In late 1965, Alice Coltrane replaced McCoy Tyner in the John Coltrane Quartet. In the eyes of Coltrane devotees she would be held responsible – just as Yoko Ono was four years later with The Beatles – for breaking up one of the key bands of not only the era, but of all time.

But in Alice Coltrane’s case (and indeed Yoko’s), nothing could have been further from the truth. A year earlier, on 9 December 1964, John Coltrane had completed A Love Supreme, on which he documented the powerful spiritual awakening he experienced following a drug overdose 10 years earlier. A matter of weeks later, the saxophonist was entering what historians now call ‘Late Period Coltrane’, where he embraced ‘New Thing’ freedom as the basis for his musical experimentation.

He added second saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and second drummer Rashid Ali to his quartet in mid-1965. It was these changes that prompted the departure of first, pianist McCoy Tyner, who said, “All I could hear was a lot of noise,” and drummer Elvin Jones in January 1966, who complained his ability was being doubted by having another drummer playing alongside him.

Coltrane’s music was now well and truly in flux, reflecting the social turmoil in American society at the time. Alice Coltrane’s biographer Franya Berkman, whose Monumental Eternal: The Music of Alice Coltrane argues that Alice’s direct involvement in John’s music proved to be the catalyst for his spiritual rebirth at this time, as well as a source of encouragement and support for some of his most far reaching experiments.

Coltrane was pursuing his musical muse with the urgency of someone who had somehow caught sight of their destiny. The albums Transition and Ascension, both recorded in June 1965, marked the beginning of what became known as ‘Late Period Coltrane,’ and works such as the aforementioned Ascension, Om, Meditations, Kulu Sé Mama and others, which, Berkman argues, were the result of Alice’s quiet encouragement as the saxophonist’s musical roller-coaster ride into eternity gathered pace.

It’s often overlooked that when Coltrane recorded the final track of Love Supreme – ‘Acknowledgement’ – in December 1964, he also recorded a further take that added New Thing saxophonist Archie Shepp and bassist Art Davis. When this extra take was finally released some 40 years later, it revealed how even then, Coltrane’s music was already in transition, even though the organic unity of the A Love Supreme suite in its released form suggested otherwise. But just two and a half years later after recording one of the defining albums of the decade, John Coltrane died of liver cancer at Huntington Hospital, New York on 17 July 1967.

It hit Alice hard, and she entered what today would be called a mental health crisis. In her self-published tract Monument Eternal, which Berkman quotes, Alice took the practices of acetic discipline to the limit, embarking on an extreme programme of meditation, sometimes sitting for 20 hours a day. There were days when she slept only two hours, her weight went down to 43 kilos, although in her telling not through grief or depression but the extreme austerities she was undertaking: she experienced hallucinations, heard voices coming from trees and had to be hospitalised more than once.

“During an excruciating test to withstand heat, my right hand succumbed to third degree burns,” she wrote. “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.”

Her family, understandably, feared for her sanity.

In 1970, Alice spoke of this period of turbulence in her life to Black Journal, giving powerful insight into her innermost thoughts at the time: “I would like to say that there were days when I spent more than 20 hours in meditation, and there were periods of time that lapsed – two or three weeks – that I know I was well beyond what human endurance is when it comes to meditation. I found out so much about myself and the people around me and about my husband and I also found out that whatever questions I might have had in my mind concerning events in the future or past were answered.

“My personal experience in meditation brought me face to face with God. Hand in hand, heart to heart and almost to the point He was me and I was Him, or we were just us. I don’t know how to praise it, it was a closeness that is just impossible to be that close with another human. I know that it gave me my freedom, it gave me my true independence. No matter where I go in the world, or whatever I do, to whatever my involvement, I am free. The world cannot claim me anymore, like I said there were demands made, definite demands which took me away from the world and at one point from everything, music, family and all because the sacrifice had to be within an inch of my life, almost literally, and I feel that because it was such a high price paid – now I can’t say it was the highest prices of Buddha or Christ because that was a life, that life – but I’ve been very close to ending my life and I feel I’ve been given my freedom now that I can act, I can live as I want to, and nothing can – there’s no claim, no one can buy me, or there’s no action I have to pay, I have no commerce to pay, all of it has been given back to me, that I’m free.”

Alice and her swami at the Satchidananda Ashram, 1970s (photo: Yogaville/Integral Yoga Archives)

In December 1970, after making Journey in Satchidananda for the Impulse! label, an album that is now recognised as a sublime expression of spiritual jazz, Alice Coltrane embarked on a five-week pilgrimage to India. She now had a guru in the person of Swami Satchidananda whom she first encountered in 1969, and who guided her on her trip. She swam in the Ganges, visited monasteries and the Taj Mahal. On her return, she wrote that the trip purged her of suffering, “Having made the journey to the East, a most important part of my Sadhana [spiritual struggle] has been completed.”

While a part of Satchidananda’s community, Alice entered a period of intense creativity and following on from her first post- John Coltrane release, A Monastic Trio (1968), came Ptah the El Daoud, Journey in Satchidananda, Universal Consciousness, World Galaxy and Lord of Lords.

On 21 February 1971, the followers of Swami Satchidananda mounted a concert at Carnegie Hall as a fund raiser for the guru’s Yoga Institute on West 13th Street, New York (it still belongs to the organisation). Headliners were Laura Nyro, the Rascals and Alice Coltrane. Alice’s part of the concert was recorded by producer Ed Michel and recently released (see review, Jazzwise 294) as Alice Coltrane: The Carnegie Hall Concert, a two CD set on Impulse!, as part of The Year of Alice an entire year of celebration of her music and influence by the Coltrane Home.

Alice’s ensemble was configured after Ornette Coleman’s double quartet on Free Jazz and the basic ensemble of Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. It comprised two saxophonists – Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp on tenor and soprano and flute – two bassists in Jimmy Garrison and Cecil McBee, and two drummers in Ed Blackwell and Clifford Jarvis; plus a couple of amateur musicians Alice brought along from her spiritual community, Tulsi on tamboura and Kumar Kramer on harmonium.

As Ed Michel, producer of The Carnegie Hall Concert points out, it was, “A live session with no weak links in the band. Two profoundly powerful horn soloists, two killer bass-drum teams, and a leader who was just that, who was a powerful force at the keyboard and/or harp, and who was always in control of the musical situation. Every player a major soloist, all conversant with an open-ended ‘free’ situation, and themselves forces in the post-(John) Coltrane musical universe.”

Although the intention was to play just a 20 minute set, the first number ‘Journey in Satchidananda’ lasted 15 minutes, while ‘Shiva-Loka’ lasted 14’40”, ‘Africa’ lasted almost half and hour and ‘Leo’ 20 and a half minutes! The concert staked out a duality that had surfaced in Alice Coltrane’s approach to music. The first two titles were how she conceptualised her own music and she wanted to define her style – introspective, contemplative and impressionistic – what many called spiritual jazz because of the emotional weight the music carried. The final two concert titles, intense, searing and questing, with their overtones of New Thing experimentation, was how she represented the music of her late husband.

This duality in her music, as she told Essence magazine in 1971, was something she wanted release from, “In some form all my life I have always been subservient: servant, nurse, cook. The man is number one.” And now, from beyond the grave, Alice Coltrane found herself again subservient to her late husband’s legacy, what she described in a 1987 Jazz Jamboree interview as, “Playing concerts that were a tribute to John Coltrane…basically playing tribute to him… to his legacy, to his genius.”

But these concerts were very much at odds with her own musical hopes, desires and ambitions, “Well, I like spiritual music,” she asserted in the same interview. “When I see what I would be doing if not a part of the Coltrane legacy it would only be spiritual music, it would not be avant garde.”

While Universal Consciousness gained a number of favourable reviews, her final two Impulse! albums, World Galaxy and Lord of Lords, did not fare well at the hands of critics, but they were in tune with artists who saw outer space as a metaphor for a place where black people may be free; such as Sun Ra and the spacey music of Herbie Hancock’s first edition of Headhunters.

But Alice’s interest was turning to wider horizons. She appeared on Carlos Santana’s album Illuminations in 1974, touring the album with him. She continued her own career on records with Warner Bros., who signed her in 1975, however, there was less and less original material and more and more Indian hymnic material, especially hymns associated with the Bhakti revival movement in India. In 1976, she said she received a divine message to start an ashram, and renouncing her secular life she donned the orange robes of a Swamini. Her last two albums for Warner Bros, Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana and Transcendence (both 1977) contained devotional hymns to be sung in the ashram. Soon after 1978’s Transfiguration she no longer performed in public or appeared on record.

A few years later, a series of her self-released cassette tapes briefly surfaced, revealing her singing voice self-accompanied on electric organ and modular synthesiser, creating ambient soundscapes with her students singing Sanskrit chants. They were revealing of the spiritual world she now inhabited, where her students and others gathered around her every Sunday at her ashram. They were devotional songs for fellow worshippers and there is even a version of ‘Journey to Satchidananda’ that revisits the melody of her 1970’s Impulse! recording. These were released on CD in 2017, as World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda (Luaka Bop).

As far as commercial recordings went, it seemed that the closing cadence on Alice Coltrane’s connection with jazz had long since been played, but in 2004, she surprised the music world when Universal released Translinear Light, her first commercial recording in 26 years.

Playing piano, organ and synthesiser, her collaborators included her son Ravi, as well as Charlie Haden, Jack DeJohnette, Jeff ‘Tain’ Watts and James Genus.

“My son was in a position of practically pleading, ‘Mom, you must do this, you have to!’” she explained. “It sort of originated from him, ‘Mom, please make a record, make a CD.’ So I said okay, and this is what we did. On the CD there is a piece called ‘A Hymn’; what I try to express in the music, with intensity and depth, comes from the heart and the spirit, and sometimes not even your mind can rationalise it. It comes from the heart and it comes from the spirit and that’s the major character of creative music. It really doesn’t come from the brain, it comes from within. You are creating − it comes from the heart, the spirit, the soul, you’re not manufacturing somebody else’s plan, somebody else’s blueprint, somebody else’s idea that’s not yours, so when you’re creating that’s the beauty side of art, you know? It comes from within you.”

And then she returned to her religious life as Swamini, with Translinear Light ending up as her final album. But although she died on 12 January 2007, she began to enjoy a sainted, metaphorical afterlife. Her music continued to resonate through New Age, jazz and experimental electronic music in general, and Björk’s music in particular; she was name checked by Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead; The Jam’s Paul Weller dedicated ‘Song for Alice’ to her; she was a recognised inspiration to Joanna Newsome; while her great-nephew Stephen Ellison, known as Flying Lotus, drew on her sense of scale and ambition in his work as a producer of electronic music; and her spiritual jazz is an inspiration to the circle of musicians around Kamasi Washington.

With The Year of Alice presenting an ambitious concert series, education outreach projects, panel discussions, a dance collaboration honouring Alice Coltrane’s creative spirit, producer Ed Michel reflects how the release of Alice Coltrane: The Carnegie Concert plays into this and the continuing influence of Alice Coltrane: “I hope, as I hoped in 1971, that the audience will keep expanding as time moves forward. The way people access music today means that exposure to what used to be thought of as ‘out’ is much more available and accessible than it was when this was recorded, and it’s a lot easier for friends to expose friends to something new, and that listeners will experience surprise and delight at something new and expansive. I hope people will feel it listening to it.”

Brandee Younger on Alice Coltrane

Brandee Younger (photo: Erin O'Brien)

“Alice Coltrane was a black woman playing the harp. As a child, how could I know that this instrument could be for me when I never saw anyone who looked like me playing it? Or, incorporating it into black music? When I think about what Alice Coltrane means to me and the many ways that she has inspired me, there is just so much but the first and most impactful is in the form of representation; cultural, musical and gender representation. She truly transcended tradition by persevering as a woman in a male dominated industry, while creating musical space for a rare instrument in jazz on an instrument very rarely played by black people. As I often felt detached from the music that I was learning as child, it wasn’t until I started to hear the harp in the context of a rhythm section, that it instantly felt relatable. Today, I feel honored to have developed this sense of attachment to the harp and sense of belonging that I didn’t have before; the sense of freedom and what feels like permission to take the instrument down non-traditional paths. I owe that to Alice Coltrane.”

This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Jazzwise. Never miss an issue – subscribe to Jazzwise today