When Alice Coltrane died a little over a decade ago, she left behind a considerable music legacy. There was her stint in John Coltrane’s band, where she played piano and helped push her husband’s playing into the stratosphere. There was a series of solo albums for Impulse that are almost outside genre: they pit jazz rhythms against her harp playing, with healthy doses of psychedelica mixed in. And there was her late-life career resurgence: 2006’s Translinear Light, an album featuring two of her sons, Ravi and Oran, plus heavyweights like Jack DeJohnette and Charlie Haden.
But there was a gap in the career, when Coltrane took 25 years off on a spiritual journey, one leading her to adopt a new name and new religion.
Out among some mountains northwest of Los Angeles, she founded a religious retreat, meditated and fasted, and led a spiritual life. And occasionally, cassettes of music found their way to collectors.
See, between 1980 and 2004, Coltrane didn’t work with a record company. But even as she lived at the Vedantic Center, she was still composing, performing and recording music. A series of cassette releases were sold at the Center, featuring powerfully spiritual music and continuing the quest her 70s records showed her travelling. For the first time, this music has been compiled and given an official release by Luaka Bop. It’s a compelling, genre-busting, and absorbing listen.
Where albums like Journey in Satchidananda or Illuminations had Coltrane using instrumental jazz to create spiritual music, these lost albums are purely spiritual: her synthesizers drone and push the music forward, Coltrane sings and chants. Gone are the reed sections, piano solos, or even jazz standards. In their place are chants, handclaps and religious devotion.
Trust me, it’s unlike anything you’ve ever heard.
World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda opens with “Om Rama,” which begins with a choir chanting and banging tambourines, invoking a Hindu deity as Coltrane’s keyboard drones and pushes; about four minutes in there’s a key change and the rhythm slows down for a different set of chants for a few minutes, before returning to the original, quicker rhythm for an extended coda. Here, in nine minutes, one gets the full experience of exuberance and bliss, plus the disciplined focus of religious devotion. By the time her last organ chord fades away over nine minutes later, it’s hard not to get an impression of what this music was meant to convey, both to listener and performer.
Elsewhere, World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda is more intimate and intense.
“Om Shanti” has her playing quiet organ chords and chanting, leading a choir as they chant in unison like something from a church service, while “Hari Narayan” has the closest thing to a jazz backbeat, but has chants against chants, not to mention occasional yells of passion, with her playing keeping things on a musical direction.
And indeed, it’s Coltrane’s jazz background which keeps things interesting here.
In what could’ve easily come together as another New Agey compilation of chants and percussion, sitar and vague trappings of Eastern Religion – if not outright Orientalism – it’s Coltrane’s skill and talent as a keyboard player which keeps things going in a new direction.
Under her, the music builds and shifts, mixing western and eastern elements into something that’s not jazz, gospel or New Age. It’s fusion, sort of, but nothing like what was happening elsewhere; remember, at the same time she was recording these songs, Weather Report was jamming off the same chords for what felt like hours, while Miles Davis was busy re-interpreting Cyndi Lauper, and Wynton Marsalis was busy scheming with Stanley Crouch to put jazz into a museum.
Indeed, the only “jazz” number here is a version of “Journey in Satchidananda” which only really alludes to her original.
This one’s slow, perhaps majestic, with her organ landing it the feeling of listening to something in a huge church. There’s no horn solos, no skittering drums or walking basslines.
By the time the compilation is over, with the 12-minute “Rama Katha,” so are the driving rhythm and stomps, leaving us with what might be Coltrane’s legacy: slow, powerful playing and focused, impassioned chanting. It’s the music of quest for fulfilment, as far out there as anything you’re going to hear in 2017 and as powerful as any gospel you’re going to hear in any year. Recommended.