Alice Coltrane: enlightenment and rage of the great spiritual teacher of jazz

Saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, son of jazz legends John and Alice Coltrane, remembers that Hindu spiritual leader Satchidananda Saraswati was a constant presence in the family home on Long Island, New York. Also, that they used to have horses and that Satchidananda “jumped on their backs to ride them without a saddle”; such was his “powerful connection with people and animals.” He, for some reason that still escapes him more than half a century later, preferred to be called Paul, not Ravi.

The guru had become a great support for his mother after the death in 1967 of saxophonist John Coltrane, one of the great musicians of the 20th century. Alice suddenly found herself 29 years old, widowed and with four small children, three of her own and her eldest from a previous relationship with her husband. “Now I will have to live my entire life without him, although I know that his invisible hand helps me,” she declared in an interview with

Ebony

magazine . In

Monument Eternal,

her memoir, she talks about what followed next: sleepless nights, hallucinations and meditations of up to 20 hours a day. She lost 15 kilos of weight during a profuse mourning not only for a husband; She also left a “spiritual companion” and the musician in whose quintet she played in the last two years of the brilliant career of the saxophonist, who died at the age of 40.

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Luckily, grief did not prevent Alice from finding her own sound: devotional and enigmatic music with traces of

blues

. She began playing the harp, a gift from John, and the technique she developed with it, her son Ravi, at 58, a jazz star in his own right, says in a video interview from San Francisco, influenced her approach. approaching the piano: “He translated the

glissando

technique

into a kind of cascading sound.”

It is enough to read the critics of the time to understand that not everyone took the widow of the great musician seriously. She had to deal with the shadow of a gigantic legacy, and to do so, furthermore, in a man's world. “Women instrumentalists could only draw attention to the supposedly masculine qualities of her playing: they were praised if her rhythm was strong, her sound broad, and her improvisations challenging,” writes Franya J. Berkman in her biography of the artist. . “Those who expected to find the aggressive intensity that characterized her work with John Coltrane were disappointed to say the least in Alice.”

Alice Coltrane, in 1970.Michael Ochs Archives

The reception of his work improved over the years, until it exploded in the last decade, thanks to the rescue of some albums that are not like the rest, and the tribute of rock references (Radiohead) or hip

-hop

and electronic music ( Flying Lotus, who is also his nephew). The sign of the times seems to be blowing in their favor: Alice Coltrane (with the rest of what they label as spiritual jazz) can fit into some of the currents that define the present, from Afrofuturism to the search for spiritual alternatives in a fractured world. The non-hierarchical narrative promoted by new forms of musical consumption also helps, and that has contributed, Ravi believes, to making it connect better than other legends of the genre with the younger generations.

Alice Coltrane's career took a big leap with her fourth album,

Journey in Satchidananda,

a masterpiece that sounds out of time and is dedicated to the guru who introduced her to music and Eastern religions. The Hindu tradition, she later explained, was the one that best adapted to the search for a universalist spirituality that she also defined in her last years with John Coltrane. After recording, she left in December 1970 with Satchidananda on a five-week trip to India: she swam in the Ganges, visited monasteries in the Himalayas, and made a pilgrimage to the Taj Mahal.

In February, a week after the album's release, the leader recruited two saxophonists (Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp, notable disciples of John Coltrane), two double bassists (Jimmy Garrison and Cecil McBee), two drummers (Ed Blackwell and Clifford Jarvis ), and two tambura (Kumar Kramer) and harmonium (Tulsi Reynolds) players to play live at Carnegie Hall in New York two songs from that album and two compositions from her husband's repertoire. They asked them not to exceed the agreed 20 minutes, and they ended up close to 80.

The lost tapes

His producer at the time, Ed Michel, recorded the concert, thinking about a publication that never came, because the bosses of Impulse!, a label in which John Coltrane had been active since 1961, thought that it would have no commercial outlet. That disdain, Michel writes in the new album's booklet, was hiding something else: if they kept it in the catalog it was because it held the keys to the saxophonist's legacy. On March 22, the music of that night, which was partially known in pirated editions, finally saw the light of day 53 years later, after a reconstruction based on the recording of two tracks that Michel kept as a souvenir. The original four-track tapes were lost: one was in the family archive, and the other in the coffers of the record company, whose ownership changed hands over the years (today it belongs to Universal).

The rescue of

The Carnegie Hall Concert

is important because there are no live documents preserved from that decisive period in Alice Coltrane's career, but above all because of the second part of the concert: the long performances by

Leo

and

Africa

prove that that band also knew sound rabid and present their leader as something more than the beatific caricature to which she and by extension spiritual jazz are often reduced.

The goal of the evening was to raise funds for the Indian guru, and singer-songwriter Laura Nyro and the rock band The Rascals also performed, whose leader, Felix Cavaliere, was, like Nyro, a disciple of Satchidananda. For him, who left his career as a businessman and embraced religion after the death of his wife, it was not the first collision with pop culture: the

swami

(teacher) arrived in the United States in 1966 and became famous by pronouncing the blessing of opening of the Woodstock festival. At Carnegie Hall, he raised $8,000 (the equivalent of $61,000 today, about 56,500 euros) for his yoga institute, which, in the midst of the explosion of the

new age era,

went from having a headquarters in New York to 25 centers around the world. the country between 1970 and 1972, the year in which, as writer Lauren Graf notes in the script, he was involved in the first of a series of scandals “due to his [inappropriate] relationships with his students.” “That guru, like many others, turned out to be too human,” Graf concludes.

Alice Coltrane with Swami Satchidananda, on the Ganges River, in 1970. Satchidananda Ashram–Yogaville

A couple of weeks ago, McBee, one of the two double bassists at Carnegie Hall, recalled from his New York apartment in a video conference with EL PAÍS, to which he appeared dressed in an elegant black tie and shirt. That concert, he said, “was quite demanding.” He never knew they had recorded it until he was recently contacted by the label. “Thank goodness, because then I was a young man making my way in New York and I think I would have been nervous.” In the years that followed, McBee would become one of the most interesting composers in avant-garde jazz and also one of the most sought-after accompanists on the scene.

“Alice was the calmest and most introspective person you could imagine,” explains the double bassist, who is still active at 88 years old. “She left you a lot of freedom, and she trusted that you knew how to make decisions that were out of the ordinary. She rarely spoke to you, and if she did, it was always to talk about music.” One of those rare occasions was on the recording of

Journey in Satchidananda,

when the pianist dictated the infectious 3X4 melodic bass line that opens the album. “They were both very quiet and intuitive,” Ravi Coltrane confirms about his parents. “That's why they understood each other so well. And I think they influenced each other a lot. “I have never met a person even remotely similar to my mother, and that makes it so difficult to describe,” adds the musician, who was not even two years old when the saxophonist died.

Ravi Coltrane rehearses with his mother, Alice Coltrane, in front of a portrait of John Coltrane, at her home in 2004.J.Emilio Flores (Corbis via Getty Images)

McBee first encountered the pianist during his years in Detroit, where she was born in 1937. In the early '60s, she was still called Alice McLeod and performed

bebop

. She grew up playing the organ in church, she went to study in Paris for a while and upon returning to the United States she was in vibraphonist Terry Gibbs' band. In New York, she met John Coltrane. They married in 1965 and soon she joined the saxophonist's new and revolutionary quintet, along with Jimmy Garrison, the old double bassist, and two other young men, the recently deceased Pharoah Sanders and the drummer Rashied Ali. None of the three had it easy with the leader's legion of fans: they blamed them for leaving behind his classic quartet and with it, a certain orthodoxy. But she got the worst of it, both before and after her death, she was left with the power over which unreleased recordings would see the light of day and in what way.

John and Alice Coltrane, photographed in 1966 by Chuck Stewart.

Increasingly distant from jazz, Alice Coltrane moved with her family to Los Angeles in 1972, where she achieved the rank of

swamini

, teacher, and abandoned her secular name for Turiya, an abbreviation of Turiyasangitananda (in Sanskrit: “the song of highest bliss of the Transcendental Lord. She also changed labels (to Warner) and even recorded an album with Santana,

Illuminations

(1974). She founded a Vedic school in her home, and in the early 1980s a monastery

(ashram)

in the Santa Monica Mountains. By then, she was already retired from public life, but, concentrating on two new instruments, her voice and synthesizers, she never stopped making music, nor did she stop recording it and publishing it on cassettes that were sold at the

ashram

. Yoga teacher Purusha Hickson, one of her first disciples, recalled in a conversation with EL PAÍS the impact of hearing her sing one of those tapes for the first time: “Her voice was very powerful. She told us that she was simply God manifesting through her body. She was the great reference in my life.”

In 2004, her son Ravi convinced her to record one last jazz-tinged album. In 2007, she died in Los Angeles. She was 69 years old.

Cover of the compilation 'Turiyasangitananda: World Spirituality Classics 1' (Luaka Bop, 2017), which brings together songs from the cassettes that Alice Coltrane recorded for believers and sympathizers.

On the tenth anniversary of her death, Luaka Bop, a label founded by David Byrne, successfully released a compilation of songs from those hard-to-find cassettes, and with it, a reconsideration of the artist's devotional music. A couple of years ago, Impulse! He released one of those tapes in its entirety for the first time on CD and vinyl,

Turiya Sings

(1982). Ravi explains her renewed interest in her mother by saying that the world finally understood what she wanted to express. She “she was not seeking fame, recognition or critical favor. She considered creativity as a gift that does not belong to you, that must be shared. It is a very special music, and everyone encounters it at their own pace. Luckily, more and more people are coming to that station.” McBee, for his part, believes that the albums they made in the seventies “are better understood now than they were then.”

The publication of the Carnegie Hall concert is the first milestone in what the three living children have dubbed “The Alice Year.” “We thought it was a good idea to dedicate ourselves to her memory before my father's centenary in 2026, to dedicate her big moment to her as well,” clarifies Ravi. Among the celebrations is a plan to reissue old albums in new formats, rescue more unpublished materials, the launch of an “oral history” project about Alice Coltrane, the commissioning of a ballet by choreographer Alonzo King based on her music, an exhibition of contemporary artists in Los Angeles or the restoration of the harp that John bought her shortly before he died.

The instrument took several months to arrive, and when it finally did the saxophonist was already dead. In her memoir, Alice Coltrane recalls that when the windows of her Long Island home were open, the wind would sometimes rattle her strings. As if an “invisible force” was tearing them.

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