Alice Coltrane
A musician who began at the organ of a Detroit church and, through waves of harp and Sanskrit chants, turned jazz into a language of prayer.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
People around her ⏳🌊
- FamilyErnie Farrow
Her half-brother and a bassist, he drew her onto the Detroit jazz scene.
- InfluenceBud Powell
A master of bebop piano she grew close to and learned from in her Paris days, he was the model for her playing in her youth.
- FamilyJohn Coltrane
Her husband and bandleader, whose music and spirituality opened the path she would follow.
- ColleaguePharoah Sanders
Played in John's band, and after John's death took the saxophone on her signature works.
- TeacherSwami Satchidananda
An Indian spiritual teacher she met in 1970, who left his mark on her spiritual life and her album titles.
- FamilyRavi Coltrane
Her son, a saxophonist, who produced her 2004 comeback album and shared her final stage.
I. The Detroit organ · 1937–1959 (age 0–22)
(Detroit) In August 1937 she was born Alice McLeod in Detroit, Michigan. Raised by her father, Solon McLeod, and her mother, Anna, she spent her childhood on the city's east side, where Black families who had come up from the South in search of auto-factory work had settled together. (Church) Her mother sang in the church choir, and around the age of seven Alice began taking classical piano lessons. As a teenager she played piano and organ for church services, accompanying the gospel singing. The surging organ and the hymnlike, congregational repetitions heard later in her music are rooted in the chapels of these years. (Brother) Her half-brother Ernie Farrow was a bassist who played in Yusef Lateef's band. Through him Alice came close to the jazz that lived outside the church, and even as she kept up her classical lessons she was drawn to the music of the clubs. (Bebop) In the 1950s Detroit was a cradle of bebop (the jazz, from the 1940s onward, of improvisation over fast tempos and complex harmonies), nurturing players such as Barry Harris, Tommy Flanagan and Kenny Burrell. Alice played in trios at local clubs and absorbed Bud Powell's right-hand phrasing. Her two faces, church accompanist and bebop pianist, grew up together in these years.
II. Paris and New York · 1959–1963 (age 22–26)
(Marriage) In the late 1950s she married the bebop singer Kenny 'Pancho' Hagood. Hagood had sung with Dizzy Gillespie's big band in the 1940s and was the vocalist who sang 「Darn That Dream」 on Miles Davis's 「Birth of the Cool」 sessions. (Paris) Around 1959 the couple moved to Paris. Black jazz musicians who had left America were gathering there, and Bud Powell too had settled in at the city's Blue Note club. Alice is said to have grown close to Powell and learned from his playing. Footage survives of her playing piano on Parisian television around 1960. (Parting) In 1960 her daughter Michelle was born. But Hagood's heroin addiction cut the marriage short, and Alice returned to Detroit with her young daughter. Her biographer Franya Berkman sees this homecoming as the turning point at which she began to make a living on her own. (Gibbs) In 1962 she joined vibraphonist Terry Gibbs's quartet as its pianist and took the stage in New York. In 1963 she recorded with Gibbs an album of Jewish melodies arranged as jazz. In these years, when she earned her living accompanying in other people's bands, her playing was still the tidy bebop of the Bud Powell lineage.
III. The Coltrane home · 1963–1967 (age 26–30)
(Birdland) In 1963, while working in Terry Gibbs's quartet, Alice met John Coltrane. She later recalled feeling a deep spiritual resonance the first time she heard him play. The two soon began living together. (Home) In 1964 John bought a house in Dix Hills, in Huntington, Long Island, and that year their son John Jr. was born. Ravi followed in 1965 and Oran in 1967. The two married in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, in 1965 (some records say 1966), and Michelle, as John's stepdaughter, took the Coltrane name. Around the time John was writing 「A Love Supreme」, the house was a place where meditation, reading and practice mingled. (Joining) When McCoy Tyner left the band at the end of 1965, Alice took his place in early 1966. There were whispers that she had won the chair because she was his wife, but John defended her, saying she played in a way that slipped free of harmonic frameworks and widened the textures of sound. With Rashied Ali on drums and Pharoah Sanders on tenor, the band leaned toward free jazz, setting aside fixed meter and chords and moving toward masses of sound. In the summer of 1966 they toured Japan together. (Loss) On July 17, 1967, John died of liver cancer at the age of forty. At the funeral the groups of Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman played. Twenty-nine-year-old Alice was left with four children and unfinished music.
A live recording from May 1966, a few months after Alice joined John's band. It is the best place to hear what different sound she brought to McCoy Tyner's chair.
- In 「My Favorite Things」, Alice's piano solo makes waves with broken chords (arpeggios), rolling the harmonies up and down. Listen to it against McCoy Tyner's solid blocks of chords and the difference is clear.
- Rashied Ali's drums scatter sound rather than keep a steady beat. In a space where the meter seems to vanish, it is worth following how the piano holds up the floor.
- Jimmy Garrison's long solo bass introduction to 「My Favorite Things」 is one of the most talked-about passages on this album. It even captures the hush of the audience before the tune begins.
- Pharoah Sanders's tenor splits its notes and soars like a scream. In its contrast with John's soprano saxophone, the two horns alternating, Alice's piano fills the space between them.
IV. Harp and meditation · 1967–1972 (age 30–35)
(Harp) John had ordered a harp during his lifetime, and the instrument is said to have arrived at the house after his death. Alice learned the harp almost entirely on her own. The wavelike sound of fingers sweeping down the strings soon became the signature timbre of her music. (Debut) In 1968, on the Impulse label and in the hands of producer Bob Thiele, she released her first album as leader, 「A Monastic Trio」. Much of it was recorded in the studio John had built in the Dix Hills house. 「Cosmic Music」, which added her playing to John's recordings, came out the same year. (Ordeal) In 1968–69 she went through a period in which she barely slept and lost a great deal of weight. She wrote in her autobiography 「Monument Eternal」 that she accepted this as a spiritual trial and a process of purification. This passage, in which she crossed from loss into faith, set the course of her later music. (Swami) In 1970 she met the Indian spiritual teacher Swami Satchidananda, became his disciple, and traveled to India that year. On 「Ptah, the El Daoud」 and 「Journey in Satchidananda」, recorded the same year, she joined forces again with Pharoah Sanders. The drone of Indian music and the tambura were set alongside a jazz rhythm section for the first time. (Organ) On 「Universal Consciousness」 in 1971 she returned to the organ of her childhood. Ornette Coleman helped transcribe the string arrangements. In 1972 she stirred controversy with 「Infinity」, which overlaid strings on John's unreleased recordings.
Recorded in January 1970 in the home studio at Dix Hills. Setting two tenors, Pharoah Sanders and Joe Henderson, side by side, it shows her standing as leader in the house John had left.
- On the title track the two tenors trade solos. Sanders's rough, fiery sound stands in sharp contrast to Henderson's sleek, supple lines.
- On 「Blue Nile」 the two saxophonists switch to flute, and Alice's harp makes waves with sweeps down the strings (glissando). It is the best-loved track on the album.
- Ron Carter's bass and Ben Riley's drums are calm and poised. Rather than the tumult of free jazz, a spiritual atmosphere builds over a deeply settled groove.
- Alice moves between piano and harp from track to track. In the piano you hear the roots of Detroit bebop; in the harp, a new path.
Recorded in the year she met Swami Satchidananda and traveled to India. Bearing her teacher's name in its title, it is the work in which her spiritual turn first became fully realized music.
- The title track opens with Cecil McBee's bass endlessly repeating a short figure (ostinato). This repetition acts as an anchor holding the whole piece in place.
- The harp ripples over a sustained tone (drone) laid low by the tambura, an Indian string instrument. The sense that the chord never changes but stays in one place creates a meditative mood.
- Pharoah Sanders plays soprano saxophone lines that echo the melodic ornaments of Indian music. Rashied Ali's drums fill the space with glittering cymbals rather than a precise beat.
- 「Isis and Osiris」 was recorded live at the Village Gate, a New York club. Charlie Haden's bass and Vishnu Wood's oud (Arabic lute) join in, adding the colors of Middle Eastern music.
This is an album that returns to the organ she played in church as a child. A season of austerity and faith bursts forth in roaring organ and strings.
- Alice mainly plays a Wurlitzer organ. Like the organ at a gospel service, she draws notes out long and swells them large, with an energy entirely unlike her piano or harp.
- 「Battle at Armageddon」 is a fierce dialogue between organ and drums. The masses of sound traded with Rashied Ali sound like a summit of free jazz.
- The album states that Alice composed the string arrangements and that Ornette Coleman helped copy out the score. The strings swirl around the organ and enfold it.
- In the title track, harp and strings overlap, and you can hear a texture that flows by the grain of the sound itself rather than along any fixed chord progression.
V. Turiya · 1972–1982 (age 35–45)
(Relocation) In 1972 Alice moved with her children to Los Angeles, California. Royalties and publishing income from John's records supported the family, and she also bore the responsibility of managing that legacy. That same year she released “Lord of Lords” on Impulse!, bringing her years with the label to a close. (Name) In the mid-1970s she received the Sanskrit name Turiyasangitananda, which is loosely rendered as the bliss that the song of God bestows. In 1975 she founded the Vedanta Center and began to lead a spiritual community. Before being known as a musician, she wished to be called a swami — a spiritual teacher. (Warner) Beginning in 1976, under contract with Warner Bros., she released “Eternity,” “Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana” and “Transcendence.” Sanskrit hymns and gospel handclaps, harp and organ, mingled within a single record. “Transfiguration,” recorded live at UCLA's Royce Hall in 1978, became her last commercial release. (Writing) In 1977 she published “Monument Eternal,” a book recording her spiritual experiences. Calmly setting down her season of austerity and the visions that came to her in meditation, it remains a primary source for understanding her music. (Retreat) In the late 1970s she withdrew from the recording industry to devote herself to her community's devotional music. In 1982 her eldest son, John Jr., was killed in a car accident at the age of seventeen. In that year, having lost a son after her husband, she recorded her first cassette of hymns for the community.
Recorded live at UCLA's Royce Hall in 1978, this is her last commercial album before she withdrew into community life. It shows what a formidable player she was on piano and organ.
- This is a trio date, with Reggie Workman on bass and Roy Haynes on drums. With so small a group, Alice's keyboards stand front and center.
- On the long piece “Leo” she drives the sound relentlessly on the organ. Roy Haynes's drums meet that force head-on, and their conversation is vividly alive.
- She also plays John's compositions, and it sounds like a scene of her retelling his music in her own language some ten years after her husband was gone.
- In the piano passages, broken chords (arpeggios) pour down like a waterfall. Set them beside her playing in John's band in 1966, and you can hear how far she had grown.
VI. Songs of the ashram · 1983–2007 (age 46–70)
(Ashram) In 1983, in Agoura Hills at the foot of the Santa Monica Mountains northwest of Los Angeles, she founded an ashram — a spiritual community. There, at the place first called Shanti Anantam and later Sai Anantam, she led worship and composed hymns. (Cassettes) Between 1982 and 1995 she released four cassettes: “Turiya Sings,” “Divine Songs,” “Infinite Chants” and “Glorious Chants.” On these recordings, circulated only among devotees, she sang herself for the first time. Over Sanskrit kirtan lay the harmonies of the Detroit church organ and synthesizer strings. (Return) In 2004, with “Translinear Light,” produced by her son Ravi Coltrane, she released her first commercial album in twenty-six years. Charlie Haden and Jack DeJohnette joined her, and her son Oran took part as well. In November 2006 she took the stage at the San Francisco Jazz Festival with Ravi, Charlie Haden and Roy Haynes. It would be her last performance. (Death) On January 12, 2007, she died of respiratory failure in a hospital in West Hills, Los Angeles. She was sixty-nine. (Rediscovery) After her death, her music found a new generation of listeners. In 2017 the label Luaka Bop released an anthology of the ashram cassettes, and in 2021 came “Kirtan: Turiya Sings,” built from originals Ravi had unearthed and stripped down to voice and organ alone.
The original of a cassette recorded in 1982 for the ashram's devotees, released for the first time in 2021 in a form pared down to voice and organ. It is the most private of prayer songs, recorded in a year of loss.
- This is the first recording on which she sang herself. Without any showy technique, in a low, calm voice, she carries the hymns along as if calling out to God.
- The lyrics are Sanskrit hymns (bhajans), yet the organ's harmonies are those of Black American church gospel. India and Detroit meet within a single song.
- The original cassette had synthesizer strings and sound effects. The 2021 edition strips them away, leaving only her voice and the Wurlitzer organ, so the two versions are well worth hearing side by side.
- The form — the same short melody repeated again and again, building little by little — is true to the character of devotional music sung together in call and response (kirtan).
Her first commercial album in twenty-six years, produced by her son Ravi. It is her final studio work, gathering together the musical language of a lifetime.
- Charlie Haden on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums joined her. Haden, after “Isis and Osiris” in 1970 and “Lord of Lords” in 1972, was playing with her once again.
- Alice moves among piano, Wurlitzer organ and synthesizer. On a single record you can hear the whole journey she had made through her instruments.
- In the passages where Ravi Coltrane's saxophone trades lines with his mother's keyboards, you can hear a family's musical lineage running on from John's band.
- The album includes a hymn performed with the ashram choir. Amid handclaps and chorus in a gospel spirit, the record ends like a prayer.
Lesser-known stories
Alice's first husband, Kenny Hagood, was the singer on Miles Davis's “Birth of the Cool” sessions. That she was already connected to the very heart of bebop's first generation before she became a Coltrane is a fact rarely mentioned, overshadowed by her name as John's wife. In 1963, during her time in the Terry Gibbs Quartet, she played piano on a Gibbs album of Jewish melodies arranged for jazz. She is credited under her maiden name, Alice McLeod. That Ornette Coleman helped transcribe the string scores for “Universal Consciousness” is plainly stated in the album's credits. It is a rare instance of two pioneers of free jazz working together, yet their names are seldom mentioned in the same breath. Because the cassettes of her ashram years were sold only to devotees, they were all but erased from the records of jazz history. Until Luaka Bop's 2017 anthology and 2021's “Kirtan: Turiya Sings” appeared, the latter part of her life was remembered only as retirement. In truth, those twenty-five years were when she made music most steadily. “Monument Eternal,” which she published in 1977, came out in a small edition and was long hard to find. As the scholar Franya Berkman's research brought the book back into view as a key to reading her music, a perspective took hold that understands her season of austerity not as aberrant behavior but as her own spiritual language.
Glossary notes 📚🔎
Free jazz
(In jazz) Jazz in which players break away from rules such as set chord progressions, a steady meter or a fixed number of bars, improvising as if conversing through sound itself. It was opened up in the late 1950s by players such as Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, and by the mid-1960s John Coltrane's band was heading in this direction too. It is like soccer players with no set play, reading one another's movements and stringing passes together on the spot. It is less that there are no rules than that listening to one another becomes the rule.
Spiritual jazz
(In jazz) Jazz that takes faith, meditation and spiritual experience as its subject. After John Coltrane's “A Love Supreme,” Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders led this current, often drawing on the instruments and sounds of Indian, Arab and African music. Repeating melodies and long-sustained tones carry the listener into deep reflection — think of the feeling of gazing at a candle in a quiet room as your mind settles. (Elsewhere) In English, “spiritual” can also refer to the African American spiritual in religious music.
Ostinato
(Word origin) The Italian ostinato means “stubborn.” The character of obstinately repeating the same figure is built right into the name. (In jazz) A short melody or rhythm repeated continuously throughout a piece. It usually falls to the bass, laying a firm floor beneath the music, over which the other instruments improvise freely. It is like jump rope: two people must turn the rope steadily for the one in the middle to jump to their heart's content. The bass on “Journey in Satchidananda” is a fine example.
Drone
(Word origin) The English “drone” means the humming of a bee. Because it is a low sound that sounds without break, it became a musical term. (In jazz) A sustained tone — one note or a few — held and sounded at length throughout a piece. In Indian music a stringed instrument called the tambura plays this role, while the melody moves freely above it. Alice Coltrane brought this into jazz to create a meditative atmosphere. Picture a quiet classroom, where a friend's voice rings out clearly over the low hum of the air conditioner. (Elsewhere) In everyday life, a drone is a remotely piloted unmanned aircraft.
Glissando
(Word origin) From the French glisser (to slide), meaning to glide from one note to the next. (In jazz) A technique of moving from a high note to a low one, or the reverse, sweeping smoothly through the notes in between. On the harp, the fingers brush down many strings at once to make a rippling sound. It is like sliding all the way down a slide rather than climbing down one step at a time. It is the signature sound of Alice Coltrane's harp playing.
Arpeggio
(Word origin) From the Italian arpa (harp), meaning to play as one plays a harp. The harp technique of plucking the notes of a chord one string at a time gave it its name. (In jazz) Playing the notes of a chord not all at once but spread out one after another. In Korean it is called bunsanhwaeum ('dispersed chord'). It is like climbing stairs one step at a time rather than leaping up in a single bound. Alice Coltrane used this technique on the piano as well to make rippling sounds, so that her harp and piano playing resemble each other.
Kirtan
(Word origin) The Sanskrit kirtan means “to tell” or “to praise.” It came to denote songs that praise God by calling on his names. (In jazz) Strictly speaking it is not a jazz term, but it is essential to understanding Alice Coltrane's later music. It is Indian devotional music in which one person sings a short melody and many others sing it back, repeating and gradually building in intensity. It is like a campfire song where one person leads and everyone follows. Alice added to it the gospel organ of the Black American church.