I heard music that was just beyond anything I had heard before. I would hear country gospel. I would hear the down-home gospel. I would hear the kind of gospel you almost wouldn’t need music with. It was flowing from the heart, from the soul. —Alice Coltrane
Long before her artistic collaborations with John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane (1937–2007), née Alice McLeod, had already acquired a wealth of musical experience and a deep understanding of the spiritual power of music. An African American keyboard prodigy, she had the great fortune of growing up in a musical family in Detroit during its postwar heyday, a period in which the city’s black musical subcultures invented some of the most influential musical styles of the twentieth century.
During the 1950s, Detroit had a reputation, particularly among African American performers and audiences, as a city whose high standards and heartfelt appreciation for modern jazz was unrivaled. Detroit’s black musical community supplied New York’s clubs and record producers with a steady source of second-generation bebop artists: performers such as Betty Carter, Ron Carter, Paul Chambers, Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, Elvin and Thad Jones, Yusef Lateef, and Terry Pollard are only some of Detroit’s more famous sons and daughters. The city was also a jazz mecca, where out-of-town musicians could find employment and develop their ideas in a rigorous yet uniquely supportive environment. It was within this rich milieu of skilled players and African American musical cognoscenti that Alice McLeod learned her craft as a jazz pianist. In fact, listeners acquainted only with her more avant-garde explorations may be surprised to learn of her superior abilities as bebop pianist, which are little known outside Detroit’s musical circles.
Yet long before her arrival on Detroit’s jazz scene, she had developed her musical ability playing piano and organ for her neighborhood Baptist church, as well as for other congregations throughout the city. This was the so-called golden age of gospel in America, and Detroit’s black churches were producing some of the most important African American keyboardists and singers of the twentieth century—artists such as Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Mom and Pop Winans, Stevie Wonder, and other Motown stars, whose mainstream success transformed popular music (Boyer 1995).
The setting of Alice Coltrane’s early life is best described as a vibrant intersection of the sacred and secular musical spheres of her family, her neighborhood, the black churches in which she played, and the social and professional associations that constituted Detroit’s jazz scene during the 1950s. These close, overlapping networks sustained and influenced the young Alice McLeod, and they are part of the greater social, musical, and religious history of African-Americans in postwar Detroit.
The majority of Detroit’s black migrants came from the Deep South, and, apart from the older bourgeoisie, the community was known to have a “down home” Southern feeling compared to communities in Philadelphia and New York, where black citizens came from the more populated and industrialized mid-Atlantic states.1 Like many African Americans who had migrated to Detroit between the world wars, Alice’s parents were both natives of Alabama. Her mother, Ann Johnston, grew up in Athens, a small, rural town; her father, Solon McLeod, was raised in the city of Birmingham. Although Alice was not sure, it is probable that Ann and Solon McLeod met in Detroit during the mid-1920s. Ann had traveled there from Huntington, West Virginia, where she had lived with her first husband, Harold Farrow—she divorced him but they remained on friendly terms—and their two children, Ernest and Margaret, who would become Alice’s half-siblings. Solon arrived in Detroit after serving in the First World War, one of a number of black veterans in search of work.
Despite the influx of African Americans, when Ann Johnston and Solon McLeod arrived in Detroit, blacks were only a small percent of the urban population—4.1 percent compared to 81 percent in 2000.2 During this interwar period, Detroit was still a multiethnic manufacturing town; it had been attracting European immigrants and white American migrant workers since the turn of the century.3 Situated on the Detroit River, with access to the Great Lakes, the city was home to the automotive industry and the largest steel foundry in the world. In addition to companies such as Ford, Chrysler, General Motors, and Dodge, the city also contained chemical plants, oil refineries, and many other smaller manufacturing companies. By the late 1920s, Detroit was “a sprawling web of industrial train tracks” and “innumerable blue collar neighborhoods” of African American, Canadian, German, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Lebanese, Lithuanian, Mexican, Palestinian, Polish, and Scottish families (Sugrue 1996, 22). Solon McLeod drove a truck for one of the many companies that delivered industrial items to the city’s factories. Ann McLeod did not work, except on rare occasions as a domestic when the family needed extra money. Usually she stayed at home raising her growing family, which included six children by the late 1930s: Ernest and Margaret Farrow, and Jack, Joanne, Alice, and Marylin McLeod.
Alice was born August 27, 1937, and her childhood spanned the war years, a period of particularly volatile race relations in the city of Detroit. Automotive manufacturing plants were converted to the production of weapons, and “almost overnight” Detroit became part of the American military-industrial complex, earning the city the nickname of “the arsenal of democracy” (Sugrue 1996, 19). War mobilization brought Detroit 500,000 migrants from diverse ethnic backgrounds between 1940 and 1943, and the black population doubled. Ironically, although unemployment was at an all-time low, discrimination was endemic in the city that was working tirelessly to preserve freedom abroad.4 Racial tension grew to such a degree that Life magazine stated in a 1942 headline that “the city can either blow up Hitler or blow up the U.S.” (“Detroit Is Dynamite,” 15). With the return of black GIS after the war, formal protests against discrimination began. In April 1943, the NAACP and the UAW organized an equal-opportunity rally that attracted 10,000 people. In response to the promotion of three black employees later that month, 26,000 white workers walked out of the Packard plant. Later that summer, the Belle Isle Riot, one of the worst race riots in American history, claimed the lives of thirty-four citizens (twenty-five of them black), in three days looting and racially motivated attacks.
By 1950, when Alice was thirteen, 357,857 black Americans had made a home in what was then the greatest industrial center in the United States. In spite of chronic racial tension and episodic violence, the black community succeeded in maintaining a culturally and economically self-sufficient subculture in what were to become increasingly segregated neighborhoods.5 Woodward Avenue divided Detroit’s largest African American residential area into the struggling East Side and the more affluent West Side, and residents often identified themselves accordingly as either East Siders or West Siders.6
An East Sider, Alice lived first in an apartment at 644 Farnsworth Avenue. During her teenage years, her family moved into a spacious home closer to Wayne State University, on a more affluent block but still east of Woodward Avenue. The neighborhood’s residents were predominantly poor and working-class families who lived in tenements and subdivided wood-frame houses. The jazz bassist Vishnu Wood (né William Clifford), a future collaborator who later introduced Alice to her guru, Swami Satchidananda, was a fellow East Sider at the time. He described the community as “Southern” and “rough and tumble” (interview with author, 2001). Gangs made their presence known in the streets, and young people developed both a street-smart edge and a tight network of friends and family who provided community support and a safety network under challenging circumstances. By contrast, the West Side demonstrated greater evidence of rising social mobility. More families owned their own homes, the public schools were of better quality, and young adults typically went on to college and other forms of professional training (Sugrue 1996, 36–40).
To some extent, these neighborhood demographics reflected the beginnings of the class stratification and class consciousness that developed in African American communities after the Second World War.7 However, families of differing economic and social status lived in close proximity.8 In these overcrowded and sometimes unforgiving circumstances, a unique cultural exchange occurred in the black community that often bypassed class distinction, and music was one of the transcendent mediums. One of the most powerful organizations that emerged in black neighborhoods with respect to both musical and cultural exchange during this period was the urban black church.
Like many large, mainstream churches, the McLeods’ neighborhood church, Mt. Olive Baptist, catered to a broad cross section of Detroit’s African American population by consciously appealing to the diverse musical tastes of its congregants. The standard repertoire for such congregations during the 1940s included spirituals that date back to slavery,9 Calvinist hymns of the eighteenth century,10 American and African American evangelical hymns of the Second Great Awakening,11 and the new gospel repertoire12 that was gaining in popularity.
The McLeods’ church could boast several choirs. This configuration was relatively common: in larger Baptist and even Methodist congregations, two choirs were customarily used to satisfy the musical tastes of their members, with a senior choir singing hymns and anthems from the European American tradition, and a gospel choir singing in the newer urban style that was common in Holiness, Pentecostal, and Church of God in Christ establishments. Alice’s mother, Ann McLeod, was fond of religious singing. She was a member of the Senior Choir of Mt. Olive Baptist, played piano, and possessed “a very natural ability for music and a beautiful alto voice” (A. Coltrane, interview with author, 2001). Ann’s first husband was the choir director at Mt. Olive Baptist. He had a reputation for “great musical knowledge” and “excellence” as a keyboardist and musical director (ibid.).
Although she began taking private piano lessons at the age of seven, Alice described Mt. Olive Baptist as the primary locus of her early musical education. Moved by her older half-brother Ernest Farrow’s commitment to musical study (he became one of Detroit’s finest jazz bassists), she became possessed by a desire to play the piano, even though there was none in her home. Although an extremely shy child, she mustered the courage to ask her neighbor Mrs. Philpot for lessons. Alice explained, “I was hesitant to say that I would like for her to teach me. But I approached her, and she obliged, and it was great, starting out with little scales and simplistic solos” (ibid.). Her weekly lessons lasted two years, at which point Mrs. Philpot requested that Alice “continue and seek higher training with either her teacher or possibly at a music school” (ibid.).
During this period, Alice had demonstrated her talents playing simple solos for Sunday school, and it quickly became apparent to her congregation that she was a precocious musician. In a gesture typical of the social engagement of black mainstream churches, Mt. Olive’s congregation offered to sponsor Alice for a year of study at the community music school in her neighborhood. With good instruction and accessible facilities, the school fostered her rapid development. In fact, after her year there, she did not study again music formally until her teenage years—she acquired her skills on the job, as a church pianist.
Alice considered her musical education at Mt. Olive Baptist to be “a gradation or graduation of sorts.” There she learned to play piano and organ for Mt. Olive’s three large choirs: the Young People’s Choir, the Senior Choir, and the Pastor’s Choir. Although Alice was musically literate and often used church hymnals, her training is best viewed as in the oral, or aural, tradition. Church hymnals provide the keyboardist with only a melodic and harmonic skeleton, similar to a jazz lead sheet. The ornamental, rhythmic, improvisatory, and timbral characteristics of black church music—qualities that clearly distinguish it from music in white Protestant churches—are part of an aurally transmitted black musical aesthetic. For instance, when I asked if anybody had taught her how to play for her church, Alice stated, “Nobody really, but you had some musical guidelines. But the rhythmical aspect, that came from the experience . . . I really think most of it just comes from the environment” (ibid.).
According to Alice, learning to play for the different choirs was a hands-on learning experience that required different stylistic skills on her part. She explained:
For the young people, there were all the written musical pieces that I would play for them to sing. There wasn’t as much rhythmical involvement there. Senior Choir was very nice, sort of strict, leaning toward the European anthems; a number of them were beautiful hymns from the hymn book. There was not a great deal of additional work needed other than being able to read . . . but when you are playing in the Pastor’s chorus, you have to play in a different kind of way. The Pastor’s chorus sounds like gospel. You have the gospel songs, from a book called Gospel Pearls, if you can find it. Beautiful songs. (ibid.)
Gospel Pearls (1921) was one of the most popular hymnals of the time.13 It included simple reductions of Protestant and gospel hymns by white writers, as well as Negro spirituals and newly composed black gospel songs.14 According to Horace Boyer, the publication of Gospel Pearls was a clear indication that gospel music had “crossed denominational music boundaries . . . Baptists no longer had to attend Pentecostal, Holiness, or Sanctified churches to hear the music. They could now hear this music in their own churches on Sunday mornings” (1995, 44). Although gospel repertoire had become standard fare, different denominations in Northern cities performed the music in their own preferred fashion. Boyer distinguishes two overarching styles of singing gospel: “one that emphasized singing in which the spirit dictated the amount of embellishment, volume and improvisation that was applied, and a second that, while attempting to incorporate the dictates of the spirit, tempered the rendition to the musical taste of the Baptist Congregation” (ibid.). Although gospel music at Mt. Olive was of this second variety, music was of no less importance to the congregation.
As a budding church pianist and organist, Alice had numerous responsibilities. In the Baptist service, each liturgical event is typically set off by a musical offering, so that the sonic component often constitutes at least half the time allotted to the church service. The pianist typically interacts with the pastor in the form of punctuating or dramatizing the sermon. The pianist also brings the congregation together in hymn singing. In the gospel portion of the service, music is expected to lead to a particularly high level of emotional intensity and expressive release for the congregation. Elements of musical performance such as dramatic shifts in timbre and register, highly syncopated rhythm, and flexible improvisational structures are tailored to the emotional peaks of the ritual and support this purpose of spiritual transformation.
In retrospect, one can see how these musical skills came to serve Alice in a variety of improvisational contexts outside the church. In a very practical sense, her church training provided her with many of the requisite skills for life as a professional jazz musician: she was required to sight read, arrange spontaneously from a lead sheet, and listen and respond intently to a soloist or the pastor. She was also required to improvise musical statements and continually adapt her aesthetics, depending on the communal energy of the moment. Playing for services and weekly rehearsals was on-the-job training.
Even more important, playing in church gave Alice the opportunity to gain musical confidence and exercise a degree of artistic power that might not have been available to her in the male-dominated secular realm. Traditionally, the church has been an acceptable performance space for African American women, where for generations they have flourished as keyboardists and singers. As church musicians, women have been the unrecognized teachers of many reputable jazz stylists. For instance, female church pianists were the first musical influences on the jazz progenitors Eubie Blake and Fats Waller (Unterbrink 1983, 40). Other women also developed musical techniques that became standard fare in both the sacred and secular realms: the keyboardists Arizona Dranes and Sallie Sanders were largely responsible for the evolution of the pentecostal playing style, which later became common in up-tempo rhythm-and-blues numbers. Alice was part of this time-honored yet undervalued tradition of female church pianists.
As Alice developed her skills, she was invited to play in other churches in Detroit where musical services were particularly ecstatic. She credited the Lemon Gospel Choir at the Mack Avenue Church of God in Christ for the most powerful musical and religious experiences of her youth. The Lemon Gospel Choir was the musical home of Deloris Ranson, the choir pianist, and David Winans. They would become the future matriarch and patriarch of Detroit’s most famous family of gospel singers. “Mom and Pop” Winans, as they are known in the gospel industry, gave birth to ten children—two of whom, Cece and Bebe, have won Grammy awards.
Independent Holiness sects such as the Mack Avenue Church of God were and are particularly known for their musical and expressive ties to African American folk churches and the religious culture of slave society. As these small, independent congregations came North, the lively musical practices of the invisible church were maintained, with hand clapping, foot stomping, and call-and-response forms. As these “folk churches” or “shouting churches”15 grew in popularity, they generated a rise in what the black community called “old-time religion.” By the 1920s, the highly interactive musical style of many of these independent sects had developed into a distinctive genre, displaying particularly ecstatic versions of European American sacred hymnody, Negro spirituals, and urban blues and jazz.16
Alice said that playing for the Lemon Gospel Choir “was the gospel experience . . . of [her] life.” It gave her a profound understanding of “down home” religion and the spiritual power of music for African Americans, as well as the experience of unmediated worship at the collective level, which she would replicate in her life as a devotional musician. Similar to possession ceremonies found throughout West Africa, at the Mack Avenue Church of God in Christ, congregants would become “highly overcome” and require tending. Alice’s account demonstrates an unusually positive attitude toward the sanctified service—many Baptist churchgoers would be put off by such emotional abandon and seeming disorder—and a moment in Detroit when the postwar gospel tradition was in full flower:
There was another choir that my parents permitted me to be involved in when I was a little older. I must have been around fifteen or sixteen. A chorus called the Lemon Gospel Singers. Now that was the gospel experience, musically, of my life! Because not only were they singing! Some of the time, when we were invited to other churches, I mean, I heard music that was just beyond anything I had heard before. I would hear country gospel. I would hear the down-home gospel. I would hear the kind of gospel you almost wouldn’t need music with. It was flowing from the heart, from the soul. After a while there was no music.
One day we were at this church. I was with the young people, ages fifteen to nineteen. I happened not to be at the piano at the time because there were two of us, and the other pianist could play anything—she was superb. The choir was singing and there was such a spiritual experience happening in that church. There was such God feeling. The people in the audience were so overcome with the spirit, they weren’t singing anymore; some were just walking around the church. Half of the choir had to be carried out—even young people. The Lord just completely swept through. The pianist started playing at such a rapid pace, and everything just stopped. What could you do? All you could do was go and sit down. There were no closing remarks, there was no more singing, there were nurses attending to those who were highly overcome, and some were carried downstairs, and that was it. The service was never dismissed by the minister. Just God. God-inspired. An experience filled with the spirit of the Lord. (A. Coltrane, interview with author, 2001)
Alice McLeod’s early experiences playing for Baptist and Independent denominations in Detroit influenced her aesthetic sensibilities and inspired a lifelong passion for ecstatic and collective forms of musical expression. Her musical experiences were marked by an ethos of flexibility and eclecticism in which music served the multifaceted purposes of religious expression, communal participation, and cultural and historical validation. More important, the most inspirational musical activities in church for her were free of fixed form and structure, and were always inspired by an unmediated relationship with the Lord. While she replicated aspects of this gospel worship style at Sai Anantam Ashram in her bhajan arrangements, as we will see, she also maintained many of these aesthetics throughout her professional career—on the bandstand with her husband, in her own jazz ensembles, and even playing bebop as a young woman.
Although the church was the primary locus of Alice’s early musical experiences, her creative, artistic, and intellectual aspirations broadened during her adolescence. She continued to work as a professional church pianist, but she also began to apply her precocious keyboard skills to the mastery of classical music and modern jazz. For a variety of reasons, classical music was not a viable professional career for most African Americans at the time, particularly for those from the East Side of Detroit. Preprofessional training requires hours of study as a young child, with master teachers who possess the proper pedigree or lineage. Alice’s socioeconomic status, coupled with widespread institutional racism barring blacks from professional classical music institutions, would almost certainly have stood in the way had she wanted to pursue this path.17 Alice, however, never said that classical music performance was her primary ambition. While she taught herself a great deal of the canonical classical piano repertoire over the years, she studied it only intermittently as a teen. Classical music, nonetheless, did remain an important part of her life:
I did have another private teacher for a short time, but her name is gone from my memory. She was an aged lady, but very nice. I probably studied about six months with her. But what I really carried forward was the importance of really keeping your music alive—even the classical music alive. Just take all the books, practice, keep your reading up to par. It’s important to me. And from time to time I do it. I still put up the classical music. It brings the path to now. I’m kind of sorry there is no more beautiful music coming from Europe, and Russia, and places like that. Back in those days in the 1800s there was more incentive or motivation to write beautiful classical themes or symphonic themes and present them. Now it’s still Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, It’s still those people that get played. Grieg and Mozart. (ibid.)
Fortunately, Alice McLeod’s African American musical subculture gave her numerous opportunities to grow as an artist. Her teenage years spanned what the Detroit jazz historian Lars Bjorn and his colleague Jim Gallert (2001) have called the city’s golden age, a period in which “the economy was booming and a take-care-of-business ethos flourished amidst a peer group of young aspirants” (Panken 2000, 44). During the 1950s, Detroit’s industrial economy provided an economic base for a thriving entertainment business; the levels of jazz musicianship and audience expectation in the city were extremely high. As the baritone saxophonist Pepper Adams explained, “You see, in Detroit the standards were so high, to compete for local gigs you had to play awful goddam good. If you were good enough to be competitive in Detroit, you were far ahead of what the rest of the world’s standards were” (quoted in Carner 1990, 21). Detroit’s standards were such that Alice’s musical role models—African American pianists active on the scene during her youth—included Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, Terry Pollard, and Roland Hannah, some of the finest players in the modern jazz tradition.
Several historical factors contributed to the exceptional quality of black musicianship in Detroit during the 1950s. Crucial determinants included the continuity of Detroit’s jazz tradition and the many venues in the city that had supported black instrumental music since its emergence in the first decades of the twentieth century. Like cosmopolitan centers such as Chicago and New York, Detroit was a magnet for musicians who had the requisite skills to play for society dance bands in the city’s numerous ballrooms.18 Although audiences were segregated, black bands played for both whites and blacks.19 When ballroom entertainment declined during the Great Depression, so-called black-and-tan clubs similar to those in Harlem began to proliferate in Detroit’s East Side. Paradise Valley, as it was called, in the heart of the city’s largest black neighborhood, emerged as the center of nightlife during the 1930s and 1940s. Large floor shows featuring jazz orchestras were common at venues such as the Plantation and the Chocolate Bar.20
During this era of Ellington-style floor shows and swing bands, a jazz subculture developed in after-hours sessions and lasted well into the 1960s. The creative environment of Detroit’s after-hours sessions during the late 1930s and 1940s was similar to those now-legendary jams sessions at Minton’s Play House in New York that fostered many of the bebop innovations. Stylists such as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Bud Powell, artists responsible for the modernist approach, were either New York natives or musicians who had already achieved national success before coming to New York.21 By contrast, Detroit jazz sessions were homegrown, local affairs. The city could not boast of a jazz recording industry, nor could its jazz musicians expect national recognition or international success. For the most part, Detroit’s jazz players, particularly during the 1950s, were born or grew up there.
Although influenced by national musical trends, particularly bebop, players incorporated these innovations to fit the tastes of local audiences, and a distinct brand of modern jazz emerged in the city, one that required musicians to be fluent in multiple genres, know a huge repertoire, and always respect the entertainment value of the music. When the bebop style caught the attention of Detroit’s young musical modernists, the new language was often played alongside rhythm-and-blues selections that were extremely popular among black audiences during the era.22 Barry Harris, whom Alice described as “a musician of the highest order,” was the central figure of a group of young, mostly black, musical intellectuals exploring the music of Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, and their associates during the early 1950s (A. Coltrane, interview with author, 2001). Harris described how audience members danced to up-tempo bebop standards such as “Cherokee”:
At that time you had to know a certain amount of tunes: rhythm-and-blues was powerful then, you had to play shuffle rhythm all night long and some of the really famous standards . . . You see, the jazz musicians came in playing their songs, they played their music. Bird played fast. There used to be a shake dancer named Baby Scruggs and she would shake dance to “Cherokee” as fast as you could play it. You had to see that. It would knock you out! Boy she was fine, you had to dig it! It was like a whole thing. We danced to “Cherokee,” we danced fast tunes and slow tunes, it didn’t have to be a slow tune you knew to dance. Jazz musicians made their own blues and stuff so you danced their blues like you danced anybody else’s blues. People danced and they knew the songs, they knew if you messed up, or if the drummer turned the beat around. Our contemporaries were there while we were playing what we wanted to play. Man, it was beautiful. (Harris 1995, 17)
In addition to integrating the dance-based nightlife, Detroit’s highly supportive, yet critical black audiences were also an important contributing factor to the exceptional quality of Detroit jazz. According to the world-renowned bassist Cecil McBee, who spent several years “getting it together in Detroit” before going on to New York (and whom Alice employed in the late 1960s as a sideman), the black audiences, whom he described as “the intellectuals,” demanded that a player “reach deep inside”:
They had to hear that—from the deepest part of your stomach. You knew if you were successful by the response of the audience and you knew and you were relieved because you knew that you had connected. And you would play yourself to death until the wee hours of the morning. Here was a place that you could express or experiment on whatever you were working on, and the crowd knew that that was the deal. They knew that the goal was to experiment individually and collectively and to reach out to the stars so far as your development was concerned. (McBee, interview with author, 2001)
The postwar economy in Detroit also contributed to what McBee described as Detroit’s intellectual jazz culture. The city’s public secondary schools, such as Cass Technical and Miller High School, had exceptional music programs. Cass required high academic standing and an audition to specialize in music there. Essentially a classical music conservatory, Cass trained such Detroit jazz artists as Billy Mitchell, Tommy Flannagan, Ron Carter, and Paul Chambers. Chambers described the program:
The curriculum took up a whole day of music. That’s why it took a couple more years to graduate. For example, we’d have the first period chamber music, the second period full orchestra, third either harmony or counterpoint and rudiments, then came piano and the academic classes . . . I used to get together with Doug Watkins, Donald Byrd, and piano player Hugh Lawson in rest periods, and we’d play. (Chambers 1961, 15)
Miller High was renowned for the music pedagogue Milton Cabrera, whose insistence on harmonic knowledge and classical technique and whose touring high-school big band trained the likes of Milt Jackson, Yusef Lateef, and the Burrell brothers. Such exceptional public high schools gave Detroit’s musical youth a huge advantage, providing them with virtuoso skills and a full understanding of functional harmony. Young African American musicians brought an extremely broad musical knowledge to the many forms of popular music that were professionally available. This gave Detroit a unique reputation as a place where young jazz players “really knew their chords.”23
Garfield Middle School and North Eastern High School, which Alice attended, did not possess the strongest music programs in the city. The fact that her secondary-school education had little influence on her musical development testifies to her own single-mindedness as an aspiring musician, as well as the strength of the other musical networks to which she belonged. She did, however, play percussion in North Eastern’s concert band, an unusual choice for a young woman at the time. The reed player Bennie Maupin—who later got his big musical break playing on Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters LP—went to the same high school and was Alice’s close friend and colleague for many years. He recalled:
She was playing timpani and chimes and glockenspiel and snare drum and all the percussion stuff that’s found in an orchestra or symphonic band, and I was just really impressed with that, because you don’t think of women or young ladies doing that. But she was there. And it was quite obvious that she really had a very good grasp of what she was doing. It was interesting to watch her going from one instrument to the other and to hear what she was actually doing with those instruments. (Maupin, telephone interview with author, 2001)
Maupin, several years her junior, also remembered that Alice was already an accomplished jazz pianist by her high-school years:
I came into the auditorium with my class, and we sat down and I looked up on the stage, and there was Alice playing the piano! And I didn’t know she played the piano, but she was playing the piano. And then she actually had a trio, she had a drummer and she had a bass player, and then I found out later that she had actually been teaching them how to accompany her. She was always teaching, always very far ahead, you know? I was just very impressed by her abilities and what she could do, and when I heard her play the piano I was just so in awe of her because I hadn’t heard anyone play like that . . . Well she was playing some tune, I didn’t know what tune it was because I didn’t know that many songs, but I knew that she was improvising on whatever it was. And they played it and the kids went wild after it was over. (ibid.)
One might imagine that the perilous, sin-filled “conservatory of the streets” that has stereotypically constituted the bebop musician’s training ground would have been off-limits to a young, church-going woman from a respectable family.24 Yet several facets of Detroit’s jazz scene gave Alice the critical musical access and professional exposure she needed to fully develop her skills and reputation as an accomplished bebop musician by her early twenties. The Detroit modern jazz network during the 1950s was a bourgeois operation in comparison to jazz networks in other urban centers.25 It was small, close-knit, and dominated by several important jazz family dynasties, including the Burrells (brothers Billy and Kenny), the Jacksons (brothers Milton, Alvin, and Oliver), the Jones family (brothers Hank, Thad, and Elvin), and the McKinneys (brothers Harold, Ray, and William).26
The high percentage of black homeownership in Detroit during the 1940s and 1950s, even among working-class people, contributed to the strength of family jazz networks, as well as to the overall quality of black music.27 Living in a house rather than a tenement was conducive to the musical mastery needed for bebop. Space to practice and jam with peers without fear of bothering the neighbors, as well as the support of a financially stable family, was a great benefit to many young black musicians coming of age. Sessions in the Jones, McKinney, and Harris homes, for instance, were common (Bjorn and Gallert 2001, 130).
Barry Harris would regularly gather the finest Detroit musicians in his family home to work on new concepts: “My mother was beautiful to all of us, Donald Byrd, Paul (Cambers) and Doug (Watkins). My house was a classroom. We could practice all we wanted” (quoted in Bourne 1985, 27). Harris explained:
In Manhattan it’s mostly apartment buildings, and you can’t play an instrument in an apartment building. Learning an instrument would be impossible. You had people from places like Brooklyn or the Bronx who owned separate homes, and they could do whatever they wanted there. Places like my place, we lived in a two-family building. Sometimes the people downstairs had a party and we would go and play, we jammed all the time. There really was a musical environment. (Harris 1995, 16)
Harris further likened this domestic environment to late-nineteenth-century salon society:
In my house we would play all day long, not for anybody; we would play and try to learn . . . Donald Byrd was there, and Paul Chambers, the Jones Brothers, young musicians. We had more what the musical greats had years ago: they had salons, that’s where Chopin, Liszt, all of them would gather, play, share information and learn from each other. (ibid.)
Although Alice’s home was not a central hub in this “salon society,” it was a meeting place for a great deal of Detroit talent. Most of the members of Alice’s immediate family were either directly or indirectly involved in music: her mother sang in church, her older brother, Jackie McLeod, was a stylishly dressed fixture in Detroit’s jazz clubs. Alice’s younger sister, Marilyn, a year and a half her junior, would go on to write successful commercial music for Motown Records. As Alice explained, “she was never interested in performance, but she has written a lot of music and some well-known pieces. She had a song for Diana Ross called ‘Love Hangover.’ She got gold on that. And another one, ‘Walk in the Night,’ that was always playing” (interview with author, 2001).
By far the most crucial to Alice’s development as a young jazz musician—aside from her own innate talents—was the presence and influence of her older half-brother, Ernest Farrow, who, during Alice’s formative years, was fast becoming one of Detroit’s finest modern jazz musicians. Alice credited Ernest for much of her early jazz education:
My brother, who is not living, played bass. That meant I got to hear everything that he was doing. And when allowed, I would go with him to the sessions and hear what the musicians were playing. And I really believed I could learn what I heard. I said, “I believe I can play this music if I put my mind to it.” He showed me as much as he could . . . I feel that he was a big inspiration for me. Had he not been in the house, I don’t know. (ibid.)
Nine years her senior, Ernest played alto saxophone in North Eastern’s concert band, as well as in ensembles for local parties, dances, and amateur contests. Alice recalls that she was always hearing recordings of “the latest thing” that inspired her brother during the 1940s, particularly “Sarah Vaughan, Lester Young, and Charlie Parker” (ibid.). By the time Alice was studying piano and playing at church, Ernest had switched to the acoustic bass, the instrument on which he would make a lasting contribution during his tragically abbreviated career as a professional musician. (Ernest Farrow died in a drowning accident in 1969—a great tragedy for his family and the jazz community, and one of many personal losses that Alice would endure.)
Barry Harris, whom Ernest had befriended in his youth, recalled the day Ernest switched from saxophone to acoustic bass. “Ernie was the cat I really grew up with all the way . . . Ernie started out as an alto player. We were going to play an amateur show at the Paradise Theatre, and he didn’t play alto as good as James Thompson, so he played the bass. That’s how he started on the bass. All he did was say, ‘I’ll play the bass,’ and he played it.”28 Although Ernest’s abilities rivaled those of many bass players who later became famous after leaving Detroit, he chose to stay in the city to raise his family. Cecil McBee, who spent several years in the early 1960s developing his own bass playing in Detroit before going to New York, described Ernest as “one of the first people that was very advanced on the instrument”:
He was far more advanced than the Ron Carters and Paul Chambers because he had a triple finger technique. This was rather novel at the time. You know I thought I was introducing it at the time but I ran into him and he had been working on it long before I was. He was really a great bass player . . . You know I thought he would have fared better if he had spent the time working on it rather than dealing with his family and other more socially involved things contrary to the music. Had he really stepped out there and made music everything he probably would have been one of the world’s greatest bass players. (McBee, interview with author, 2001)
Bennie Maupin described Ernest Farrow’s lasting impact on the next generation of bass players:
Ernie was just awesome. I mean, he was so incredible . . . There are a couple of bass players who really stand out from Detroit. The one of course is Paul Chambers, who when he was fifteen or sixteen was playing with Miles Davis. Then there was another named Doug Watkins—died in an automobile accident when he was very young. They were very much touched by Ernie because Ernie was a bit older than them . . . his sound, his time, the language that he used . . . It was really a sad thing [his passing], because he was such a great talent and the warmest personality. (Maupin, telephone interview with author, 2001)
Alice was also extremely fortunate to have had the guidance of Ernest’s musical associates, in particular Barry Harris, called the “high priest of bebop,” who has since been responsible for teaching scores of jazz musicians the harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic language of modern jazz. As Ernest’s close friend and musical partner, and the long-time suitor of Alice’s older half-sister, Margaret, Harris was a regular visitor at the McLeods’. Alice explained:
The family thought Barry was going to marry my sister. He took her to the prom. We thought they were the king and queen of Detroit. Barry was like my own brother . . . He has shown me so much, chords, and voicings. He was at the house often, and they would all go out and he would play professionally with my brother. (A. Coltrane, interview with author, 2001)
Other influential jazz pianists also frequented the McLeod home and would show Alice various techniques. Terry Pollard, another famous female pianist from Detroit, became an important mentor to the young Alice McLeod. Ms. Pollard, a musical colleague and love interest of Ernest’s for many years, gave the McLeods their first piano, “an old upright,” when Alice was just a girl.29 Later, when Alice was a young woman, Terry Pollard recommended her to bandleaders, local club owners, and promoters.
By the time Alice was an aspiring jazz musician, Ernest had solidly established himself within Detroit’s professional community, playing steady engagements in sought-after West Side venues such as the Bohemian Club, Klein’s Show Bar, and the Blue Bird Inn, for the most accomplished composers and arrangers in the city.30 At Klein’s, Ernest played for the bandleader Hindal Butts in a band that included the pianist Hugh Lawson, the trombonist Curtis Fuller, and the saxophonist Pepper Adams, all of whom left for New York shortly thereafter to earn international recognition. At the Blue Bird, Ernest played in the house band under the leader Yusef Lateef, with the trumpeter Donald Byrd, the drummer Frank Gant, and the euphonium player Bernard McKinney (later Kiane Zawadi).
In 1958, at the Blue Bird, Ernest led his own band, the International Jazz Quartet, composed of the altoist Sonny Red, the pianist Hugh Lawson, and the drummer Oliver Jackson, and Joe Henderson while he was attending Wayne State University. Ernest’s tenure as the leader at the Blue Bird was “a banner year” for the club (Bjorn and Gallert 2001, 117). It had recently reopened after renovations and featured big names such as Miles Davis and his sextet, as well as the bands of Horace Silver, Art Blakey, and Jimmy Smith. Former Detroiters Sonny Stitt, Billy Mitchell, Thad Jones, and Milt Jackson also returned in 1958 to play engagements at the club.
Ernest often took Alice to jam sessions during this period, exposing her to the many formidable musicians who were his colleagues. As she put it:
I think my environment was the sessions—when you would sit in at a session, you would make your friends, and once you were known you were called for jobs. You had to make yourself known. People would say there’s a session here or there. You know once John Coltrane came to town and they called me and I don’t know, I wasn’t available. You know people would say you missed it! Trane was here. You should have heard it! Every time he played over a G minor 7, and then—it was like that! All the musicians would flock. Whoever was in town—Miles Davis came into town. (A. Coltrane, interview with author, 2001)
Kenneth Cox recalled hearing her regularly at the West End Hotel’s after-hours session, and at the home of Joe Brazil in Conant Gardens. Jam sessions at Joe Brazil’s were highly regarded among jazz musicians, and talent passing through the city would frequently show up to play. While on tour in Detroit, John Coltrane did indeed attend sessions, and, according to Cox, it was at Joe Brazil’s that Alice first met her future husband, although she recounted that their formal introduction occurred in New York several years later.
Alice’s first working band in Detroit was a group called the Premieres—“a lounge act,” to use the bassist Vishnu Wood’s description of the band—that fused the quartet singing of gospel and rhythm-and-blues genres with jazz improvisation. The members of the Premiers (George Bohanon, trombone; Anthony Jackson, bass; Oliver Jackson, drums; and Alice, organ) were each accomplished instrumentalists and strong singers. The group found steady work in local show bars as well as in the resort areas outside the city. Acts such as the Premiers were common in Detroit, providing a model for many of the talented musical acts that Berry Gordy Jr. later made famous at Motown records. The Premieres were particularly busy in 1956. Their engagements at the Eagle Show Bar and La Vert’s Lounge and Bowl, two popular Detroit venues, were regularly advertised in the Michigan Chronicle. They were also regularly booked at the Eagle Show Bar in 1958.
Between 1956 and 1960, while playing for the Premiers, Alice also performed in various engagements when groups needed a pianist: she recalls having accompanied both Yusef Lateef and Sonny Stitt in the late 1950s. While developing her professional musical career during this period after high school, Alice met her first husband, Kenneth Hagood, a native of Detroit. Eleven years her senior, “Poncho” Hagood was by then a reputable bebop scat singer who had recorded with Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis. Famous for his vocals on the bebop classic “Oop-Bop-A-Da,” Hagood had returned to Detroit to find employment during the late 1950s and was playing local gigs with Ernest when Alice emerged on the scene.
In 1960, the young couple decided they would travel to Paris together and find work. This was a choice that many notable jazz musicians had made since the 1920s. However, by the early 1960s, living abroad had become particularly appealing. Jazz had generally lost its commercial appeal, replaced by rhythm and blues and its white cousin, rock and roll. Finding work, particularly as a bebop-oriented musician, had become increasingly difficult as musicians playing divergent jazz styles (modal jazz, hard-bop, cool, third stream, and the much contested avant-garde experimentation of Ornette Coleman and his sidemen) were all competing for limited resources and venues. A circle of bebop musicians was thriving abroad, and Poncho and Alice felt that they would do well in Europe. On the recommendation of her family, who did not deem it proper or safe for Alice to travel to Paris with Hagood out of wedlock, the two were married.
Alice spent nearly a year in Paris, where she was struck, as many African American artists have been, by the way the city was “culturally minded, culturally oriented, so appreciative of American music” (ibid.). She worked steadily amid a community of exiled musicians such as Lucky Thompson, Oscar Pettiford, Kenny Clarke, and Hazel Scott, and she recalled playing in upscale jazz venues that drew an international jet-setting crowd, including Prince Ali Kahn, Rita Hayworth, and Elvis and Priscilla Presley.
In Paris, Alice met her musical mentor Bud Powell and spent a good deal of time with his family at their home. Powell was “a guiding light” for Alice: “His sound, his knowledge of chord changes, dexterity. I felt that he was the best inspiration for me—well I can’t say the best, John Coltrane was the best—but he was a great inspiration” (ibid.). Her time with the Powells gave her an opportunity to sit by the great pianist whose lengthy melodic constructions and bebop figures she would closely emulate, particularly in her recorded work with Terry Gibbs. The Powell residence was also a place of familial and spiritual sustenance for her:
Sometimes we would have, what would you call it . . . at home reunions. We would sit down and talk about Detroit and New York. Talk about the family. Talk about the children, the music. Talk about church! We would do that and they were very heartfelt times. We would reminisce about roots, family, and friends. Those who were not with you now, and some only God knows when or if you would see them again. So those were very special moments. Almost like sacred moments. Sometimes we would even sing a hymn or two, or a gospel song. It was just beautiful . . . I have always stayed close to the church, wherever I was. (ibid.)
I find it characteristic that during her busy professional life, she still sought the company of family and spiritually minded individuals with whom she could “raise a hymn.” The following year, while living in New York, she attended church every Sunday in Harlem with her mother’s sister, Margaret Johnston. This spiritual orientation was present, in various forms, throughout her professional career.
Although her time in Paris was musically and culturally enriching, it was also a period of hardship, which may account for her needing to seek the support of the Powell family. In Paris, Alice became pregnant with her first child, Michelle; concurrently, her marriage with Hagood began to deteriorate. Although Alice was reluctant to discuss the matter, several of her Detroit colleagues have insinuated that Hagood struggled with drug addiction at the time. Michelle was born in Paris in 1960. By the time Alice and Michelle returned to the States, Poncho and Alice were legally divorced.
Although Alice never spoke publicly of the period as one of difficulty, life as a single mother and a freelance musician at the age of twenty-three must have been an extraordinary challenge. The professional compromises that she was forced to make were considerable. On her return from Paris, she had wanted to move to New York to pursue a formal musical education. This dream, however, was superseded by the practical decision to get a day job in Manhattan. She explained:
I wanted to just go study. I wanted to go back to the books, to some technical basics. I thought if I studied for a year that would be sufficient. Then I could continue with what I was doing. But it didn’t turn out that way. After a family discussion, it came up that I should work instead and I agreed that I should work and not go [to school]. I had applied to Juilliard and also applied at the Manhattan School. But, after that discussion, she, Auntie [Margaret Johnston], thought it better that I work, not being able to foresee what might be forthcoming. So I went to work as a file clerk. But it wasn’t long after that, maybe two or three months, my brother showed up and I just started working full time [as a musician]. (ibid.)
Ernest frequently came to New York to work, and he recommended his sister for various jobs, as did Barry Harris, who was by then living in the city as well. Alice played regularly with the tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin and remembers the numerous musicians from Detroit who were quite successful in the city at the time. She soon realized that she could make more money by playing music than by working a day job. However, it was difficult raising her daughter at such a distance from her extended family. After nearly a year in New York, she decided to return to Detroit and pursue her music there, a choice that Ernest had also made.
When Alice returned to Detroit, she and Michelle moved in with her parents. Between late 1960 and early 1962, Alice found steady work playing as a solo artist or with a bassist in various show bars. One in particular, the Hobby Bar, a reputable piano bar on Linwood Avenue, showcased local talent and was often a meeting place for local musicians. Alice also became the leader of a sextet that worked regularly in the city and its environs. This was a modern jazz ensemble consisting of valve trombonist George Bohanon from the Premieres, Frank Morelli and Bennie Maupin on reeds, George Goldsmith on drums, and Melvin Jackson on the bass. Alice wrote the arrangements, which consisted of work by contemporary jazz composers as well as her compositions.
During this period, her friendship with Bennie Maupin blossomed, and the two spent a great deal of time exploring various musical ideas. At her family home, with Michelle crawling on the floor, the two worked on pieces for the ensemble. Maupin described her as a great mentor:
Alice and I would be in the living room listening to whatever we were listening to, or she’s playing something for me on the piano, or helping me to interpret some of her stuff, you know, working on a lot of different things with her. In retrospect, I realize I was working on my ear training. She was teaching me things about, you know, voice leading—she was teaching me about how to interpret her music, specifically. And about phrasing and about all kinds of different stuff. You don’t think about it when you’re young like that, you’re just kind of grabbing ahold of it. That was a period that was maybe a two-year period or something like that, but you know all of that I consider very significant. And I don’t think that she realizes to this day how much she taught me. (Maupin, interview with author, 2001)
Maupin recalled Alice’s remarkable ability to transcribe almost anything she heard from a record and immediately put it on paper for the band. One of the first projects he remembered her working on was a series of Thelonious Monk compositions that Hall Overton had arranged for a concert at Town Hall, in New York. Alice took the arrangement for a large ensemble and voiced it for the sextet, filling in harmonies on the piano where instrumental voices were absent.
Maupin also recalled that he and Alice would spend time listening to the music of other composers and improvisers. They were particularly fascinated with John Coltrane’s recording Africa Brass (1961), which had recently been released. In fact, long before her personal and professional association with him, Alice’s compositions for the sextet were influenced by the modal conception of John Coltrane and his contemporaries. Her original work tended to reach beyond the bebop genre for which Detroit was known. Though there are no recordings of the ensemble to explore, Maupin recalled Alice’s compositional and improvisational technique as highly adventurous:
Well you know, we had these forms that she had created. And so they would be, like, basically points of departure, but the improvisation that took place inside them was very adventurous. It wasn’t like the standard, the AABA kind of tune like most bebop forms, or a twelve-bar blues, or something like that. I mean, we might have some of those too, but some of the forms were sort of extended, and the structures, just harmonically, were quite different. So, you know, there might be things that you couldn’t quite put your ear on right away. And we were experimenting with the use of, you know, dissonances and, you know, just trying different scales and experimenting. I mean, we did a lot of that. And when people hear things that they don’t, that they aren’t familiar with, some people gravitate towards it, some people shy away from it because it makes them uncomfortable, you know. And she was just like, man, I mean, sometimes I would just be standing there on the bandstand listening to how she was approaching these pieces.
You know, when you play with people sometimes you sort of get to know how they function? Some people play it safe. They’ll play things pretty much the same each time. Alice never did. I mean, when she played, the lines would be uniquely different. And I listened to her enough to know they were different. I knew the lines were different, and it wasn’t, she didn’t repeat herself just because she knew the particular figure would work in a particular place or something. It was never about that—she was always reaching for something, you know? And that was just so very exciting, and impressed me to the extent that I’m very much that way, you know, myself. I mean, I’m not a lick player. I don’t go around trying to do that. I never wanted to be, and that created problems for me growing up in Detroit. (ibid.)
Clearly, Alice’s musical open-mindedness and willingness to depart from the restrictions of Detroit’s bebop tradition, even in those early years, were indicative of the creative potential that she would unleash in her work with John Coltrane as well as in her own solo career.
When Alice’s future husband came to Detroit’s Minor Key in January 1962, Alice and Bennie Maupin attended the show together. Although Alice had heard John Coltrane with Miles Davis in Paris, it was the first time she had heard him live with his own ensemble. Maupin described their inspirational evening and the way in which the innovations of John Coltrane were quite challenging for Detroit audiences dedicated to the bebop style:
The music just overwhelmed us. I mean, we got there—I went and picked her up and we drove over to this place, and it used to be an old furniture store. So they had an area that you could kind of sit in upstairs, so we were able to get upstairs and sit right in front of the bandstand, so we could look right down at the band. And we sat there all night, you know, and just listened to that music, you know? But even prior to that, going to hear John live, we were already daily listening to Africa Brass and just marveling at what had happened there. No one had made a recording like that. You know, with that kind of intensity, with the sounds of animals, and you know, it was just, it was just very different. But that was a very special night for us that I’ll never forget, because we sat there and we listened to the music, and people were very—the Detroit audience was very oriented towards bebop, to say the least, which is why so many great bebop players come from there—and, you know, they loved John’s music, and a lot of people were connected to John, of course, through Miles. But as he started to come with his own music, people started to be very critical. And people were not so easy to relax and say, “oh yeah, he’s just reaching for something different.” People were very, very vocal about how they, how the music had affected them. And they were, like, “what the hell is he doing?” You know, and so we sat there that night and we listened and we talked and we listened. We stayed the entire night. (ibid.)
In 1962, after Alice reestablished herself in Detroit, her childhood mentor Terry Pollard approached her about playing in Terry Gibbs’s band. A New York bebopper and one of America’s foremost vibraphone players at the time, Gibbs preferred to work with musicians from Detroit, who, he felt, possessed the necessary combination of dexterity, blues phrasing, and harmonic sophistication that his music required. Before hiring Alice, Gibbs had toured with a host of Detroit natives: Alice’s half-brother, the bassist Ernest Farrow; the bassist Herman Wright; and the pianist Terry Pollard.
Alice’s parents were aging, and although she was reluctant to leave her daughter Michelle and go on the road, Alice felt that it was time for her to get greater professional exposure, to ensure that she could better provide for herself. She auditioned for Terry Gibbs in New York at Nola’s Studio and, according to Gibbs, “right from the introduction Alice played on the first song, I knew that she was something else. She sounded like Bud Powell. She played chorus after chorus, and every note was a gem” (Gibbs and Ginell 2003, 228).
Between 1962 and 1963, Alice toured the country with Gibbs’s band, which at the time included Herman Wright on bass and Bobby Pike on drums. Their first big engagement was at the Metropole, in Manhattan, playing opposite Gene Krupa. In Gibbs’s band, Alice made use of the mallet skills she had acquired in high school. She and Gibbs would “close the show with a duet, a kind of show business thing,” which he had popularized earlier when Terry Pollard was in the band. Although Gibbs was a notorious entertainer, Alice was far more than a novelty act or “girl musician” for Gibbs:
She wouldn’t have been there if she couldn’t play, because I don’t hire anybody—girls, boys, yellows, blacks, greens—I only hire people that can play good and that I have fun playing with. She kept getting better all the time. We started out playing slowly, and as we played more and more, she got better and we played faster. She would have been a great vibes player if she had stayed with us. (Gibbs, telephone interview with author, 2001)
Later that summer, the band opened for the John Coltrane Quartet at New York’s Birdland. It was during this engagement that Alice and John began to get to know one another. Gibbs recalled: “There was a back booth in Birdland where musicians could sit, and every time we’d get off the stage, Alice would be there, just staring at John while he played. I think she was falling in love with him” (ibid.). In our interview, Alice offered more details of her initial encounter with John Coltrane at Birdland:
I had an inner feeling about him, but I’m not the only one—there must be thousands of people. When I heard his recordings I would hear not only what goes into your intelligence or your senses, your mentality—but also something else, like another message. I connected with this other message. It was like he had to be saying that to me. Of course, that could be just the imagination. But I was connecting with another message that I perceived as coming though his music. So then when we were there at Birdland, and he was in performance, that same feeling would come back, like some kind of inner knowing, or recognizing something that I’m hearing, something that I comprehend was associated with my soul or spirit. I would think the first two days it wasn’t more than you speak. That’s it, “hello.” And you just go sit down and don’t have anything to say. He was the most quiet person! Quiet as quiet. His silence was loud because it was so pervasive—like he didn’t hear anything. This little waiting room that the musicians would sit in before their performance, I don’t believe it took up more space than around twelve by five or something. But he would sit there and the quiet was strong. It didn’t make you feel isolated, but part of. I identified with it right away. And it was a kind of silence that you don’t want to disturb. You don’t interrupt with, “Oh, would you like some tea?” You respect it.
The first several days I had very little to say beyond “hello.” That’s it. When more than “hello” came out, well, I was walking into my little room, and I heard him play something that he had composed. He was walking behind me playing. I said, “This is so beautiful. What a very beautiful theme, a very beautiful melody.” He said, “It’s for you!” I said, “Thank you very much. It is so beautiful.” From that moment on, from the moment that words were shared and exchanged—by the end of the week, well it was the termination of my time with Terry Gibbs. (A. Coltrane, interview with author, 2001)
After their stint working at Birdland in the summer of 1963, John would come to see Alice while she was on the road. Following a successful six-week tour on the West Coast and a reunion show in Detroit in 1964 that brought veteran Terry Pollard out to play, Alice quite suddenly resigned from Gibbs’s band. Gibbs recalled in the book he wrote with Ginell:
About five days before we were to open at the London House, Alice came to me and said that John wanted her to go to Sweden with him and that they were eventually going to get married. I really got bugged because I had always wanted to play the London House. I was ready to call the union or my attorney. How could she do this to me? We had a winner and now she was going to leave me with an unrehearsed group. We had been together for almost one year. After calming down and thinking about it, I figured, to start with, how do you stop a woman in love from doing anything? Plus, Alice was one of the nicest people I ever knew. I lucked out by hiring Walter Bishop Jr., a very well known bebop piano player and we did very well at the London House. To this day, Alice and I are good friends. She lives about five miles from where I live and we talk to each other from time to time. (ibid., 231)
Alice’s encounter with John Coltrane at Birdland in 1963 ultimately determined the course of her personal and artistic life. Listening to Coltrane improvise each night also inspired her musicianship in an immediate fashion. Her musical conception during this period is documented on three albums with Gibbs’s band: The Family Album (1963), El Nutto (1964), and Jewish Melodies in Jazztime (1963), a rather forward-looking fusion album that brought the best New York klezmer musicians out of the woodwork to play. These LPS with Terry Gibbs provide the first commercial recordings of Alice’s piano work prior to her collaborations with John Coltrane. They are also the only recordings available of her playing in the modern jazz idiom, as she abandoned the formal constraints of straight-ahead jazz in 1965, when she joined her husband’s ensemble. For the most part, the structures of the original Gibbs compositions on these albums follow a thirty-two-bar AABA form, or a twelve-bar blues form, and display chord progressions and substitutions characteristic of bebop jazz. However, several tunes featured on Jewish Melodies in Jazztime are modal tunes that follow the harmonic structure of the Eastern European folk melodies that Gibbs drew upon.
The bebop idiom clearly pervades Alice’s work here. One is immediately aware of the influence of her jazz mentors Barry Harris and Bud Powell, and the dominance of the bebop vocabulary popular among her Detroit peers. Parker-like chromatic phrases that accentuate chord tones frequently appear over the major chord, as in figure 1.1, taken from the first measure of her solo on “One for My Uncle,” from The Family Album.31 We see the same figure again, transposed with slight modification, in the first bar of her improvisation on “Henny Time,” in figure 1.2. This phrase also appears in measure 27 of “Button Up your Lip” and in measures 1 and 5 of “Sunny Girl,” as well as in several of her solos on the albums El Nutto and Jewish Melodies in Jazztime. Such highly calculated phrasing, the “licks” that players regularly rely on, is common in bebop-oriented playing, and individual musicians are known for their signature melodies.
Fig. 1.1 First measures of Coltrane’s solo on “One for My Uncle.”
Fig. 1.2 First bar of Coltrane’s improvisation on “Henny Time.”
Fig. 1.3 Measure 16 of Coltrane’s solo in “Sunny Girl.”
Fig. 1.4 First bar of Coltrane’s solo on “Up at Louge’s Place.”
Fig. 1.5 Coltrane’s “rhythm changes” bridge of Gibbs’s “El Nutto.”
Alice also employs the altered dominant scales that bebop musicians were using with great regularity by the late 1940s. The first is the whole-tone scale, often associated with Thelonious Monk, which is drawn from measure 16 of her solo in “Sunny Girl,” shown in figure 1.3. Alice also favored the melodic minor scale, also known as the superlocrian, over dominant harmonies. Figure 1.4, taken from the first measure of her solo on “Up at Louge’s Place,” is a particularly salient use of this altered sonority, as it anticipates the actual dominant chord by one measure. This combination of horn-like bebop phrasing and her mastery of harmonic tension and release should remind listeners of her mentor Bud Powell. Also reminiscent of Powell are her lengthy phrases, made all the more interesting by the use of well-placed, highly syncopated accents. Observe, in figure 1.5, her masterful playing in the “rhythm changes” bridge of Gibbs’s “El Nutto.”
As was the case with many Detroit pianists, the blues idiom pervaded much of Alice’s playing. One finds numerous examples of blues-based melodic elements, often in compound meter, which, though prevalent in modern jazz, are highly characteristic of the gospel genre. The church would also have been the context in which she absorbed and made use of this language from an early age, as opposed to the blues club or dance hall. For instance, figure 1.6, excerpted from measures 9–11 of her solo on “El Cheapo,” demonstrates her frequent use of the ornamented pentatonic scale with a 12/8 feel. Blues aesthetics are also apparent in the note clusters she accents in her right hand. Jazz pianists use this device in order to imitate the blues inflections of guitar and voice; see, for example, figure 1.7, from measure 14 of “Henny Time.”
Fig. 1.6 Measures 9–11 of Coltrane’s solo on “El Cheapo.”
Fig. 1.7 Measure 14 of “Henny Time.”
Most noteworthy about Alice’s style as an improviser during this period—what makes her truly distinct from her Motown colleagues—was the way that she infused Detroit’s modern jazz language with a trance-like intensity. She regularly disrupted the formal and metrical aspects of Gibbs’s compositions with extended modal passages and rhythmic and melodic motifs played over the bar line. Subdividing and expanding each beat, she achieved enormous feats of virtuosity. She committed herself so completely to the musical moment that formulaic patterns and preconceived ideas were ineffectual. Neither calculated nor predictable, her solos were inspired by “the dictates of the spirit,” to borrow a phrase from Clarence Boyer.
For instance, with its precarious double-time passages and extended motivic development, her solo on “Up at Louge’s Place” from The Family Album abandons the constraints of the meter and bar line and displays her predilection for feeling over form. The moments of emotional abandon heard on The Family Album anticipate even more ecstatic improvisations featured in the minor, modal tunes of Jewish Melodies in Jazztime. Tunes with static harmony provide for a much more intuitive and somatic improvising experience at the piano than do those with rapid harmonic motion. In such modal contexts, Alice allowed her technique to take over as she surrendered fully to rhythmic and motivic inspiration. She was also particularly at home in minor keys, especially improvising on tunes with slow harmonic motion—much of the music she recorded during her career as a bandleader, such as “Ptah the El Daoud” or “Journey in Satchidanda” were tunes of this nature. On Jewish Melodies in Jazztime, we can see that her improvisations were already headed in this direction. We can also begin to understand why John Coltrane may have been attracted to her playing. Gibbs recounted how Alice actually “stole the date” from him:
She was starting to play runs she got from listening to John and all the musicians flipped out every time she played. She was making those Eastern-style runs on minor songs and they sounded very authentic. I was the Jew, and she was wiping me out. (2003, 230)
Salient aspects of this virtuosity can be seen in the opening bars of her solo on “Bei Mir Bist du Schon.” There she introduced a double-time motif that outlined the interval of a third. She later repeated and transposed this figure, thereby obscuring the beat, barline, and harmony of the original tune. Figure 1.8 shows the opening measure of her solo, followed by measures 12–18 in figure 1.9.
There is a shimmering intensity in her double-time work on this album that results from the ornamentation and varieties of rhythms she used, even at breakneck tempos. She was also an extremely nimble pianist—John Coltrane used the adjective “fleet” to describe her playing. Notice the gestural nature and rhythmic complexity of her opening statement on “Nyah Shere” (figure 1.10) and measures 33–34 from “Shaine Une Zees” (figure 1.11).
Fig. 1.8 Opening measure of Coltrane’s solo on “Bei Mir Bist du Schon.”
Fig. 1.9 Measures 12–18 of “Bei Mir Bist du Schon.”
Fig. 1.10 Opening measure of “Nyah Shere.”
Fig. 1.11 Measures 33–34 of “Shaine Une Zees.”
What we see in Alice’s early tracks with Terry Gibbs is not the work of a young novice, but that of a seasoned musician already disposed toward the emotional, technical, and spiritual intensity that would come to define her playing with her husband. Raised in a religious and exceptionally musical household in postwar Detroit, Alice was slated for early professional success. Close family ties to Detroit’s gospel and bebop network gave her access to playing opportunities, insider knowledge of the latest techniques and innovations, and a comparatively stress-free environment as a female musician. As a church musician, Alice drew from a rich well of African American folk music and ritual performance practices that date back to slavery. As a progressive bebop musician, she was also up to date on the latest rhythmic and harmonic innovations occurring among her peers. Finally, she was deeply influenced by the musical and spiritual ecstasy of gospel worship, elements she felt were present in the music of John Coltrane. All of these aspects would coalesce into a definitive, original, and mature artistic concept during her years as John Coltrane’s musical and spiritual partner.
