, you can hear traces of Coltrane’s Detroit roots – she grew up there, as Alice McLeod, playing in churches and shows steeped in gospel, blues, and jazz, before moving briefly to Paris and then New York. She fell in love with John Coltrane in 1963 and they married in Mexico in 1965; he died of liver cancer, at age 40, in 1967.

“She was very upset,” says the musician Vishnu Wood, who befriended her early on in Detroit. “I had been following this guru Satchidananda and I took her to meet him. They got along very well and he reached out to her, and next thing I knew we were doing an album, Journey in Satchidananda.” (Wood plays oud on the album, released in 1970.)

For those whose knowledge of Coltrane centers mainly on her classic albums for Impulse and Warner – albums such as Journey in Satchidananda with Pharoah Sanders and Universal Consciousness – the ashram tapes come as a bit of a surprise. They involve synthesizers and voice, elements lacking in her classic 1970s work, with their lush arrangements of harp, woodwinds and other acoustic instruments. She sings on many of the ashram recordings – her voice a sweetly husky, low alto – and she plays a big 1980s synthesizer, the Oberheim OB-8, in addition to organ and other instruments.

Several members of the ashram join in too, on voice and on additional instruments

Alice Coltrane at her ashram. Photograph: Sri Hari Moss/Luaka Bop

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The synthesizer on the ashram recordings was her daughter Michelle Coltrane’s idea. “Her daughter Michelle said ‘Let’s look at synthesizers, mom, you might like it, and she found the Oberheim OB-8, which was easy to use, and she applied that rather liberally to her music,” says Baker Bigsby, the audio engineer who worked with Alice Coltrane as well as Sun Ra and Ornette Coleman.Michelle Coltrane remembers that her mother generally shied away from technology; she even shunned using appliances like microwave ovens. “She was happy having a grand piano, a big Steinway grand, and she did love the organ – she had one at the ashram and one at her home,” says Coltrane. “I said, Mom, you gotta check out Roland and Korg and all these products that are coming out, that have arpeggiators and all these things that she might find attractive, and that are easy to transport as well … the next thing you know, we’re on that Oberheim.”“When looking through the spiritual eye, or the third eye encased within the human mind, one can see vividly beyond the ken of human eyesight, beyond the material atom, and into the future, thereby transcending the limitations of time and space,” she wrote in her book Monument Eternal, published in 1977 after she’d become a swamini herself. Through it all, she continued making music. In the 1980s and 1990s, she shied away from major labels, choosing instead to release material on private press cassettes

Now there’s a movement to reintroduce Coltrane. As well as the reissue of her ashram tapes, there’s also an upcoming film by director and sound artist Vincent Moon is in the works, and numerous tributes, including the closing concert of this year’s Red Bull’s New York festival, featuring her son Ravi Coltrane (her grand-nephew is Steven Ellison AKA Flying Lotus). Meanwhile, with these newly rediscovered tapes from the 1980s and 1990s, perceptions of Coltrane’s body of work are changing, too – demonstrating that she was a tremendous musician whose work did not end with her legendary 1970s run of records.

On a recent Sunday at the ashram, the musician Surya Botofasina played some of these bhajans on keyboards – rousing and jazzy renditions, imbued with gospel and blues – while everyone sang along. “I was one of a number of kids who grew up on the ashram, what we call our ashram family,” Botofasina says. “To this day it still remains home sweet home for the heart, because of the tremendous spiritual energy that swamini put into it on every level, including the bhajans we were fortunate enough to sing every Sunday.”

World Spiritual Classics: Volume I: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda is out now on Luaka Bop; The Ecstatic World of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda will take place in New York on 21 May

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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/24/alice-coltranes-devotional-music

Pop Music

April 24, 2017 Issue

Alice Coltrane’s Devotional Music

A new album collects her compositions, blending synthesizers, organ, and Sanskrit chanting, from the years she ran an ashram in Los Angeles

 

by Hua Hsu

The New Yorker

In the early eighties, Coltrane bought forty-eight acres and built an ashram.  Chuck Stewart Photography, LLC

Near the end of his life, John Coltrane decided to buy a harp. The visionary saxophonist and bandleader hoped that having one in his home studio would help him rethink his approach to harmony and texture. The harp he ordered took months to build and wasn’t delivered until after his death, of liver cancer, in July, 1967. It sat in the house in Dix Hills, Long Island, where he and his wife, Alice, were bringing up their young children. If the windows were open, Alice later recalled, a strong breeze would make the strings hum, as though some invisible force were strumming them.

Alice and John met in the early sixties in New York City, when she was gigging and he was already a star. She was born in Detroit in 1937, and, like many contemporaries, received her most formative musical education through the church. She studied the piano, mastering the classical repertoire as well as bebop, and she began touring and recording in her early twenties. She played with John’s ensembles, but by the time of his death she had largely stepped back from music.

Those who knew Alice and John described them as kind, gentle introverts who understood each other on an instinctive level. Though they had both grown up in strict Christian households, in the sixties they began immersing themselves in other faiths. They weren’t the only ones seeking new forms of transcendence in the pages of the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, and books about Zen Buddhism. In 1966, the cover of Time famously asked, “Is God Dead?” The seekers thought that maybe people had been taught to look in the wrong place. For black artists, especially, pursuing other systems of belief became a way of rethinking one’s relationship with America.

John’s death set Alice adrift. She wouldn’t eat or sleep; she suffered from hallucinations. Though many people around her worried about whether her emaciated frame was the result of devotional fasting or severe depression, she later described this period as transformational, thanks largely to an encounter with the Swami Satchidananda, an Indian religious leader who toured America in the late sixties and appeared at Woodstock, where he opened the festival. In Alice’s mind, Hindu traditions could accommodate the kind of universalist ethos that she and John had imagined at the end of his life. The Swami’s teachings appealed to Alice’s sense that the Holy Spirit was everywhere, that we were merely the flesh-and-blood manifestations of an infinite life force.

Alice taught herself how to play the harp, which can sound wondrous and mystical even in amateur hands. Her style was impressionistic, effervescent. Her notes sparkled and then dissolved in the air around her. What better way to express one’s relationship to the larger world? In 1968, Alice began releasing albums as a bandleader. During this time, especially in the experimental circles that had grown around her husband, opportunities for women to lead their own ensembles were rare. The music she made was initially criticized as derivative of John’s. In the case of his posthumous album “Infinity” (1972), purists attacked Alice’s decision to dub her own string arrangements over some of his previously unreleased works.

Alice’s music was solemn and heavy, filled with stormy passages that felt like nervous attempts at purification—a struggling kind of transcendence. Like much of the more forward-thinking jazz of this era, it was music that felt in a hurry to get somewhere. Every now and then, though, a glistening sweep of harp would cut through the dirge, sounding the possibility of glory in the wreckage. John’s death was a theme, but so was a desire to surrender her ego, and to offer herself to something greater. In the ten years that followed, she released about a dozen albums on Impulse! and Warner Bros., many of them masterpieces that imagine a meeting point between jazz and psychedelic rock, gospel traditions and Indian devotional music. And then, after the release of “Transfiguration,” in 1978, she seemed to disappear.

In the sleeve notes for “A Monastic Trio” (1968), Alice’s first album as a bandleader, the poet and critic Amiri Baraka called her “one earth bound projection of John’s spirit.” She had no problem with being defined in terms of her husband’s legacy, for some of the most radical music he made was an attempt to translate their private world for the masses. It was the “earth bound” part that she resisted.

On Alice’s album covers, she often wore a look of dreamy preoccupation, and their titles—“World Galaxy,” “Universal Consciousness”—easily aligned her with many of her outer-space-obsessed peers. For artists like Sun Ra or Herbie Hancock, outer-space futurism offered a potent metaphor—a way of illustrating a sense of alienation, and a dream of shuttling someplace where black people might be free. But Alice was looking elsewhere.

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Finding Meaning in Music

In 1972, Alice and her children moved to San Francisco, where she devoted herself to Vedic practice. She established the Vedantic Center in her home, and, a few years later, moved it, along with her family, to Woodland Hills, a neighborhood of Los Angeles. She took the name Turiyasangitananda—Sanskrit for “the bliss of God’s highest song”—and attracted a diverse congregation of worshippers. (Among her youngest acolytes was her great-nephew Steven Ellison, who now draws on her sense of scale and ambition in his brilliant work as the electronic producer Flying Lotus.) She came to believe that bliss was close at hand—it was inside you. The universe wasn’t a range of options and futures that were light-years away; it was an idea you couldn’t quite grasp, and in the struggle to try to imagine infinity’s sprawl all you could do was just try and align yourself with it. In the early eighties, after the death of her son John, Jr., she bought forty-eight acres in nearby Agoura Hills and built an ashram.

“World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda” will be released on Luaka Bop next month, a little more than ten years after her death. It is the first collection to highlight the music she made during this time. Her children had encouraged her to visit a local music shop to see all the fancy things that the new modular synthesizers could do. While initially reluctant, she became fascinated with the way that these keyboards allowed her to bend or stretch notes at will. She began making her own devotional music, overlaying surging, swelling ambient soundscapes with Sanskrit chants. Residents at the ashram recall Alice waking them up before dawn, so that they could listen to her newest compositions. Many of them, including her children, had never heard her sing.

“Ecstatic Music” draws from four cassettes that Alice released between 1982 and 1995 on a tiny local label devoted to Vedic teachings. The music is astounding. “Om Rama” feels as if you’ve walked into the middle of a daylong ritual—it’s all handclaps, tambourines, and blissful chants chasing after the occasional erratic whoosh of a synthesizer. It stays at a frenzied peak for a few minutes, until a wailing, ascending note sweeps everything away, slowing the song to a stately procession. Through the haze comes Alice’s creaky church organ, which sounds as if it had been transplanted from a gospel record.

On “Rama Rama,” a sitar’s thrum is matched with gentle waves of synthesizer, the kind of juxtaposition between old and new that gives much of this music an uncanny feel. For Alice, synthesizers and organs were simply a new way of humming along with the universe, as she had previously tried to do playing the harp. “Journey to Satchidananda” revisits the melody from one of her masterpieces, “Journey in Satchidananda,” released in 1970. Here the original’s insistent rhythm is unravelled, slowed down to a swirl of chants and tranquil synthesizer tones.

Record collecting offers a strange approach to historical thinking: yesterday’s undervalued commodities often become tomorrow’s fetish objects. No genre, style, or level of professionalism is beyond redemption. Still, the renewal of interest in New Age music is surprising. Some of the most exciting labels today, such as New York’s RVNG Intl. and Los Angeles’s Leaving Records, mix avant-garde dance music with reissues of old meditation or relaxation music. The pianist and zitherist Laraaji, who, following his “discovery” by the producer Brian Eno, released some twenty albums in the eighties, is arguably more popular than ever. (He is also still selling tickets to his famed “laughter meditation” sessions.)

Perhaps it’s because we live at a time when notions of wellness and personal care are mainstream that the idea of ambient music with a purpose holds a special appeal. And a lot of people listen to music as an alternative to organized worship; for years, in the Bay Area, there has been a church devoted to John Coltrane. For some, “Ecstatic Music” will be perfect for zoning out, couched as it is in a religiosity that is welcoming, nonjudgmental. But one of the reasons that albums like this have remained obscure is that they were recorded with a specific pursuit in mind: they were for the ashram, devotional songs for fellow-worshippers.

I first encountered this music on a blog specializing in obscure “celestial” music. (I love anything that dares to try to describe the wholeness of the universe, and I’m a sucker for harps.) When I listened to “Rama Katha,” which is included on the vinyl version of this album, I was startled by its quiet and its patience. It was so intimate and honest that I almost felt that I shouldn’t be listening. I couldn’t tell if its ambient drones were the result of the poor digitization of a hissing cassette or part of the music itself. Alice was backed only by her keyboard, which flickered and whirred from a comfortable distance. Her voice—never the instrument she was famous for—resounded with untroubled confidence. This wasn’t music that was pushing its makers and listeners to a higher plane. Alice was already there. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the April 24, 2017, issue, with the headline “Praise Songs.”

• Hua Hsu began contributing to The New Yorker in 2014, and became a staff writer in 2017.
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https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6858261

Jazz Musician Alice Coltrane Dies

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January 15, 2007

Heard on Morning Edition

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by Ashley Kahn

Alice Coltrane, widow of the legendary jazz musician John Coltrane and a giant of the jazz piano in her own right, has died. She was 69.

STEVE INSKEEP: 

Next, let's take a moment to remember Alice Coltrane, who died on Friday. She may be best known as a piano player who married jazz legend John Coltrane. But she was also a musical innovator, an influential spiritualist who developed her own sound on piano, on organ and on the harp.
(Soundbite of music) 

INSKEEP: We have a report now from music journalist Ashley Kahn. 

(Soundbite of music) 

ASHLEY KAHN: As Alice Coltrane saw it, there's really no difference between making music and worshipping the divine. It was part of the philosophy she had inherited from her husband, saxophonist John Coltrane. 

Ms. ALICE COLTRANE (Widow of John Coltrane): Once, John and I were coming form a concert that he had played, and it was late in the morning. We heard a couple leaving, and the lady said, oh, I have to hurry home. I'm going to church tomorrow. And her friends said, church? You've already been to church. 

(Soundbite of music) 

KAHN: She was born Alice Lucille Mcleod in 1937 to a musical family in Detroit. She studied classical piano, fell in love with bebop jazz and then fell in love with John Coltrane in 1962. When he died five years later, she became a widow with a career that was just beginning. 

(Soundbite of music) 

KAHN: Over the next 40 years, Alice Coltrane accomplished many things. She led a center for spiritual study. She raised four children, and she created an entirely original musical mix of modern jazz and the Indian Ragga's classical influences and funky blues. 

(Soundbite of music) 

KAHN: In 2004, at the urging of her son, saxophonist Robby Coltrane, she came out of retirement and recorded her final album, "Translinear Light." 

(Soundbite of music) 

KAHN: In the circle of jazz, a musician does not die or pass away. It's simply referred to as leaving. At the age of 69, Alice Coltrane has left us to begin a different stage of her journey. May she travel well. 

(Soundbite of music) 

INSKEEP: Ashley Kahn is author of "The House that Trane Built: The Story of Impulse Records." 

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Alice Coltrane: 'Translinear Light'

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September 23, 2004

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Ashley Kahn's 'Morning Edition' Report on Alice Coltrane

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Alice Coltrane

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Cover for Alice Coltrane's Translinear Light (Impulse Records, 2004) 

If jazz legend John Coltrane has disciples — musical or otherwise — chief among them would be his widow, Alice Coltrane.

Alice Coltrane, now 67, met her husband when they were both touring jazz musicians — she was a noted bebop jazz pianist and classically trained musician. She shared with her husband a passion for both music and the spiritual side of human experience. At one point, she joined her husband's famed quartet on piano, replacing jazz great McCoy Tyner.

When her famous husband died of liver cancer in 1967, Alice Coltrane became a fierce guardian of his vast musical estate. She was also left with the task of raising their four children. She continued with a string of well-received albums, but quit the jazz world in 1978.

Now, after a 26-year hiatus, Alice Coltrane is back with a new CD, Translinear Light. The title is a play on the Coltrane name, and also a nod to Alice Coltrane's deep spirituality.

"Look at what trance means," she tells The Tavis Smiley Show producer Roy Hurst. "It means to transcend... it means to become transcendental! So if we get a singular transcendental path of light, that could lead to such great dimensions of consciousness, of revelation, of spirituality, of spiritual power."

Alice Coltrane will join her son Ravi Coltrane and artists Savion Glover and Branford Marsalis in a concert to benefit the John Coltrane Foundation on Sept. 30 in Los Angeles.

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https://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/revisiting-alice-coltranes-lost-spiritual-classics-w479218

Revisiting Alice Coltrane's Lost Spiritual Classics

As a new collection of the late artist's private ashram recordings surfaces, those close to her shed light on an overlooked chapter in her career

 

Associates and relatives of the late Alice Coltrane reflect on the religious music she made in her later years, featured on a fascinating new release. Sri Hari Moss 

by Brad Farberman

May 2, 2017

Rolling Stone

"The world wasn't ready then and it's not ready now, unless you're talking about intergalactic top ten hits," Carlos Santana says of the music of Alice Coltrane, with whom he made an album, the beatific Illuminations, in 1974.

Related:

John Coltrane's 'Interstellar Space': Legacy of a Free-Jazz Masterpiece

 

Saxophonist's groundbreaking duo LP summed up his cosmic quest, influencing generations of jazz and rock seekers – from Nels Cline to Jack DeJohnette 

But David Byrne's Luaka Bop label would beg to differ. On Friday the imprint will shed light on a previously shadowy phase in the life of the late jazz pianist and harpist – who was married to saxophone great John Coltrane from 1965 until his death in '67 – with the release of World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda. The album features selections from a series of albums spanning from the early Eighties up until 1995, originally issued on cassettes passed out to members of Sai Anantam, the Southern California Vedic ashram Alice started in 1983. The religious music – consisting of chanting, percussion and Alice's soaring, soothing keyboards – arrives at a special time: a decade since her death and during a period in which people the world over seem desperately in need of spiritual uplift.

The compilation is also a welcome reminder of Alice Coltrane's place in jazz and music history. The Detroit-born musician, who rose to prominence as a member of John's last band and went on to release more than 10 albums of searching, often otherworldly sounds with jazz greats like bassist Ron Carter and saxophonist Pharoah Sanders backing her up, has been shouted out by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood and had songs dedicated to her by the Jam's Paul Weller ("Song for Alice") and her grandnephew Flying Lotus ("Auntie's Harp"). Solange once featured Alice's "Turiya & Ramakrishna" on her website Saint Heron, and then there's Yo La Tengo, whose Twitter bio reads "a monastic trio" – a nod to Alice's 1968 debut of the same name.

"It's had a pretty monstrous effect on me," YLT bassist James McNew tells Rolling Stone of Coltrane's music. "I started playing upright bass a couple of years ago and I'm really bad at it. I'm like a toddler with that thing. ... But one of the first things that I latched onto was a record that I had known for a really long time but I found it to be very reassuring to my severe limitations on the instrument ... the Journey in Satchidananda album, which is such a patient record. Everything just unfolds so gently and physically reflects meditation. And I feel like listening to that record over and over again has helped, just, my life in so many ways, and it'll help yours, too."

That 1971 LP, Coltrane's best-known album and a cult classic, is named after Swami Satchidananda, who helped Alice explore her spiritual side starting in 1969. From there, she traveled to India, cut ties with the world of record companies after 1978's Transfiguration and started Sai Anantam in the early Eighties. Though many thought Coltrane had played her final notes – she wouldn't release another album commercially until 2004's powerful Translinear Light, which wound up being the final LP she issued during her lifetime – nothing could have been further from the truth. Not only had she continued playing, she had taken a new weekly gig: every Sunday at the ashram, with vocal and percussive accompaniment from its members. World Spirituality Classics 1 consists of studio versions of what would go down at these weekly rituals, which expanded on the musical ideas Alice had studied and employed prior to her life as "Swamini."

"The songs were a combination of traditional Hindi themes and melodies that my mother would orchestrate with her own jazz- and blues-influenced style," says Alice and John's son, saxophonist Ravi Coltrane. "She would accompany these songs and create new arrangements for them. And some of the tunes were her own compositions, using some of the standard chants and praising of this particular deity or this particular god. She would, again, create her own compositions with those words."

Michelle Coltrane, Alice's daughter from a previous marriage, remembers the ceremonies vividly. "It would begin with music," says Michelle, a singer. "Mother would just sit down at the organ and maybe she would just, for lack of a better term, freestyle. I would always say it sounded serious. Even though it was uplifting, it was very serious kind of tones. It was an organ where she used her feet – it had that bass on the bottom. It was so beautiful. And everyone would know when it was time to start a tune, because you play the melody. ... [Sings a melody] So we knew that was the song coming up. And someone would say 'page 32' for the visitors that were there. So that would be in Sanskrit on one side and English on the other. So we knew that that song was coming. ... Everyone would join in."

Importantly, these cassettes were also the first recordings to feature Coltrane's vocals, which were surprisingly bass-y. "It's deep," reflects Michelle. "She was 117 pounds. It was a lot of presence coming out of there."

Surya Botofasina, a pianist raised at Sai Anantam, is also doing his part to continue Coltrane's legacy – on May 21st in New York, at a tribute concert presented by Red Bull Music Academy, he will head up a performance that recreates the sounds and feel of Alice's weekly offering. (Ravi will also front a group on this night.) More than for her music even, Botofasina remembers Alice for her decency and modesty.

"She was the hardest person I have ever met to give a compliment to," says Botofasina. "She could play something so amazing. 'That was so beautiful what was played. That was so incredible what you did.' And you could say that to her and her response would be so quick to just basically say, 'Oh, no, that was the lord. That wasn't me.' That I find very rare and inspiring."

Santana understands Alice in a similar way. He sees her as having been on a mission to help people. Making music was merely her way of doing that.

"It was never for entertainment or show business," the guitarist says of the music Alice, as well as her husband, made. "The goal for Alice Coltrane and John Coltrane – the aim, the trajectory, the goal and the purpose – was always to uplift, transform and illumine human consciousness." 

http://thequietus.com/articles/22328-alice-coltrane-review-john-coltrane

The Strange World Of... Alice Coltrane
by Stewart Smith 

May 3rd, 2017

The Quietus

Stewart Smith takes a look at the astounding back catalogue of Alice Coltrane and finds ten points of entry for the curious

Alice Coltrane is one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, with a sublime musical vision that encompasses jazz, blues, gospel, Indian classical, North African music, and European modernism. Although her achievement is now being recognised, for many years Coltrane was misunderstood and dismissed by many of jazz’s gatekeepers. Some viewed her in the way many view Yoko Ono: responsible for the break-up of her husband John Coltrane’s classic quintet; a sexist and demonstrably untrue claim. 

Others simply didn’t get what her music was about, dismissing it as so much hippy twaddle. As the normally on-point Richard Cook writes in his Jazz Encyclopedia, "Her albums of her own music often come across as soft-headed and incoherent rambling… one wonders if she would have enjoyed any attention at all if she had remained plain Alice McLeod." 

Such wrong-headed attitudes are thankfully on the wane. Coltrane was hugely respected by the heavyweight musicians she worked with, who were clearly less hung up on genre boundaries than many critics. Her music has always attracted open-minded music fans - Journey In Satchidananda is one of the cult albums – but in recent years it has enjoyed a new lease of life, with Radiohead, Four Tet and Sunn 0))) among the acts paying homage.
The Los Angeles beats & jazz community centred around her nephew Stephen Ellison, aka Flying Lotus, has played a key role in raising her profile, and there’s undoubtedly a heady whiff of Alice in Kamasi Washington’s symphonic jazz arrangements. She’s also a major influence on contemporary jazz innovators like Joshua Abrams and Amirtha Kidambi, who clearly respond to her unorthodox approach. 

Born in Detroit in 1937, the young Alice McLeod was a musical prodigy, learning piano from an early age, and playing organ in Mount Olive Baptist Church by the age of nine. Gospel remained a great love and its influence can be heard throughout her work. In her teens, she discovered bebop through her older half-brother, the bassist Ernie Farrow, and was entranced. Before she was twenty, she had gigged with saxophonists Cannonball Adderley and Sonny Stitt. She later moved to Paris where she studied piano with the great Bud Powell. She returned to the US after her first marriage ended, where she played with vibist Terry Gibbs (she appears on his 1963 album Plays Jewish Melodies In Jazztime) who introduced her to John Coltrane in 1963. 

He was her soulmate and collaborator, and together they had four children before John’s untimely death from liver cancer in 1967. Her music and spirituality helped her overcome the trauma of losing her husband at 30, and in 1968 she released the first of her twenty solo albums, the beautiful A Monastic Trio. 

In the 1970s, she became a disciple of Swami Satchidananda (the guru who opened Woodstock) and took on the name Turiyasangitananda. She soon became a spiritual leader herself, opening the Vedantic Centre in 1975, and the Sai Anantam Ashram eight years later. As a result, she drifted away from the music business, although she continued to record devotional music for her community. Those recordings enjoy their first commercial release with the new compilation on Luaka Bop, The Ecstatic Music Of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda; a real cause for celebration. Before her death in 2007, she returned to the studio for one final album proper, the wonderful Translinear Light. Read on, as we unpack her legacy. 

 
Something About John Coltrane 


Alice Coltrane joined her husband’s band in 1966, recording a number of studio sessions including the final album released during his lifetime, Expression, and the posthumously released Stellar Regions. She also appeared on several live recordings, including Offering: Live At Temple University, a phenomenal set recorded in Philadelphia in 1966, but only released in 2015. Alice’s piano playing on these albums is less flashily virtuosic than McCoy Tyner’s, but it’s highly distinctive nonetheless, with the extended harmonies, rippling modal lines and driving bass she would develop further on her own albums. She hooks up beautifully with bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Rashied Ali, riding the latter’s multi-directional flow, while providing rhythmic and harmonic anchors when necessary. She more than proves herself of being willing and able to follow her husband on his ecstatic journeys to the outer reaches.

Following John’s death in 1967, Alice founded the independent Coltrane Records to release the jointly credited Cosmic Music, featuring two 1966 tracks by the John Coltrane Quintet, and two new pieces she had recorded with her first quartet (with Pharoah Sanders, Jimmy Garrison and Ben Riley) at her Long Island home studio in 1968. Highlights include John’s ‘Reverend King’, where a light, folkish melody erupts into a wild collective improvisation, and Alice’s ‘The Sun’, a modal piano piece that opens with a spoken word invocation recorded by her husband and Sanders in 1966. By pairing her own music with her husband’s, Alice announced her intention to continue on the visionary path they had mapped out together. That approach met with some controversy, not least in 1972, when Alice added string, organ and bass overdubs to two 1966 tracks to create half of the John Coltrane album Infinity. Jazz purists cried blasphemy, but as Alice repeatedly pointed out, the project was a realisation of her and John’s original vision. As she told The Wire magazine in 2002, "We had a conversation about every detail; [John] was showing me how the piece could include other sounds, blends, tonalities and resonances such as strings. He talked about cosmic sounds, higher dimensions, astral levels and other worlds, and realms of music and sound that I could feel." The results are fascinating and rather gorgeous, offering a glimpse where John might have gone next had he lived.


The Harp


Towards the end of his life, John Coltrane decided to buy a harp, hoping that the instrument would help him rethink his approach to harmony and texture. The harp took months to build and wasn’t delivered to the family home until after his death. Alice would later recall how, if the windows were open, a strong breeze would make the harp’s strings hum, as if it was being played by some invisible force. She soon mastered the instrument, developing the dreamy rippling style that can be heard on ensemble recordings and beautiful solo pieces like ‘Wisdom Eye’ from 1976’s Eternity. This sublime live clip captures her solo harp playing in all its glory; if your eyes are still dry by the end of it, there is no hope for you. 


New Beginnings


Alice Coltrane’s solo debut Monastic Trio (1968) is one of her finest, confidently establishing her compositional voice with a series of tunes that combine Easter modes with blues and gospel tonalities. As the sole lead instrumentalist, Coltrane plays the shit out of the piano, particularly on ‘Ohnedaruth’ and ‘Gospel Trane’, where she brings her rippling, harp-like phrasing to complex modal structures. The gracefulness of her right-hand playing is underpinned by a gutsy sense of swing that reflects her gospel and bebop roots. The harp makes its first outing on Side B, as Coltrane conjures shimmering clouds of tone over Garrison’s exploratory bass (I’ll even wager that ‘Lovely Sky Boat’ is an influence on Parliament’s simultaneously sublime and ridiculous ‘Silent Boatman’, with its ‘Skye Boat Song’ references and luscious harp). 

The following year’s Huntington Ashram Monastery is an equally fine trio outing, with Rashied Ali on drums and erstwhile Miles Davis bassist Ron Carter stepping in for Garrison. 1970’s Ptah, The El Daoud offers an expanded sound, replacing Ali with Riley, and bringing in Sanders and Joe Henderson on saxophones and flute. It’s a stone-cold classic. Carter and Riley are a more in-the-pocket rhythm section than Garrison and Ali, providing a solid, funky backbone for the title track’s expansive Egyptian strut. Henderson’s warm, hip style contrasts nicely with Sander’s weirder expressions, while Coltrane dazzles with undulating piano leads and strident gospel riffs. ‘Turiya And Ramakrishna’ is a deeply soulful piano ballad, its blues inflected with Eastern modes, while ‘Blue Nile’ is a blissed-out spiritual jazz gem, with Coltrane on harp and the saxophonists doubling up on flutes.

 
The highest song of bliss: Journey In Satchidananda (1971)


Coltrane met her guru Swami Satchidananda in 1970, travelling to India with him, and taking on the name Turiyasangitananda. Sangit means music in Sanskrit, and Coltrane translated her adopted name as ‘the transcendental lord’s highest song of bliss’. Hinduism, she felt, could best accommodate the Universalist vision she and John had explored together, and that syncretic approach is reflected in the world music fusion of Journey In Satchidananda. The title track is Coltrane’s best known tune, and deservedly so, with harp and tamboura wrapping themselves around Cecil McBee’s mantra-like bassline. ‘Isis And Osiris’ reflects Coltrane’s interest in Egyptian cosmology, with Vishnu Wood’s oud cutting through the mystical drift. This is the album which begins Coltrane’s voyage beyond jazz, and it’s as innovative as it is accessible. 


Infinite music: Universal Consciousness (1971), World Galaxy (1972), Lord Of Lords (1972).


Coltrane’s final three albums for Impulse are her most radical, weaving together European modernism, Indian classical, psychedelic rock, gospel and modal jazz to create a truly cosmic music. These albums largely eschew horns for strings and Wurlitzer organ, reflecting her fondness for flowing sounds. As she said in 1971, ‘the instruments which require breathing are more in line with what’s happening on an earthly level, but the instruments that can produce a sound that’s continuous, to me, express the eternal, the infinite.’ 

Universal Consciousness is arguably her masterpiece, an utterly mind-blowing album that is still hard to fathom 46 years on. The astounding title track hits with the force of a meteor, as slashing atonal strings – co-arranged with Ornette Coleman – lay waster to your speaker cones over Jack De Johnette and Rashied Ali’s twin drum barrage. The organ-led ‘Battle At Armageddon’ is one of the heaviest pieces Coltrane recorded, as she teams up with Kali, El Daoud and Jesus Christ to vanquish demonic forces. Her Wurlitzer playing is wild, as she uses the tone wheel to emulate the swoops and bends of her husband’s soprano saxophone, and embarks on freewheeling modal runs that touch on Indian classical music, gospel, and Terry Riley’s wilder flights. The breadth of her spiritual interests is reflected in titles like ‘Oh Allah’ and ‘Hare Krishna’ and ‘The Ankh Of Amen-Ra’. Truly visionary music.

Coltrane handles all the string arrangements on World Galaxy laying dense, billowing clouds of strings over stormy bass and percussion while she lets rip on organ, piano and harp. Her take on ‘My Favourite Things’ is nuts, with the strings modulating from breezy major to dramatic minor, while Coltrane opens vast black holes of organ. The fulcrum of the album is the ‘Galaxy…’ trilogy, where Coltrane elevates her music to the astral plane. ‘Galaxy Around Olodumare’ is free jazz via Stravinsky and Stockhausen, with Frank Lowe’s raw saxophone burning a hole through gaseous string abstractions, before some sudden tape edits turn the universe inside out. ‘Galaxy In Turiya’ is more consonant, with Coltrane’s harp drifting over luscious strings, while the symphonic re-imagining of ‘Galaxy In Satchidananda’ sounds like the birth of a new planet.

Lord Of Lords has Coltrane’s trio going head to head with a full orchestra, with some intriguing versions of Stravinsky and Dvorak themes. The albums Coltrane subsequently recorded for Warners, most notably Eternity (1976) and the awesome live set Transfiguration (1978), push her sound in a more accessible, but no less rewarding, direction, with inventive big band arrangements and flourishes of Latin percussion alongside the strings, piano, harp and organ. 


Guest Spots And Collaborations


In addition to her own projects, Coltrane guested on a number of albums by jazz heavyweights, including McCoy Tyner’s splendid Extensions (recorded 1970, released 1974) and Charlie Haden’s very fine 1976 duets album Closeness. She also worked outside of jazz, contributing harp to Laura Nyro’s 1970 album Christmas And The Beads Of Sweat. Check out the incredible ‘Map To The Treasure’, where Coltrane’s harp ripples gorgeously behind Nyro’s vocal and piano.

Her most sustained collaborative projects, however, are the 1974 albums she made with saxophonist Joe Henderson and Carlos Santana, respectively. Henderson’s The Elements is a concept album exploring the classical model of the cosmos. ‘Earth’ is the highlight, with Coltrane laying a tamboura drone over a deliciously slow and deliberate groove, as Henderson plays superbly off Michael White’s hip violin jabs. It’s not unlike a benign cousin to the vicious tabla-funk of Miles Davis’s ‘Black Satin’. A spacey interlude sees the drums drop out, as Kenneth Nash narrates cosmic wisdom over flute, tabla and harp, and then we’re back into the main theme, with White and Henderson raising the pressure over that indelible groove. 

llluminations is less well regarded ("Carlos attempts once again to reproduce his own alpha waves on guitar and Mrs Coltrane contributes background music barely worthy of ‘Kung Fu’", sniffs the self-styled Dean of Rock Critics Robert Christgau) but it’s worth a listen if you can get with the idea of Santana noodling over lush strings. It’s not all chilled-out music to meditate to: ‘Angel Of Sunlight’ burns, as the group attempt a jazz-rock take on John Coltrane’s late music. Much of the track is taken up with Santana shredding over Jack De Johnette’s hard-driving drum barrage, but Alice shows the boys how it’s done with an irradiating Wurlitzer solo. 


Devotional music


In 1975 Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda became founder and director of the Vedantic Centre. Her final studio albums for Warners, Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana and Transcendence (both 1977) reflect this new stage in her life by exploring traditional Hindu songs, while maintaining a connection to jazz through their complex harmonies and extended instrumental breaks. The growth of her spiritual community led to the establishment of the Sai Anantam Ashram in Cornell, California, in 1983, where she quietly began recording devotional music. She shared these with her followers via a series of private press cassettes, which are now collectors’ items. Selections from Turiya Sings (1982), Divine Songs (1987), Infinite Chants (1990), and Glorious Chants (1995) appear on the new compilation World Spiritual Classics Vol. 1: The Ecastatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda. 

The music is absolutely stunning, with its heady mix of Hindu devotional music from the Indian and Nepalese traditions, gospel, spiritual jazz and New Age music. Don’t let the New Age tag put you off. There’s nothing hippy dippy about this music: it is heavy. The arrangements are primarily for organ and synthesiser, with Coltrane joined on vocals by her students. The lightness of the melodies, combined with the density of the drone, is totally mind-bending, with organ and synth laying out huge blocks of chordal bass under the heavenly voices. Coltrane rarely solos, but occasionally adds subtle right hand variations and weird modulations. Best of all are the vast, sweeping synth glissandi she uses to ramp up the intensity of the music, an effect that recalls her orchestral arrangements of the 1970s, while elevating the listener to even higher planes of cosmic bliss. I could listen to those whooshing synths sounds on a loop, although I might never come down.

Coltrane’s alto vocals are gorgeous and deeply felt, not least on the impossibly beautiful ‘Er Ra’, where she sings at the top of her range over harp and strings. She’s joined on the joyous call-and-response kirtans by choirs and other soloists, giving these traditional Hindu hymns a gospel fervour that is matched by the grooving organ and handclaps. In addition to the traditional material, there’s a version of ‘Journey In Satchidananda’ that leaves me breathless, as a choir sings the theme over monumental suspended synth chords that seem to be played by Shiva herself. In the second half, male vocalist Sairam Iyer enters with an impassioned raga and I’m completely sent. Luaka Bop and the Coltrane family can’t be praised enough for making this incredible music more widely available.

 
The 21st century Alice Coltrane: Translinear Light (2004)


Alice Coltrane came out of semi-retirement in the early 2000s to work with her son, the saxophonist and producer Ravi Coltrane, on what would be her final album. As Ravi told the journalist Ashley Kahn, the aim was to make a modern day Alice Coltrane album, ‘forward thinking’ with ‘a little bit of historical influence there’. Featuring a sympathetic cast of collaborators including her old friends Haden and De Johnette, as well as Ravi and his brother Oran on reeds, Translinear Light celebrates her musical and spiritual interests: she revisits her classics ‘Blue Nile’ and ‘Sita Ram’, engages in some stunning modal interplay with Ravi on the gorgeous title track, and channels her gospel roots on a shimmering version of the traditional ‘Walk With Me’. That gospel influence is deeply felt on the Hindu devotional song ‘Satya Sai Isha’, where the Sai Anantam Ashram Singers summon the spirit over grooving organ, shakers and hand-claps. Halfway through, Coltrane doubles the tempo, and the whole thing takes off in a soaring expression of joy. She brings her synths down from the Ashram for blissed out ‘Jagadishwar’ and ‘Hymn’, while her Wurlitzer organ the drives the gospel tune ‘This Train’ down the cosmic railway. Her husband’s music is represented by ‘Cresent’, ‘Leo’, and the bonus track ‘Impressions’ (Interstellar Light), a fiery organ wig-out with De Johnette channelling the Rashied Ali of Interstellar Space. A beautiful and generous album.


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/02/arts/music/alice-coltrane-ashtram-world-spirituality-classics.html

Music

Alice Coltrane’s Ashram Recordings Finally Have a Wide Release

by MIKE RUBIN 

MAY 2, 2017

New York Times

Alice Coltrane around 1970. Credit Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images 

Surya Botofasina, 39, a keyboardist who lives in Brooklyn, has fond memories of growing up at the Shanti Anantam Ashram in Agoura, Calif., which was established in 1983 by Alice Coltrane, the jazz pianist, harpist and widow of the saxophone immortal John Coltrane.

Mr. Botofasina’s favorite times were Sundays at 1 p.m., when 40 to 50 participants would crowd into the ashram’s temple and sit on pillows on the floor, with men on the left side of the room, women on the right and elders on chairs against the wall. Students wore white, while on the stage Ms. Coltrane — known to her students as Swamini Turiyasangitananda — wore orange robes so “incredibly bright,” Mr. Botofasina said, “that I felt like I had to hide from it, bright like the sun.”

After a spiritual discourse, Ms. Coltrane would begin to play a massive Hammond organ, cuing the singing of transcendental hymns called bhajans.

This week, 10 years after Ms. Coltrane’s death in 2007 at age 69, Luaka Bop will release the sounds of the ashram on “World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda,” a compilation culled from four cassettes she recorded between 1982 and 1995. Only available at the ashram, and now out of print, the cassettes have long been sought by collectors, selling for as much as $450 apiece on the internet. The collection illuminates a missing phase in Ms. Coltrane’s remarkable musical journey from bebop to free jazz to New Age.

“On most of the records we work on, the music isn’t as revered as this is already,” said Yale Evelev, Luaka Bop’s president. “This has a certain amount of other weight that comes with it. It’s sacred music.”

The newly remastered recordings feature Ms. Coltrane singing for the first time on record, leading a large choir through Eastern-influenced devotional music, with lyrics chanted in Sanskrit but shaped by the African-American church tradition. “That touch of gospel feeling in there never existed with the Hare Krishnas, I can promise you that,” said Baker Bigsby, a Los Angeles audio engineer who worked with Ms. Coltrane for over 30 years. “It’s a little bit of Detroit inserted into this Indian music.”

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The bhajans would begin with a call-and-response chant of the names of Hindu gods, and then singers like Panduranga John Henderson, who toured with Ray Charles, would solo as the songs built in an improvisational way. “You never knew how long the song was going to be,” said Michelle Coltrane, Ms. Coltrane’s daughter. “There was hand percussion, Indian drums, high voices and low voices and children’s voices, and once you got to the right number it all blended in and sounded very beautiful.”

Alice Coltrane’s great-nephew, Steven Ellison, who records as Flying Lotus, also visited Auntie, as he called her, on Sundays at the ashram. “That was my church experience,” he said in a 2010 interview for The New York Times. “She was really inspiring. I’ve never met anyone like her, ever.”

As Ms. Coltrane wrote in an insert for “Divine Songs,” a cassette released in 1990, “chanting is a devotional engagement, one that allows the chanter to soar to higher realms of spiritual consciousness.”

Luaka Bop will release “World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music Of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda” this week. Credit Luaka Bop

Ms. Coltrane had long been an ecumenical spiritual seeker. She began playing the organ in Mount Olive Baptist Church in Detroit at 9, and made her first album appearance in 1963 on “Terry Gibbs Plays Jewish Melodies in Jazztime.” She soon met and began playing with John Coltrane, who died in 1967, leaving her a widow with four young children. In “Monument Eternal,” her 1977 memoir of her spiritual awakening, Ms. Coltrane describes the period after her husband’s death as one of “tapas,” or austerity, “the taking upon one’s self of a voluntary suffering for some spiritual good.” She experienced sleeplessness, extreme weight loss, visions and, she wrote, “meetings and confrontations with both disembodied souls and phantasmagoric entities.”

After two years of tapas, she found peace in the counsel of Swami Satchidananda, the Indian guru who had given the opening remarks at Woodstock. Ms. Coltrane made several pilgrimages to India, where she received a revelation to leave her secular life behind. She founded the Vedantic Center in 1976 in San Francisco, which eventually relocated to the Agoura ashram in 1983. She changed her name to Turiyasangitananda (“the transcendent bliss of God’s highest song”), having her children practice spelling it out with fridge magnets.

Ms. Coltrane released seven albums on the Impulse! label in the late 1960s and early ’70s and five more for Warner Bros., pushing beyond jazz into what might be termed “cosmic music,” the title of the 1968 album credited to her and Coltrane. After 1978, she devoted herself to the study of Vedic scriptures, and to the bhajans on the Luaka Bop collection. “This is music that she was playing every Sunday, so this was her life now,” Michelle Coltrane said. “She wasn’t really going back.” (In 2004, however, Ms. Coltrane was coaxed by her son Ravi to record one final jazz album, “Translinear Light,” and perform a few shows.)

As part of the New York edition of the Red Bull Music Academy Festival, Luaka Bop is presenting two concerts on May 21 in Queens that will try to recreate the ashram’s vibe. Mr. Botofasina is the musical director of the first portion of the event, which will take place at sunset and feature a seven-member choir from the ashram, now called Sai Anantam. (Ravi Coltrane, himself an acclaimed saxophonist, will lead a tribute to her jazz achievements.) “This is the first time that we’ll be attempting to stay very consistently with what she recorded,” Mr. Botosafina said, “and pay homage and re-enact that as accurately as possible.”

But just as the music is finally reaching a larger audience, the fate of the ashram, which is down to about a dozen members, is in doubt: The Coltrane estate put the land up for sale in 2015, though there have been no takers at the $5 million asking price.

“The ashram is ending, but the music is now becoming what the spiritual practice is, and I think that’s an amazingly timed thing,” Mr. Evelev said. “This music then also takes on this other life and hopefully gets to tour around the world, and the people who sang it then will continue to sing it.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 3, 2017, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Ashram Recordings Of a Coltrane. Order Reprints| Today's Paper

Related Coverage:

Alice Coltrane, Jazz Artist and Spiritual Leader, Dies at 69  January 15, 2007 

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   Alice Coltrane--Music-Review Oct. 24, 2006

http://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2016/05/universal-consciousness

"Divine music is a curative virtue; it is a gift from God that brings healing and comfort to the soul. This music can uplift one’s spirit up to a higher dimension of being that is filled with peace and joy. Divine music is the sound of true life, wisdom, and bliss. This music transcends geographical boundaries, language barriers, age factors; and whether educated or uneducated, it reaches deep into the heart and soul, sacred and holy, like an Infinite sound of glory entering the Lord's sanctuary." –- Alice Coltrane (1937 – 2007)

Universal Consciousness: The Spiritual Awakening of Alice Coltrane

May 3, 2016

by Britt Robson
Red Bull Academy

It was inevitable that the legacy of Alice Coltrane would long be obscured in the massive shadow cast by her husband. John Coltrane, after all, was the most venerated and influential tenor saxophonist in the history of jazz music. 

But the closer one examines the genuinely phenomenal life, music and spirit of Alice Coltrane, the more inevitable it seems that she will also someday receive her proper due. The most striking aspect of her biography is that she became a master musician and a spiritual guru in the same way, by carrying forth all her accumulated wisdom in a welcoming synthesis, rather than shedding, judging and discriminating her way to “growth” and “maturity.”

Along this path, Coltrane transformed clichés like “generosity of spirit” and “universal consciousness” into practical implements and palpable goals through the evidence of her music and the abiding example of her devotion. And although it became a singular and generally underappreciated journey, there is some wonderful symmetry in her taking what had been a shared vision with John Coltrane further than anybody would have imagined.

Alice McLeod began absorbing a broad and vivid swath of music and religion at an early age. Her parents directed, played and sang in the choirs at Mt. Olive Baptist Church in Detroit at a time when the city was an industrial hub first for the machinery of World War II and later as a car manufacturer during the economic boom of the postwar era. At her request, Alice began receiving private piano lessons from a neighbor when she was seven. Her performances on piano and organ inspired the congregation to sponsor her music education at a community school. 

By her mid-teens she was a prodigy, in demand to perform at other churches, including those that practiced the hand-clapping, foot-stomping call-and-response services more common in the south. According to a story she related to her biographer, Franya J. Berkman, Alice was playing and vocalizing with the Lemon Gospel Singers in a church one day when “The Lord just completely swept through.” She describes worshipers falling out from the visitation, some being attended to by nurses while others were carried downstairs. Alice described this service, and others like it, as “the gospel experience, musically, of my life!” 

It was during these postwar years of her teens and early twenties that Detroit became the “motor city,” an industrial boomtown, ushering in what was referred to as a golden era in both gospel and bebop jazz. Through her older half-brother Ernest Farrow, an in-demand saxophonist and later bassist, Alice learned the rhythm & blues spin Detroit’s musicians put on the modern language of bop. She played percussion in her high school marching band, self-taught the sidemen in her own jazz trio, and, whenever possible, tagged along with Farrow to hang out with national-caliber talents such as pianist Barry Harris, bassist Cecil McBee and saxophonist Joe Henderson.

Alice’s first working band was called The Premiers, who performed a blend of gospel, jazz and rhythm & blues and included trombonist George Bohanon, bassist Anthony Jackson and drummer Oliver Jackson, who would each go on to appear on dozens of records. “She was proud to say she was from Detroit,” says Alice’s eldest child and only daughter, Miki Coltrane. “There’s a picture of my mom in church next to this huge organ when she couldn’t have been more than 10 or 11 years old. She used to earn a few dollars playing it and give it to my grandma, Annie McLeod. At high school there was Marvin Gaye and the Gordy kids — the Gordy family [before Berry Gordy founded Motown Records] had a store like a 7/11 down the block.” 

In 1960 when she was 23, Alice married Kenneth “Pancho” Hagood, a renowned bebop scat singer eleven years her senior, before the couple relocated to Paris. Their time in Europe was brief — less than a year — but consequential. She became pregnant with her first child, Michelle, now known as Miki Coltrane. She divorced Hagood, Miki’s father, who was besieged by a drug habit. And she spent much of her time studying with the seminal bebop pianist Bud Powell, who became a pronounced influence on her phrasing and approach while also emboldening her to take chances in the music. 

This bold confidence impressed Bennie Maupin —a bass clarinetist who was mentored by Alice and later played on Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew album — after she returned to Detroit. “Some people play it safe. They play things pretty much the same way every time,” Maupin told Berkman. “Alice never did…she was always reaching for something, you know?”

Maupin and Alice also shared a love for a then-new release by John Coltrane, Africa/Brass and together saw Coltrane perform for the first time when he played Detroit in January 1962. After Alice was hired to play in a band led by the vibraphonist Terry Gibbs who was impressed with her Powell-like prowess on piano and the fact that she could also join him on vibes, the group opened for the John Coltrane Quartet during an extended engagement at Birdland in New York in the summer of 1963. That is where John and Alice Coltrane met and fell in love. 

There is no question that John Coltrane delved into Eastern spirituality and religion years before he met Alice. “John was very aware of the Vedantic, the Hindi way of reincarnation and other modes of worship and divinity, of the divine being within instead of up on a cloud,” said Ashley Kahn, the author of A Love Supreme, a book about John Coltrane’s classic album. “He had read the Bhagavad Gita and Autobiography of a Yogi, before he met Alice. “But part of their attraction was certainly that she was predisposed to be on the same sort of musical and spiritual quest, and that they could share that path together.” From the moment Alice notified Gibbs that she was quitting his band because John had asked her to go to Sweden with him before they were married, the Coltranes traveled the world, absorbing cultures.

“They both loved Indian instruments, like the tamboura,” Miki Coltrane remembers. “But there were others too; they brought back a koto and some other instruments from Japan. We had bagpipes in our living room.”

They also had children — three sons between 1964 and 1967. At first, motherhood cut into Alice’s musical career. As Kahn puts it, “While John was upstairs [in their house in Fort Dix, New Jersey] meditating and praying five days solid while composing A Love Supreme, she was taking care of the children and supporting him.”

In July of 1967, just four years after he met Alice at Birdland, John Coltrane died of liver cancer. He had been complaining of pain for months, but held off seeing a doctor and they diagnosed it too late.

They brought back a koto and some other instruments from Japan. We had bagpipes in our living room

---Miki Coltrane

Six weeks before her 30th birthday, Alice was a widower with four children, bereft of her soulmate, family breadwinner and chief outlet for her own musical career. Meanwhile, the counterculture was seizing the popular imagination on a number of fronts, be it the Summer of Love, the heyday of the Black Power Movement, or the vogue of alternative religions and forms of consciousness. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were just over the horizon. Alice Coltrane was breaking down. 

In her spiritual memoir from 1977, also titled Monument Eternal, she describes what seems like a hellish existence from roughly 1968 to 1970. Unable to sleep or eat properly, her weight fell from 118 to 95 pounds. She had hallucinations in which trees spoke, various beings existed on astral planes, and the sounds of “a planetary ether” could spin through her brain and knock her unconscious. Her family was concerned for her health, and more than once she was sent to the hospital due to self-inflicted wounds, including a third-degree burn so awful that her blackened flesh fell off her hand. 

The overarching theme of this riveting, frequently gruesome account is not that Alice fell into the nadir of her existence, but rather that she experienced tapas, a vital period of trial, tribulation and transition. She explains tapas as a time of unremitting austerity, designed to cleanse and enhance her spirit. The relentless and yet serene path she followed in the many decades after her prolonged ordeal validates this outlandish interpretation of events. 

The music under her own name from this period seems intended to further the musical and spiritual direction of her late husband. The first song on the first record is an elegy entitled, “Ohnedaruth,” the name she gave his spirit, which is the Sanskrit word for “compassion.” The sidemen on the three records from 1968-70, A Monastic Trio, Huntington Ashram Monastery and Ptah the El Daoud, are primarily her late husband’s cohorts.

And yet, even with many stylistic similarities, we can hear Alice beginning to figure out how to fill the enormous void under daunting circumstances. The songs are mostly hers, modal tunes with somber moods. But there is strength and sustenance too. Her playing is more prominent, and often she is performing on the harp John bought her shortly before he died. As with the piano, she is playing the entire instrument, set free on glissando arpeggios that Kahn describes as “very loose, almost like water flowing back and forth, very spiritual and meditative.”

But there is also the soulful, swinging bottom that is the rhythm of the Christian church —one song on The Monastic Trio is explicitly entitled “Gospel Trane.” There is also more overt blues and rhythm & blues than late-period John Coltrane was invoking, luminous piano-blues like the song “Turiya and Ramakrishna” on Ptah the El Daoud. There are the introductory bass ostinatos and squawking jazz horns common to John Coltrane, set off by sparkling harp and mournful piano from Alice, who wrote sophisticated jazz arrangements and improvisations spangled with a dab of funk. Her first three releases are appropriately the music of someone who is not John Coltrane but who loves him and cherishes his art. At the time, many critics heard the root influence but were not ready to relate to or reward Alice’s distinctive embellishments and so dismissed the records as pale imitations.

The tapas of austerity helped prepare Alice for a spiritual ally, Swami Satchidanada, an Indian guru introduced to her by another transplanted New York musician from Detroit, Vishnu Wood. Although he was somewhat of a celebrity guru — he came to the United States as a guest of the visual artist Peter Max, and even opened the Woodstock Festival — Satchidanada taught the Hindu philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, which promoted the concept of self-realization, the notion that their soul is not different than god.

Describing this self-realization in a 1988 radio interview, Alice explained, “It just means you go to your fullest and highest potential and not be limited by some tenets of some doctrine that says we come here, here’s the minister, and we pay our tithes and go back to our home or our job or business or whatever and do everything you want.” Advaita Vedanta did not preclude the admission of other faiths — on the contrary it sought to promote global understanding among all religions for people to better serve and love each other, which is the path to their “fullest and highest potential.” 

In her Alice Coltrane biography, Franya Berkman makes two incisive observations about Alice’s embrace of Advaita Vedanta. “[A]s an extraordinarily self-disciplined, independent, and inner-directed artist with a strong predilection for religious expression, Alice was uniquely suited to pursue the yogic and devotional lifestyle that the swami advocated,” she wrote. Also: “In its inclusiveness and emphasis on personal potential, Vedanta is similar to the spiritual and creative philosophy that John Coltrane developed.” 

The first musical manifestation of this commitment was Journey in Satchidananda, recorded in November, 1970, a month before Alice took her first trip to the holy sites of India with the Swami. From the opening title cut, the arching drone of the tamboura, an Indian stringed instrument played by Tulsi, is pervasive, announcing a new Eastern influence that is further enriched by the oud of Vishnu Wood. Many of the John Coltrane touchstones remain, especially the bass ostinatos from Cecil McBee and Charlie Haden. But even the D-minor blues, “Something About John Coltrane,” feels tinged with Eastern spirituality, as Alice’s soulful piano and the beseeching soprano of Pharoah Sanders falls under the tamboura’s sway.

After she returned home from India, Alice unfurled what is arguably the masterpiece of her commercial recording career with Universal Consciousness, recorded less than six months after Journey in Satchidananda. Voracious in her desire to communicate and receive love and wisdom — and unearth it within herself — Alice added Turiya to her name, the Sanskrit word for “pure consciousness.” Following a divine vision, she also plays the Wurlitzer organ for the first time on record, an instrument that would dominate her religious music in the future. Her extensive liner notes conjoin myths and texts from various religions and read like a gothic melodrama. She composed string arrangements for four violinists and got the great avant garde jazz iconoclast Ornette Coleman to transcribe them. At least two of her original compositions, “Hare Krishna” and “Sita Rama,” are based on traditional chants, another component of her later, privately released work. 

Universal Consciousness anticipates the “world music” movement by more than a decade. It is a bountiful blend of a symbolically omnificent organ that absorbs the traditions of the Black church and Indian chanting rituals. Euro-classical strings are embellished and taken further Eastward by the flowing harp passages. The droning tamboura hovers over an ace jazz rhythm section of bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Jack DeJohnette, who suggest rhythmic frames and sturdy timbres for the varied meters and chromatic harmonies mushrooming out of the lush mix.

Universal Consciousness became the first album of a trilogy that ended Alice’s relationship with Impulse, the label that contained her husband’s most adventurous recordings and all her own up to this point. Both World Galaxy (recorded in November 1971) and Lord of Lords (the summer of 1972) feature a 16-piece string orchestra, which is used to interpret A Love Supreme, and another John Coltrane-associated work, “My Favorite Things,” on the former record and pieces by Euro-classical composers Stravinsky and Dvorak on the latter album.

The strings are less effective — especially on the John Coltrane pieces — on World Galaxy, which derives its strength from Alice’s protean, ever-shifting instrumentation on organ, piano and harp, and from the saxophone blasts of jazz tenor Frank Lowe. Lord of Lords centers much of its musical energy around the organ (again anticipating Alice’s more overtly spiritual work), especially on her intrepid, jazz-oriented version of Stravinsky’s “Firebird Suite.”

But the crowning glory of Lord of Lords is her reclamation of Dvorak’s “Largo,” from the composer’s New World Symphony. That it was taken by the composer from Negro spirituals he or his assistants heard was made plain when one of his former students transformed it back to a spiritual, entitled “Going Home,” that further evolved into a popular hymn and part of the jazz repertoire.

The Los Angeles-based electronic musician Flying Lotus is a grand-nephew of Alice’s, and in The Pitchfork Review recalls “Going Home” being a popular song frequently played at family funerals, including Alice’s own in 2007.

On Lord of Lords, Alice leads off “Going Home” with harp but switches to organ and executes a driving gospel-blues solo on the instrument accompanied by Haden on bass and [drummer] Ben Riley on drums. The bones of Dvorak’s arrangement are there. The depth, tone and tenor of the piece is restored to its original owners. On her benediction with Impulse, Alice Turiya Coltrane once again didn’t leave anything behind.

After she returned home from India, Alice unfurled a masterpiece: Universal Consciousness.

In 1972, the same year in which she recorded Lord of Lords, Alice relocated to the Bay Area of California, where she founded the Vedantic Center in a San Francisco storefront. Miki, the oldest of her four children, was twelve at the time.

“When we were packing up the house, we were worried about missing our friends, but she said that when she was in meditation [it was revealed to her that] we were supposed to move there,” Miki says. Four years later, when Alice had another revelation, instructing her to abandon the secular life and become a spiritual teacher in the Hindu tradition, the children were first informed by a note on the refrigerator, announcing that her name was now Swamini Turiyasangitananda. By then, Alice had already relocated the Vedantic Center to a house next door to the family home in Woodland Hills, California. 

The 1976 revelation instructed her to build an ashram, and in 1983 she opened the Shanti Anantam Ashram on 50 acres in nearby Agoura Hills, California. By their own accounting, Alice’s children were raised well in this intensely spiritual yet occasionally disruptive environment. 

“We were required to go to services until we were 18, and to learn all the songs, of course, but she allowed us to be children, giggling and poking each other,” Miki said. “When the students lived next door to us, there were courses given on Wednesdays and Sundays, but the students would also cook and we had get-togethers in the rec room, with chances to play violin or read poetry. Most of them were religious-based, but there was still a family feeling to it. The services were much more amazing at 30 years old than at 15, when you were hurrying to get into the car to go to the beach. But it bloomed into being a uniquely devotional experience.” 

When Purusha Hickson first heard Universal Consciousness, he set aside the dishes he was bussing and laid down on the floor to fully absorb it while others covered his shift. It was 1974 and Hickson was a 20-year-old kid who had hitchhiked across the country and was volunteering at One Mind Temple, a San Francisco crash pad serving vegetarian meals in the Fillmore.

“When I heard her music, in my heart I could tell she knew something. I had to meet her,” Hickson said. “People who knew her as Mother Turiya called her up and she said to bring me to see her. She was playing at the 60th birthday of Swami Satchidanada and afterward I got an opportunity to meet her. She was so down-to-earth, with no pretensions, but at the same time there was this spark of light about her.”

Hickson was initiated into the Vedantic Center exactly a year after that meeting, ten days after his 21st birthday in December 1975. He went on to live at the center in Woodland Hills, and later at the ashram. Today he holds a position of honor as the keyboardist in Alice’s stead at the Agoura Hills location, now known as Sai Anatam Ashram.

Hickson had a front-row seat for the changes taking place in Alice’s music. In the mid-to-late ’70s, “she was still playing concerts, but with us she emphasized chanting. She talked about growing closer to god through the power of sound, with the recitation of mantras. And when she played it was otherworldly. Her organ was intense stuff that reminded me of John Coltrane’s saxophone.”

Alice’s move to the West Coast and immersion in religion drew her focus away from commercial recordings. There were collaborations with artists such as Carlos Santana and Joe Henderson, but the first album after Lord of Lords under her own name, Eternity, is a pastiche. Recorded for her new label, Warner Brothers, in the summer of 1975, there are songs overtly connected to rhythm & blues (with her old Premiers bandmate George Bohanon), Afro-Cuban percussion, another bout of strings with Stravinsky, and a series of spiritual tracks albeit with a choir accustomed to Euro-classical singing. 

The next two records nestle into devotion to family and self-realization, and are clearly influenced by the revelation that drew Swamini Turiyasangitananda out of Alice Coltrane. Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana, from the late summer of 1976, features her leading her students on five traditional Hindu chant-songs, instrumentally accompanied only by her daughter Miki (identified as Michaelle Sita Coltrane) on tamboura for a short track, and her son, Arjuna John Coltrane Jr., on drums during a glorious 19-minute duet on the closer. 

Transcendence, from the spring of 1977, features a mesmerizing solo track — “Vrindavana Sanchara” — framed by two other spiritually-infused compositions with a string quartet. But the song-chants with her students on the back end of the album are the real reward, for they crystallize the devotional passions of gospel testimony and Hindu bliss in a riveting synergy.

“She used to tell us to chant from the heart and not worry about mispronouncing names; that if you are calling to god, god will know who you are calling to,” Hickson says. “Even when we were chanting in Hindu, she said you don’t have to sound Indian; just give it that universal feeling.”

She used to tell us to chant from the heart and not worry about mispronouncing names; that if you are calling to god, god will know who you are calling to.

Purusha Hickson

“My mother had a totally different emphasis of attack on the devotional songs,” said Miki Coltrane, singing a chant with the gospel tinge of blues and funk. “Then I went to India and heard all these people chanting and they locked it in in a different place,” she continued, providing the familiar singsong rhythm of traditional Hindu chanting. “It was only then that I realized what she had done — I hadn’t noticed. It was done with respect, but [her chants] had a groove.” 

The final commercial recording delivered by Alice in the 20th Century, a live double-album entitled Transfiguration, was at once a throwback to her jazz and classical roots and a forward immersion in spiritual rapture encased in the lineage of her late husband. There is a moving solo piano piece for John Coltrane, entitled, “One For The Father.” “Prema” likewise finds her on piano paired with strings. 

The rest of the music is delivered on organ, accompanied by the ace jazz rhythm section of drummer Roy Haynes and bassist Reggie Workman. It culminates in a blistering 37-minute workout of John Coltrane’s “Leo,” utilizing his 12-tone system that he based on the 12 signs of the zodiac. In her Alice Coltrane bio, Berkman claims “her up tempo keyboard work is the most exciting of her commercial career….she takes leave of the jazz business with a truly breathtaking swan song.” The review at Allmusic.com simply says, “If you can own only one Alice Coltrane record, this should be it.”

Another resplendent outlier in Alice’s musical output is Turiya Sings, arguably her most peaceful and soothing album. Originally released only through the Avatar Book Institute four years after Transfiguration in 1982, it is Alice sing-chanting Hindu mantras over organ, strings and synthesizer, the hauntingly beautiful vocals distilled down from a 15-hour recording session. 

“When Swamini first started teaching, she never sang. But when we moved to Woodland Hills, there were not as many people around, and she wanted to help us until we gathered more voices,” Hickson related. “But when she came out with Turiya Sings, it was kind of amazing.” 

Once the ashram was established in 1983, the music Alice made reflected what was played at services there. Following the South Asian tradition of singing “bhajans”—Hindu texts and chants adapted to music—she went deeper into the form first explored on the spiritual material of her late ’70s albums for Warner Brothers. As with Turiya Sings, for many years, the only way to get Divine Songs (1987), Infinite Chants (1991) and Glorious Chants (1995) was through the Avatar Book Institute or directly at the Sai Anantam Ashram itself. 

Each of the records is a little different. Divine Songs has more of Alice’s individual song-chanting, whereas the Infinite Chants is geared toward the choir at the ashram and the driving sway and hand-clapping of the worshipers. Glorious Chants was recorded in the mandir — or spacious temple — on the grounds of the ashram and is probably the most full-throated choir recording. 

“Sometimes she obviously had an arrangement she worked on privately, and she would teach us the voicings she wanted to hear from that,” said Shankari Adams, another longtime student and the author of the forthcoming biography, Portrait of Devotion: The Spiritual Life of Alice Coltrane, Swamini Turiyasangitananda. “But the most common process I witnessed was her taking the chanting we did during weekly worship service. That would be the bassline and then she would go into the studio and add layers or tracks to that base line for the devotional music. Sometimes it would be tamboura, or strings, or percussion.” The organ was already there. 

“I am a non-musician but she just let us sing from our heart, because what she wanted from the music was the way we were speaking to god, or about god, and the way it touched you,” said another student, Jayalakshmi Moss. “Because of her profound ear, she knew where to place you so were with people who knew music and would be there in front of your face to help you.”

One of the more remarkable things about the Alice Coltrane legacy is how this intensely spiritual music has become something of an underground phenomena. Some of the buzz has been spurred by Flying Lotus, who attended services at the ashram and waxes eloquent about the beauty and power of what Alice was laying down. The availability of this music on Youtube and other sites also exposes more listeners to these unique bhajans. And the record Alice made at the urging of her son Ravi Coltrane — Translinear Light, in 2003 —was another catalyst.

When people talk about reinventing standards, they may go back to the 1920s. Alice was reinterpreting ancient Vedic texts.

Mark “Frosty” McNeill

Among the influential champions of Alice’s devotional music is Mark “Frosty” McNeill, co-founder of internet radio station Dublab out of Los Angeles. “There is this really unique blend of someone fully devoted but also extremely talented, making records on her own schedule and her own terms,” said McNeill, who is in the process of turning his Alice Coltrane fixation into an audio-literary Masters thesis at USC. 

“The actual musical blend continues this idea of universality that both her and John Coltrane had. That means there are not as many boundaries when it comes to the spiritual and the musical,” McNeill says. “The harp is not a common instrument in jazz. The unique string arrangements with the Eastern tonalities and the electric instrumentation are not typically fused — it is unlike anything I have ever heard before. Yeah it sounds like gospel, but then she is singing a Sanskrit chant on top of a soulful Wurlitzer, with synthesizer swells and cosmic sweeps that evoke a big bang creation of the universe.

“I mean, when people talk about reinventing standards for jazz, they may go back to the 1920s. But Alice is reinterpreting ancient Vedic texts that are thousands of years old with her own unique arrangements.” 

“I was born an African American Christian,” said Jayalakshmi Moss, “and I can absolutely hear the church in her music. But it is also absolutely unlike anything I have ever heard. Many of us are well-traveled and we have chanted with many fine masters of spirituality. But we all know that her blend is absolutely unique.”

Moss added that there is “lots and lots of music that Alice recorded in our mandir that has not been released, that is uncut. It is sacred and timeless.” 

Also unreleased is a huge, ambitious project, involving a year of rehearsals at the ashram because the chanting is done in multiple languages, including Sanskrit, Hebrew and English. It includes extensive arrangements for orchestra and was planned in conjunction with her son Ravi and performed in New Jersey in 2006. The title is The Sacred Language of Ascension, deliberately meant to harken to John Coltrane’s Ascension, perhaps his pinnacle of impassioned sheets of sound. And as recently as this past February 27, there was a sold-out performance of Universal Consciousness at the Portland Jazz Festival, led by Ravi Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. Nearly a decade after her death, Alice Coltrane is finally in vogue, her once checkered reputation as a jazz artist and musical visionary buttressed for the ages. But then, she always had bigger concerns than what people thought of her. 

“People used to ask her all the time, ‘Should I call you Alice or Swamini?’ And she would always say, ‘You can call me either one, whatever you like,’” said Hickson. “She taught us that people start out with an external person, a guru or shaman, but that person will only take you so far,” said Adams. “In the end, people have to make the journey inward, ourselves. Our only real guru is our divine inner spirit.” 

Or, as Miki Coltrane puts it, “Most people don’t have the kind of patience, or the kind of belief, that my mother had. She didn’t toot her own horn. She let the universe handle it.”

Illustrations by Robert Beatty

On a different note

Rescued From The Fire: Frosty on Alice Coltrane

Red Bull Music Academy Daily

The Red Bull Music Academy Daily is the online publication by the Red Bull Music Academy, a global music institution committed to fostering creativity in music. Just like the Academy, we think of it as a platform for the essential ideas, sounds and people that have driven – and continue to drive – our culture forward.

"Divine music is a curative virtue; it is a gift from God that brings healing and comfort to the soul. This music can uplift one’s spirit up to a higher dimension of being that is filled with peace and joy. Divine music is the sound of true life, wisdom, and bliss. This music transcends geographical boundaries, language barriers, age factors; and whether educated or uneducated, it reaches deep into the heart and soul, sacred and holy, like an Infinite sound of glory entering the Lord's sanctuary." – Alice Coltrane (1937 – 2007)

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/15/arts/music/15colt.html 

Music

Alice Coltrane, Jazz Artist and Spiritual Leader, Dies at 69

by BEN RATLIFF

January 15, 2007

New York Times 

Alice Coltrane, widow of the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane and the pianist in his later bands, who extended her musical searches into a vocation as a spiritual leader, died on Friday in Los Angeles. She was 69.

The cause was respiratory failure, said Marilyn McLeod, her sister and assistant.

Ms. Coltrane lived in the Woodland Hills section of Los Angeles near the Sai Anantam ashram in Agoura Hills, which she had founded in 1983. Known as Swami Turiyasangitananda, Sanskrit for “the highest song of God,” she was the guiding presence of the 48-acre ashram, set among the Santa Monica mountains, where 25 to 30 full-time residents study the Vedic scriptures of ancient India, as well as Buddhist and Islamic texts.

She was also the manager of Coltrane’s estate, as well as of his music-publishing company, Jowcol Music, and the John Coltrane Foundation, which has given out scholarships to music students since 2001.

As a pianist, her playing was dense with arpeggios that suggested the harp; the instrument had an important place in her life. One of her childhood heroes was the Detroit-based jazz harpist Dorothy Ashby, and she was later motivated to study that instrument by Coltrane, who loved its sound.

Raised in a musical family in Detroit, Ms. Coltrane played piano and organ for church choirs and Sunday school from age 7. As a young musician in Detroit, she was studying classical music and playing piano in jazz clubs, in a group including her half-brother, the bassist Ernie Farrow, and the trombonist George Bohannon.

In her early 20s she lived briefly in Paris, where she studied informally with the pianist Bud Powell, and was briefly married to the singer Kenny (Pancho) Hagood, with whom she had a daughter, Michelle. She returned to Detroit, playing in a band with her brother, and then moved to New York in 1962. A year later she met John Coltrane.

Alice Coltrane

She was playing vibraphone and Powell-inspired bebop piano in a group led by the drummer Terry Gibbs at Birdland, on a double-bill with Coltrane’s quartet. Coltrane was well established by the beginning of the 1960s, though she hadn’t known about him for long before moving to New York; the first time she ever heard him, she said, was on the 1961 album “Africa/Brass.”

They connected instantly; she moved in with him and traveled with the Coltrane band. By the summer of 1964 they had relocated from New York City to a house in Dix Hills, on Long Island. They married in 1965 in Juárez, Mexico, coinciding with Coltrane’s divorce from his first wife, Naima Grubbs. By that time she and Coltrane had already had two of their three children together — John Jr., who died in 1982, and Ravi, who by his 30s had become an acclaimed jazz saxophonist.

Ms. Coltrane is survived by her sisters, Marilyn McLeod of Winnetka, Calif., and Margaret Roberts of Detroit; her daughter, Michelle Carbonell-Coltrane of Los Angeles; her sons Oran Coltrane of Los Angeles and Ravi, of Brooklyn; and five grandchildren.

In 1966, as the Coltrane band’s music became wilder and more prolix, she became its pianist. She replaced McCoy Tyner, who quit without rancor, largely because he could no longer hear himself on the bandstand. Though she wasn’t Mr. Tyner’s technical equal and lacked his percussive power, she fit with the group’s new purpose; by the time of the recordings that would become the album “Stellar Regions,” in February 1967, she was fluid and energetic within the group’s freer new language.

She told an interviewer that Coltrane helped her to play “thoroughly and completely.” This meant stretching the definitions of rhythm and harmony, but she also meant something broader; Coltrane was talking about “universalizing” his music, creating a nondenominational religious art that took cues from ancient history and foreign scales. He helped her to sign a contract as a solo artist with his label, Impulse. And he introduced her to Eastern philosophy and religion, which became the main focus of her life.

After Coltrane’s death from liver cancer in 1967, Ms. Coltrane took a vow of celibacy. And at first she made music closely related to his, often reflective, minor and modal; on piano or harp she played flowing, harplike phrases over a deep midtempo swing, and she worked with the bassist Jimmy Garrison and the drummer Rashied Ali from John Coltrane’s band. On records like “A Monastic Trio,” “Ptah, the El Daoud” and “Journey in Satchidananda,” she was able to reconcile blues phrases and jazz rhythm with a kind of ancient, flowing sound.

Ms. Coltrane met her guru, Swami Satchidananda, in 1970, and in more recent years became a devotee of Sathya Sai Baba. By the early 1970s she developed a renewed interest in the organ, because it produced a continuous sound; she wanted to make a meditative music that wouldn’t be interrupted by pauses for breath. Her 1972 record, “Universal Consciousness,” with Ms. Coltrane on Wurlitzer organ and string arrangements by Ornette Coleman, became a far-out classic. In the mid-70s she switched to the Warner Brothers label and made four more records, including orchestras and Hindu chants. Thereafter, until 2004, she made records purely for religious purposes, distributing them privately.

After first establishing the Vedanta Center in San Francisco, she moved her ashram to Agoura Hills, just northwest of Los Angeles, and expanded it. In the past 10 years, she performed the occasional concert with Ravi, and in 2004 she finally returned to recording jazz, making “Translinear Light,” produced by Ravi, who reunited her with some old colleagues like Charlie Haden and Jack DeJohnette, as well as a chorus of singers from her ashram.

Correction Appended

Correction: January 30, 2007 

 
An obituary on Jan. 15 about Alice Coltrane, the widow and piano accompanist of the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, referred incompletely to the musician Terry Gibbs, with whom she played early in her career. Although he plays the drums, he is best known as a vibraphonist. 

https://exclaim.ca/music/article/alice_coltranes_monastic_trio_gets_vinyl_reissue_via_superior_viaduct

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Alice Coltrane's 'A Monastic Trio' Gets Vinyl Reissue via Superior Viaduct

by Gregory Adams

February 18, 2014

Close to 50 years after it first appeared, the late Alice Coltrane's avant-garde full-length debut A Monastic Trio is getting a vinyl reissue through Superior Viaduct.

Originally pressed up by Impulse! in 1967, this latest edition arrives through Superior Viaduct on April 29. While a few CD represses popped up in the '90s and most recently in 2004, this will be the first North American vinyl pressing since its initial release.

While pianist/harpist Coltrane (née Alice McLeod) had studied piano under Bud Powell, played with vibraphonist Terry Gibbs and performed with her husband John Coltrane, A Monastic Trio marks her first release as a band leader. Issued a year after the death of John Coltrane, the record's six compositions feel his presence, a press release notes, whether via his adopted Hindu name "Ohnedaruth" being used as a song title or because back-up musicians Jimmy Garrison, Rashied Ali and Pharaoh Sanders had been frequent collaborators with the saxophonist.

The set is described as fusing "spiritual free jazz and new age along with classical, Eastern, post-bop and gospel," all the while showcasing Alice Coltrane's piano and harp skills. Down below, you can hear her fluid, finger-rolling piano lines atop the meditative shaker rhythms of "I Want to See You."

In other Superior Viaduct news, the imprint will also reissue "grandmother of trip-hop" Leslie Winer's Witch on April 29. You can learn more about that release here.

A Monastic Trio:

1. Ohnedaruth
2. Gospel Trane

3. I Want To See You
4. Lovely Sky Boat
5. Oceanic Beloved
6. Atomic Peace

AUDIO: https://soundcloud.com/superiorviaduct/alice-coltrane-i-want-to-see

https://www.essence.com/2006/08/25/a-love-supreme-with-alice-coltrane

https://thevinylfactory.com/news/alice-coltrane-documentary-spiritual-journey/

Watch a short documentary about Alice Coltrane’s spiritual journey

 by  Anton Spice

May 4, 2017

The Vinyl Factory 

From recording with John Coltrane to her devotional Ashram tapes.

This week Luaka Bop will release The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, a breath-taking collection of music recorded by the harpist and spiritual leader at her Sai Anantam Ashram outside Los Angeles in the early ’80s.
Charting her life and career from meeting and recording with soul mate John Coltrane to the nadir and re-awakening that followed his death, Luaka Bop have shared a moving 6-minute film that gives a glimpse of this remarkable musician’s spiritual journey.

Narrated by Coltrane’s granddaughter Turiya, it provides a context for Coltrane’s unique musical explorations that combined her gospel roots with Eastern themes and heavy doses of synthesized experimentation. 

You can watch the documentary below and order your copy of the LP ahead of its release on 5th May here.

Luaka Bop Presents: Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda:

Album release: May 5, 2017
Support: bit.ly/2p9luLw

iTunes: http://radi.al/AliceColtrane
https://www.facebook.com/AliceColtran...
https://www.alicecoltrane.com


Narrated by
Turyia Coltrane

Script Supervision
Michelle Coltrane

Developed by
Eric Welles-Nystrom

Based on the article “Universal Consciousness: The Spiritual Awakening of Alice Coltrane”
By Britt Robson
Courtesy of Red Bull Music Academy

Editing
David McCleod
Eric Welles-Nystrom

Script:
Yale Evelev, Eric Welles-Nystrom & Paul Tyree-Francis

Audio Engineer:
Noah Georgeson

Assistant:
Devendra Banhart

Research:
Michelle Coltrane
Turiya Coltrane
Eric Welles-Nystrom
Hayden Waggener
Ross Chait


“Er Ra”
Written by Alice Coltrane (Jowcol Music, BMI)
Performed by Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda

“Journey to Satchidananda”
Written by Alice Coltrane (Jowcol Music, BMI)
Performed by Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda

“Om Shanti”
Written by Alice Coltrane (Jowcol Music, BMI)
Performed by Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda

Spectral animations from “Eternity’s Pillar”

Video footage of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda in India is from the show
“Rhythms of The World: Bombay Jazz”

Archival photographs of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda in India courtesy of Michelle Coltrane

Archival photos from The Sai Anantam Ashram courtesy of Radha Botofasina


Thanks to
The Family of John & Alice Coltrane
Michelle & Turiya
The Sao Anantam Ashram
Noah & Devendra
Michael
Radha


(c) 2017 Luaka Bop, Inc.

 

A Love Supreme With Alice Coltrane

The legendary jazz saxophonist John Coltrane would have turned 80 this month. Susan L. Taylor talks to his wife, muse, musical collaborator and fellow spiritual traveler at her ashram in Southern California 

by Susan Taylor

December 16, 2009 

Essence.com

The ashram is another world, an abode in the rolling hills of Agoura, California, 40 minutes north of Los Angeles. A clear-water creek meanders among massive oaks, refreshing the land and inner landscape of a serenely beautiful sister some call Swamini. Most know her as Alice Coltrane, master musician and wife of the great saxophonist John Coltrane. “I love these trees,” I tell her, feeling their presence as keenly as I sense hers—abiding, deeply rooted, always reaching for the light.

For years I had been curious to know how this woman, who grew up in the Baptist church in Detroit, had come to found an ashram, Sai Anantam, where some 30 people live, and another 50 come to nourish the spirit. I wanted to visit and speak with Sister Alice about her spiritual life and her beloved husband, John, who died 39 years ago.

It seems strange to write of John Coltrane in the past tense when his spirit remains so vital and present for so many. “John Coltrane lives!” my husband, Khephra Burns, wrote in liner notes for the album Tribute to John Coltrane. “Lives !…in the courage of artists standing naked before the world, as Coltrane stood, baring his soul for Love’s sake, clothed only in the cry of the preacher, the prophet, the mystic.”

John would have turned 80 on September 23. His death from liver cancer in 1967 left Alice with a daughter, Michelle, from a previous union; and sons John, Jr., who died in an automobile accident at 17; Ravi, a tenor and soprano saxophonist; and Oran, who plays guitar and alto sax. Alice Coltrane—composer, pianist, organist, harpist— had been off the scene for 26 years when she released Translinear Light in 2005. In the interim she founded the ashram in a San Francisco storefront, moving to Agoura in 1982. It was here that I spent a night and a glorious day with the gifted healer and teacher.

What are your core spiritual beliefs here at the ashram?
 
I believe that meditation is the highest spiritual practice, the pathway to God. Our studies of various religions take us a distance. Great lectures by revered, saintly souls may take us even further. However, to know God as Spirit, as consciousness, as truth, we have to engage ourselves so that we can experience the omnipresent God in everything. Meditation to me is the way.

What is it about the meditative state that allows us to know God’s presence?
 
The mind is always busy. Even when we are not speaking, the mind is active—thinking, planning, worrying, deducing, rationalizing, speculating. The mind is a great gift, but it has to be quieted down in order to feel, hear and see the presence of God. Meditation is not a philosophical or intellectual pursuit. It is spiritual. When you quiet your mind, you can enter a world of clarity, peace and understanding. You will always find something of value from meditation. If you need to calm down and be more patient, meditation should become a part of your life. You will operate more smoothly, work more efficiently and proceed more confidently and in control of your life.

This ashram is a place of peace. But how do we, who aren’t living in so idyllic a spot, stay peaceful in the face of so many competing personal pressures, with our hearts hurting for our neglected community and our children? How can meditation help with these things?
 
If we are worldly oriented or adversely affected by life’s challenges, we cannot give the children the time, attention and guidance they need. But we can receive healing and direction from meditation itself.

You don’t have to adopt an Eastern religion. You just need to set aside 15 minutes a day to be still. Keep a little notebook near you to record your experiences. You are going to find there is something in those notes that you require in your life, your family, your work, on your spiritual path. Just as it is fire’s nature to burn, it is meditation’s nature to heal, to bring peace and uplift you beyond your worldly environment and transport you to a higher plane.

What is your chosen path, your religion?
 
Mine is a Vedic, Eastern path. The name comes from the Vedas, the world’s oldest known scriptures proclaimed as emanations from God and compiled during meditation into Four Testaments by the saints and rishis, or holy men. The rishis would write on stone or palm leaves to keep a record of the spiritual renderings and transmissions, and then impart them to the people. Vedas and other scriptural literature always come through meditation by holy men and women of God. The Vedas are teachings for life, family, government, military warfare, arts, sciences, marriage and, moreover, spiritual guidance for liberation and self-realization.

Throughout the world today’s women’s voices have been silenced. Women have been greatly repressed. But thousands of years ago women were respected as sages and wisdom carriers.
 
Oh, yes, a lot of scripture has revealed the lives of great ladies of spiritual wisdom. Anasuya, known as mother of the gods; she was powerful, loving and beautiful. Sita Devi, consort of the Lord of the Treta Yuga (an ancient period of time) was known for her forbearance and great faith in God in the midst of opposition. Sarasvati, known as the mother of learning, intelligence and knowledge. Mira Bai, a queen and ardent devotee of the Lord was despised by family members, jailed and prosecuted by authorities. Joan of Arc was burned. Believers know that Mother Mary, mother of Christ, was highly empowered and revered.

As was Mary Magdalene.
 
Yes, she also was great. And now more people are finding out that she was one of Christ’s highest initiates.

But so castigated. The truth about her wisdom and power are little known.
 
Well, that has been the problem. Women have been held back and limited throughout the centuries. Creation could not have been rendered, not even considered, let alone be brought into manifestation without woman. She is principal, a powerful energy. She is first.

Now how does that square with the Adam and Eve story? Many people do take the Bible’s powerful stories, metaphors and allegories literally.
 
We concretize them, which is a big mistake. In the Bible Adam represents reason—brain, calculating, deducing, rationalizing, speculating. Eve represents sentiment—emotion, feelings from the heart. The point is not about Eve being made from Adam’s rib or that she was a temptress, a sinner, disobedient and to be blamed for the Fall. The point is that we all have both male and female aspects and must balance both. We’ve not looked to the inner meaning. The Bible is so encoded with wisdom. God has given us everything for our understanding.

What are your thoughts about the many predictions in the Bible like Jesus’ return?
 
We take them all so literally, and are waiting for Christ to come a second time. Christ has returned many times. Unfortunately, we the people did not remember his statement, when it is written, “Those that have ears, let them hear. Those that have eyes, let them see. I am here.” Yes, this means, hear and see me as I am. Christ is saying, “I do not look like your interpretation of me, and I do not return according to your design or idea of me.” Christian historians would have faltered and the American and other churches worldwide would have failed long ago with his presence.

My understanding is that the Christ spirit is in all of us and it is love. Jesus taught that we could do works even greater than his did if we would give our life to God, have faith in his Father and learn to love one another. Sounds so simple, so easy, but we don’t understand it or trust it and more than anything what humanity is struggling to evolve to. Living love, giving birth to the Christ spirit in us, isn’t that the whole purpose of meditation?
 
Yes, that is it. Give your heart to God and continue to love your family, friends and elders; however, remember that these relationships are all temporary and transitory. No matter how great or small, they will come to an end. And yet, God never leaves you, neither forsakes you, nor betrays you. When you give your heart to God, it is accepted and honored.

Were you leaning toward Eastern philosophy and religion before you met John?
 
Not at all. John was already interested in Eastern philosophy. Even though his family was Christian, he studied various other faiths, everything from metaphysics, Cabala, Hindu mysticism, Sufism, Buddhism, Islam and Judaism to numerology and astrology. In the early sixties John was very much interested in meditation and in the different ways people throughout the world honor God.

When and how did you two meet?
 
It was at Birdland in New York City, 1963. I played piano with the Terry Gibbs band, and the John Coltrane Quartet was the headliner. Backstage there was a small seating area for musicians. John would always be sitting at the farthest end, and I would take my seat at the opposite end. He had a pensive, contemplative aura, such a quietness and peace about him that I didn’t speak to him because I didn’t want to disrupt this peace.

After about three days, we did speak, and I was highly impressed by his calm mannerisms, his beautiful hands, his serene face, eyes and smile, and his soft, gentle voice. I felt wonderful. It was a joy to converse with him. He talked about music, art, architecture, science in terms of Einstein’s theory of relativity, yoga, vegetarianism and so much more.

How did the romance begin? Did you open your hearts to each other immediately?
 
Absolutely! It was a different day, a new day in our lives. Some years later I recall his saying, “Years ago, I had dreamed of you, not knowing that someday we would meet.” I will never forget one particular moment backstage. I was walking down the corridor and totally unbeknownst to me John was following me with his horn, and he began playing “Always.” That was John’s tender and charismatic way of expressing his thoughts through song.

The brilliance of John Coltrane—Amiri Baraka has referred to him as the heaviest spirit in the universe. My husband, Khephra, says when he first heard Meditations he cried. What do you think John was saying through his music?
 
He was saying, “Dedicate your life to God, for all is with God.” He’d had a spiritual experience and this pointed all of his musical endeavors toward A Love Supreme. And despite his receiving accolades from peers, prestigious awards, a Grammy and worldwide acclaim, John dedicated himself completely to God through such albums as Om and Meditations, and songs like “Dear Lord,” “Offering,” “Peace on Earth,” “Song of Praise,” and so many other spiritual compositions.

What would you say he was trying to give?
 
John knew that music fundamentally is a spiritual language that speaks to the heart and soul. Unfortunately, everyone cannot go to the mountain, or to isolation. But through music, people can go within their own heart and let their spirit soar, and maybe say, “Lord, at least through spiritual sound, I could possibly reach that open door that leads to your sacred domain.” I felt that through John’s compositions, and the sound of his instrument, this could pave the way to the righteous path, giving us a time for spiritual reflection, concentration, upliftment and revitalization. In India, there is a Name of God known as Nadabrahma. It means God as sound. God is sound.

John was deeply affected by the need for peace in the world; and he wanted to utilize his music as his elders had done in the church. Not necessarily from the pulpit, but from a platform that could serve as an outreach to many more souls that those who followed his music. He respected the faiths of others, and I don’t believe people knew how deep his thoughts were on the subject of salvation, liberation and God realization, and that he believed in love toward all mankind with and the effort to relieve pain and suffering.

Although John was already revered as a pioneer in artistic expression and improvisation, some jazz critics blamed you for the change in his music, saying you led him toward the avant-garde and caused the breakup of the famous John Coltrane Quartet with Jimmy Garrison on bass, Elvin Jones on drums and McCoy Tyner on piano.
 
I was committed to just being there for whatever purpose I could serve. I didn’t have to inspire John to go into the avant-garde field. He led that way on his own. The man was a genius, he didn’t need anything from me. And that’s why it’s so interesting that critics decided to dislike me. At a point McCoy Tyner stated it was time for a change, time for him to leave. And this is what they all did. They left on their own. When John said he wanted me to play with him, on piano, I told him there were many others who were qualified. He said, “I want you there because you can do it.” It was a wonderful, a beautiful response from him and I was astounded. He could have chosen from among many fine pianists from around the world.

You were a child prodigy, and John surely appreciated your mastery as a pianist.
 
John and I did have a wonderful time making music together. We’d sit at the piano and go through Stravinsky and Schoenberg and Copland, and the children would be around us running and playing.

John Coltrane, the musician, we know. But what was he like as a husband and father?
 
He was an excellent husband, father and obedient son to his mother, Mrs. Alice Coltrane, Sr., who lived in Philadelphia. We lived on Long Island, New York, and he loved to be at home. We always had dinner together whenever possible. I could not cook as well as his mother, but I loved to cook good vegetarian meals for the family, and occasionally bake his favorite apple pie. We spent a lot of time outdoors taking pictures of our children, watching them play and grow. We were so close; he was so very gentle with us. John never once raised his voice at me or the children. He was at peace with himself and didn’t feel he had to use anger to express his feelings. He was fulfilled in his mission in life.

Often, after he had left for work, I would discover a note that he had left stating his love and adoration for me. On any given day, he would bring me flowers. When holding hands in silent moments, I could feel a warm and tender magnetic energy flow from his palms. It was truly very comforting.

When John passed away, you were not yet 30 and had four young children.  How did you cope?
 
In terms of the children, it was very difficult for me. The youngest was only four months old. The older ones couldn’t understand why their dad did not come home from the studio. I had to wait until they were older before I could fully explain his absence. Mercifully, God brought me through those hard times. And in some sense, God had prepared me. Once, prior to his transition when I was in meditation, I began to see different things about him. I was seeing that we would have less time to spend together. In this visionary state, I saw him walk up to me and say, "I have something to tell you of great importance, and it is that I am going.” I asked, “Where are you going?” And he said, “I'm going on to enlightenment.”

Did he know he had liver cancer?
 
No. I believe that he knew that he was quite ill, but I had to practically take him to the doctor for an examination. He tried to avoid it by saying, “Everything is okay, it’s alright.” Following that initial examination, the gravity of his condition was discovered, yet not fully defined. The doctors said that they needed one more test to fully evaluate the situation. However, on one fateful day, John passed on before the final test was taken.

Were there symptoms?
 
He was in pain, very tired, debilitated. Then he told me, “I cannot play my horn anymore.” I was shocked. I was speechless.

I read that you’ve taken the vow of celibacy.
 
Yes, I have taken vows of celibacy since the time John departed the world. I could not envision myself with someone else. I did not want to remarry. Once I expressed this to some family members who told me, "Give yourself some time." I said no. There is no one who can stand in his place, not even in his shadow. I will not bring another man into my life here over my children. Never.

Have you also taken vows of humility, sacrifice and austerity?
 
The vow of celibacy also includes humility, and I wholeheartedly adhere to it, and daily live it. Also, many sacrifices have been made for the sake of others. As for me? I sacrificed concretizing for years, accepting no recording contracts. My musical career came to an end for 26 years for God. In terms of austerities known as mortification of the body, I have experienced them. Foremost, I do not recommend that anyone engage in them, they can be dangerous to the unadept, also to those who are misguided by something or someone. I have fasted for three months on water and protein drinks, and similarly for 10 months at a time. I have stayed awake from three to four days in an effortless, meditative state, with little or no communication with others.

Why the retreat from the jazz world and staying off the scene for 26 years to honor God.
 
After fulfilling my Warner contract, I really wanted to go deeper into what the Lord had outlined for me to do. I felt that it was time for the next generation of musicians. And the music was changing, so I thought maybe my time is finished. Maybe this is sufficient.

What are your days like now?
 
I live very simply. I’m awake at 4:00 a.m. for meditation. I like to walk around our grounds in the early morning. I take a light breakfast, and a normal evening meal around five o'clock. Then, I have the rest of the evening to myself, to read, to listen to music, or to spend time with family members, or help the grandchildren with their homework. During the day, I attend to the evangelical duties and to the needs of our spiritual organization. I also oversee the business of our family and Jowcol Music, John's publishing company. It controls all of his songs, and there are always requests to use his music in recordings, films, videos.

This is another existence out here on The Land, as you call it. Music, meditation, chanting, people of all races and backgrounds living in isolation. We think of folks living like this as having dropped out.
 
Dropped out of what?

Society.
 
These aren’t people who don’t want to think for themselves. The young people here aren’t helpless ones depending on me. We all still have to face our tests and our trials. There are many professionals here, people with various college degrees, physical therapists, yoga and special education teachers. They’ve not dropped out of human society. The children go to public schools. This is not a commune. No one was proselytized to come here or solicited in any way. This is an ashram, a place for spiritual refuge where you develop yourself devotionally and spiritually.

What is it you offer residents and initiates? And what do you ask of them?
 
I ask that they be sincere in their purpose. We’re here for the Lord, and everyone understands that and participates in our activities and helps keep our land beautiful. Meditation, prayer, recitation of the names of God, singing the Lord’s glories, service to the community—taking clothing and food to homeless shelters, helping native American communities, singing to the elders in hospitals, providing them daycare and medicine, offering service wherever it’s needed—these are the reasons for being here. When we serve humanity, we serve God.

What I try to give is the guidance that people might not otherwise have been able to find. Someone may be having difficulty meditating or may be struggling at work, with a child or in a relationship. I offer my inner understanding. God has healed so many people of disorders and diseases here.

What has replaced the joy of playing jazz?
 
The joy of chanting the holy names of God—Prince of Peace, Rose of Sharon, Jehovah Gira, Krishna, Shiva, El Shadai.

Why an ashram?
 
I felt this was the next step the Lord ordered me to take.

Sister Alice, what would you say to Black women? What must we do to find our way home again?
 
Go within. God is working on the inside. Just go into the sanctuary of your heart, offer your prayers and your worship there. Offer your tears of devotion to the Lord there. God will never, ever fail you. He will receive you.

THE MUSIC OF ALICE COLTRANE: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH ALICE COLTRANE:

Alice Coltrane - Journey in Satchidananda (1971) [Full Album]

 

Alice Coltrane - Turiya And Ramakrishna

 

Alice Coltrane - Reflection on Creation and Space (A Five Year View) LP 1973 [FULL ALBUM

 

Ptah, the el Daoud - Alice Coltrane & Pharoah Sanders - Full Album

 

Alice Coltrane - A Monastic Trio (full album)

 

Alice Coltrane - Turiya Sings

 

Alice Coltrane - Eternity (1976) [Full Album]

 

Journey In Satchidananda

 

Alice Coltrane Harp Solo

World Galaxy - Alice Coltrane

 

ALICE COLTRANE - Something About John Coltrane

 

Alice Coltrane & Joe Henderson - Earth

 

Alice Coltrane ‎- Universal Consciousness (1971) FULL ALBUM

 

Cosmic Music ~ John Coltrane/ Alice Coltrane

 

Alice Coltrane ft. Pharoah Sanders - Journey In Satchidananda

 

Alice Coltrane - Huntington Ashram Monastery

 

Alice Coltrane - Going Home

 

Alice Coltrane '' Lonnie´s lament '' = Warsaw 1987

Alice Coltrane Before John

 

Alice Coltrane - The Sun

Alice Coltrane Interview & Performance w/ Marian McPartland - 1981

Om Supreme - Alice Coltrane

 

Alice Coltrane - Wisdom Eye

 

Carlos Santana & Alice Coltrane - Angel Of Sunlight

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Coltrane

Alice Coltrane

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Alice Coltrane (née McLeod, August 27, 1937 – January 12, 2007), also known by her adopted Sanskrit name Turiyasangitananda or Turiya Alice Coltrane, was an American jazz pianist, organist, harpist, singer, composer, swamini, and the second wife of jazz saxophonist and composer John Coltrane. One of the few harpists in the history of jazz, she recorded many albums as a bandleader, beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s for Impulse! and other major record labels.^[1]

Alice Coltrane in 2006

Birth name	Alice McLeod
Also known as	Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda
Born	27 August 1937 Detroit, Michigan, U.S.
Died	12 January 2007 (aged 69) Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Genres	Jazz
Occupation(s)	Musician, bandleader, composer
Instruments	Piano, organ, harp, vocals
Years active	1962–2006
Labels	Impulse!, Columbia, Warner Bros.

Biography

Early life and career (1937–1965)

 

Born on August 27, 1937, in Detroit, Michigan, Alice McLeod grew up in a musical household. Her mother, Anna McLeod, was a member of the choir at her church, and her half brother, Ernest Farrow, was a notable jazz bassist. With the motivation of Ernest, Alice pursued music and started to perform in various clubs around Detroit, until moving to Paris in the late 1950s. Alice studied classical music, and also jazz with Bud Powell in Paris, where she worked as the intermission pianist at the Blue Note Jazz Club in 1960. It was there that she was broadcast on French television in a performance with Lucky Thompson, Pierre Michelot and Kenny Clarke.^[2] She married Kenny "Pancho" Hagood in 1960 and had a daughter with him.^[3] The marriage ended soon after, on account of Hagood's developing heroin addiction, and Alice was forced to move back to Detroit with her daughter.^[4] She continued playing jazz as a professional in Detroit, with her own trio and as a duo with vibist Terry Pollard. In 1962–63 she played with Terry Gibbs' quartet, during which time she met John Coltrane. In 1965 they were married in Juárez, Mexico. John Coltrane became stepfather to Alice's daughter Michele and the couple had three children: John Jr. (1964–1982), a drummer; Ravi (b. 1965), a saxophonist; and Oranyan (b. 1967), a DJ who played saxophone with Santana for a period of time.

 

Solo work (1967–1978)

 

In January 1966 she replaced McCoy Tyner as pianist with John Coltrane's group. She subsequently recorded with him and continued playing with the band until his death on July 17, 1967. Their love for each other and their growing spirituality resulted in some of John's most creative musical efforts, including one of his most critically acclaimed records, A Love Supreme.^[5] After her husband's death, she continued to forward the musical and spiritual vision, and started to release records as a composer and bandleader. Her first album, A Monastic Trio, was recorded in 1967. From 1968 to 1977, she released thirteen full-length records. As the years passed, her musical direction moved further from standard jazz into the more cosmic, spiritual world. Albums like Universal Consciousness (1971), and World Galaxy (1972), show a progression from a four-piece lineup to a more orchestral approach, with lush string arrangements and cascading harps. Until 1973, she released music with Impulse! Records, the notable jazz label with which her husband released many of his later albums. From 1973 to 1978, she released primarily on Warner Bros. Records until she stepped away from the public eye.

 

Ashram years (1975–1995)

 

After the death of her husband, Coltrane experienced a period of trial. She suffered from severe weight loss and sleepless nights, as well as hallucinations. These tapas (a Sanskrit term she used to describe her suffering), led her to seek spiritual guidance from the guru Swami Satchidinanda and later from Sathya Sai Baba.^[6] By 1972, she abandoned her secular life, and moved to California, where she established the Vedantic Center in 1975.^[7] By the late 1970s she had changed her name to Turiyasangitananda.^[8] She was the spiritual director, or swamini, of Shanti Anantam Ashram (later renamed Sai Anantam Ashram in Chumash Pradesh) which the Vedantic Center established in 1983 near Malibu, California.^[9] Alice would perform formal and informal devotional Vedic ceremonies at the ashram. She performed solo chants, known as bhajans, and group chants, or kirtans. She developed original melodies from the traditional chants, and started to experiment by including synthesizers and sophisticated song structures. This culminated in her first spiritual cassette, Turiya Sings, in 1982. The cassette was released only to the members of the ashram, through her publishing company, the Avatar Book Institute. Through the mid 1980s into the mid 1990s, she released three more cassettes, Divine Songs in 1987, Infinite Chants in 1990, and Glorious Chants in 1995. New York-based label Luaka Bop released a compilation of tracks from her ashram tapes as World Spiritual Classics: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda in May 2017.

 

Later years and death (1995–2007)

 

The 1990s saw renewed interest in her work, which led to the release of the compilation Astral Meditations, and in 2004 she released her comeback album Translinear Light. Following a 25-year break from major public performances, she returned to the stage for three U.S. appearances in the fall of 2006, culminating on November 4 with a concert for the San Francisco Jazz Festival with her son Ravi, drummer Roy Haynes, and bassist Charlie Haden.^[10]
Alice Coltrane died of respiratory failure at West Hills Hospital and Medical Center in suburban Los Angeles in 2007, aged 69.^[11] She is buried alongside John Coltrane in Pinelawn Memorial Park, Farmingdale, Suffolk County, New York.

 

Impact

 

Paul Weller dedicated his song "Song For Alice (Dedicated to the Beautiful Legacy of Mrs. Coltrane)", from his 2008 album 22 Dreams, to Coltrane; the track entitled "Alice" on Sunn O)))'s 2009 album Monoliths & Dimensions was similarly inspired. Electronic musician Flying Lotus is the grand-nephew of Alice Coltrane.^[12] The song "That Alice" on Laura Veirs' album Warp and Weft is about Coltrane.^[13] Orange Cake Mix included a song entitled "Alice Coltrane" on their 1997 LP Silver Lining Underwater.

 

Discography

As leader

 

• A Monastic Trio (Impulse!, 1968)
• Cosmic Music (Impulse!, 1966–68) with John Coltrane
• Huntington Ashram Monastery (Impulse!, 1969)
• Ptah, the El Daoud (Impulse!, 1970)
• Journey in Satchidananda (Impulse!, 1970)
• Universal Consciousness (Impulse!, 1971)^[14]
• World Galaxy (Impulse!, 1972)
• Lord of Lords (Impulse!, 1973)
• Reflection on Creation and Space (a Five Year View) (Impulse!, 1973; compilation)
• Illuminations (Columbia, 1974) with Carlos Santana
• Eternity (Warner Bros, 1975)
• Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana (Warner Bros., 1976)
• Transcendence (Warner Bros., 1977)
• Transfiguration (Warner Bros., 1978)
• Turiya Sings (Avatar Book Institute, 1982)
• Divine Songs (Avatar, 1987)
• Infinite Chants (Avatar, 1990)
• Glorious Chants (Avatar, 1995)
• Priceless Jazz Collection (GRP, 1998; compilation)
• Astral Meditations (Impulse!, 1999; compilation)
• Translinear Light (Impulse!, 2004)
• The Impulse Story (Impulse!, 2006; compilation)
• World Spiritual Classics: Volume I: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda (Luaka Bop, 2017; compilation)

 

As sidewoman

With John Coltrane

• Live at the Village Vanguard Again! (Impulse!, 1966)
• Live in Japan (Impulse!, 1966; released 1973)
• Stellar Regions (Impulse!, 1967; released 1995)
• Expression (Impulse!, 1967)
• The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording (Impulse!, 1967; released 2001)
• Infinity (Impulse!, 1972)

With Terry Gibbs

• Terry Gibbs Plays Jewish Melodies in Jazztime (Mercury, 1963)
• Hootenanny My Way (Mercury, 1963)
• El Nutto (Limelight, 1964)

With Charlie Haden

• Closeness (Horizon, 1976)

With Joe Henderson

• The Elements (Milestone, 1973)

With McCoy Tyner

• Extensions (Blue Note, 1970)

With various

• Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool

See also

• List of jazz arrangers

 

References

 

1. Chris Kelsey. Alice Coltrane Biography at AllMusic
2. 
   
3. "The Lucky Thompson Discography 1957–1974". Retrieved February 17, 2011.
4. 
   
5. Voce, Steve (16 January 2007). "Alice Coltrane – Obituaries". The Independent. Archived from the original on December 24, 2012. Retrieved October 9, 2015.
6. 
   
7. "Transfiguration and Transcendence: The Music of Alice Coltrane | Pitchfork". pitchfork.com. Retrieved 2017-02-28.
8. 
   
9. "Transfiguration and Transcendence: The Music of Alice Coltrane | Pitchfork". pitchfork.com. Retrieved 2017-02-28.
10. 
    
11. "Swamini A. C. Turiyasangitananda". Sai Anantam Ashram. Archived from the original on May 21, 2007. Retrieved June 9, 2007.
12. 
    
13. Hazell, Ed (2002). "Alice Coltrane". In Kernfeld, B. The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. i. London: Macmillan. p. 494.
14. 
    
15. Transfiguration (CD liner notes). Coltrane, Alice. Burbank, California: Sepiatone. 1978. STONE01. Coltrane wrote the liner notes as Turiyasangitananda. She had written liner notes as Turiya Aparna for Universal Consciousness (1971).
16. 
    
17. "Background". Sai Anantam Ashram. Archived from the original on May 21, 2007. Retrieved June 9, 2007.
18. 
    
19. "Alice Coltrane Quartet featuring Ravi Coltrane with Charlie Haden & Roy Haynes". SFJAZZ. Archived from the original on December 10, 2008. Retrieved May 25, 2007.
20. 
    
21. Ratliff, Ben (January 15, 2007). "Alice Coltrane, Jazz Artist and Spiritual Leader, Dies at 69". The New York Times. Retrieved April 11, 2016.
22. 
    
23. Chris Martins, "Flying Lotus Rising", LA Weekly, May 13, 2010.
24. 
    
25. Gill, Andy (August 16, 2013). "Album review: Laura Veirs, Warp and Weft (Bella Union)". The Independent. Retrieved September 24, 2013.
26. 
    
14. Talent in Action. Billboard. Nielsen Business Media, Inc. 13 March 1971. pp. 28–. ISSN 0006-2510.

External links

1. Official website
2. Alice Coltrane at All About Jazz
3. Alice Coltrane at AllMusic
4. Alice Coltrane discography
5. Alice Coltrane Playlist: Divine Ferocity
6. In-depth Alice Coltrane obituary with a record-by-record overview of her career from NewYorkNightTrain.com
7. Last Song For Alice Coltrane, The Indypendent, Steven Wishnia
8. RBMA Radio On Demand – Sound Obsession – Volume 7 – Tribute to Alice Coltrane – Kirk Degiorgio (The Beauty Room, As One)
9. Alice in Wonder and Awe – An interview at ascentmagazine.com on jazz, God and the spiritual path.
10. Alice Coltrane at NPR Music
11. Alice Coltrane in discussion with A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami