Of course, John Coltrane is the one who inspires everybody, if you were fortunate enough to be in his presence in those days. He would always encourage you to fully express what you had. Not half of it, because it’s not made that way, or three-quarters—the entire experience of the expressive self. Truth on your instrument. That just opens so many doors, so many avenues, so many vistas, so many plateaus. You could hear your sound, music, light coming from the ethereal, heavenly realms. When you played in octaves that you would never go—your bass area, and your contrabass area, or your tenor area. You heard all kinds of things that would have just been left alone, never a part of your discovery or appreciation. —Alice Coltrane
In February 1966, Alice McLeod, now Alice Coltrane, made her first recording with her husband John in a San Francisco studio, which was posthumously issued as “Manifestation” on the CD Cosmic Music. Her stunning and seemingly overnight transformation from a Detroit bebop pianist to a champion of the new music evident on this recording speaks to the profound impact of John Coltrane as a musical role model. It also raises the question of how she acquired these new techniques. She had not been participating at jam sessions or performing club dates devoted to free jazz. To the contrary, shortly after Alice McLeod and John Coltrane met at Birdland in July 1963, they began their life together as a family, and she gave up steady work as a musician. While she was touring, Alice had asked her aunt to care for Alice’s daughter, Michelle. Now, after a joyful reunion with Michelle, Alice soon found herself pregnant. She and John had three boys within three years: John Junior, 1964–85; Ravi, born 1965; and Oran, born in 1967).1 Her discography indicates this dramatic turn of events, with its gap of two and a half years between her last studio session with Terry Gibbs and her 1966 recording debut with her husband.
In 1966 when Alice recorded “Manifestation,” it was not clear that she would become John Coltrane’s regular pianist. However, soon after the February recording session, John asked her to join his new group, featuring Rashied Ali on drums, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Pharoah Sanders on woodwinds. This was a highly controversial decision in the jazz world: John Coltrane’s previous “classic quartet,” featuring the pianist McCoy Tyner and the drummer Elvin Jones, had won him great public notoriety. Tyner’s distinctive and innovative approach as an accompanist had also been crucial to John Coltrane’s artistic development. For any pianist, these would have been large shoes to fill.2 Furthermore, John was exploring extremely dissonant, free-form musical templates that were alienating many of his fans. As Alice put it: “When he became avant-garde, as they termed it, he lost many people, many followers. They didn’t like it, they didn’t approve of it, they didn’t appreciate it. And there was no way he could go back, there was no road to return to. It was his commitment, it was his decision” (A. Coltrane, interview with Palmer, 1991).
Despite the controversy surrounding the dissolution of his previous all-star band, the direction of his new music, and the serious health problems that emerged during the last year and a half of his life, John Coltrane recorded a significant amount of material with Alice and his quintet, with the support of Bob Theile and the Impulse! label. Nearly all of this music was issued posthumously, and a good portion has only recently been released. Fortunately, there is now substantial documentation of John’s late work and Alice’s musical contributions to her husband’s ensemble, which can be heard on the albums Cosmic Music, recorded 1966–68; Live at the Village Vanguard Again! 1966; Live in Japan, 1966; Expression, 1967; Stellar Regions, 1967; and The Olatunji Concert, 1967.
Clearly, John Coltrane had a profound influence on Alice’s musicianship. Even though she had not been on stage for many months, she had been immersed in her husband’s music, so that when she joined him in the recording studio, she was attuned to his compositional sensibilities. Furthermore, Coltrane was an effective and encouraging bandleader who always achieved tremendous results from his players. Playing solos on John’s compositions, Alice was no longer constrained by meters, bar lines, or fixed harmonic indications. She integrated the blues-based pentatonic language of her prior style with rapidly shifting tonic pedals and extreme dissonance. Freed from the formal mandates of bebop, she made full use of her technical prowess and the entire range of the piano, expressing herself without reservation. She allowed the “dictates of the spirit” that surfaced in her work with Terry Gibbs to fully “manifest” themselves (Boyer 1995, 44).
Although John taught Alice—as he did all his band members—to fully explore her creative potential, it is important to realize that their relationship was not simply one of musical mentor and disciple: it was an intimate and complex marital partnership, in which family life and religious exploration provided a foundation for their mutual development. In fact, I believe that John Coltrane’s biographers have significantly underestimated Alice’s deep influence on him as a partner. In the short time that they were together (July 1963 to July 1967), John Coltrane’s music changed dramatically. When the couple first met in Birdland in 1963, he was performing with his classic quintet and straddling a somewhat conservative middle ground between the metered, modal music of the jazz mainstream and the timbral explorations of the avant-garde. In 1965, however, he assembled a new group for the album Ascension and was committed almost exclusively thereafter to playing “free.”3 When Alice joined him on the bandstand after her three-year maternal leave, he recorded the albums listed above, six of the most unconventional and daring projects of his career. Furthermore, the spiritual intent of his music, first revealed in A Love Supreme in 1965 and in later “out” recordings such as Om (1965) and Meditation (1966), became increasingly explicit during his time with Alice. It was also at this time that he gained the reputation of jazz guru.
Remarkably, despite both her prior immersion in the church and her subsequent life as a swami and devotional musician, Alice has largely been left out of the accepted account of her husband’s spiritual rebirth during the 1960s. But this should not come as a surprise. Even at the height of her own commercial recording career, Alice never received recognition commensurate with her contributions; in the public’s imagination, she remained, and still remains, simply the wife of John Coltrane. Alice herself was partly responsible for this lack of recognition. She was always self-effacing in interviews and behaved with the conviction that service to her husband’s legacy was historically important. Journalists and scholars rarely asked Alice about her own career. Instead, they viewed her as a primary source of information about her late husband. This problem plagues all of Coltrane’s former sidemen; however, Alice’s status as significant other—privy to the man behind the horn—has exacerbated this problem. Moreover, she privately and publicly embraced her role as partner and feminine counterpart to her husband: “I kind of liked housekeeping myself. I liked to cook. I liked being a mother. I liked having a house. I liked all of that part of it” (interview with author, 2001).
This is not to say that she was unaware of the workings of male power or the prevailing attitudes of the women’s liberation movement. Rather, she asserted a feminist politics of interdependence as opposed to one that would have women become more like men. If she had had a different attitude, she might never have found the innovative and complementary style as a side person that she did in her husband’s late quintet. In a 1988 radio interview with Dolores Brandon, Alice explained:
Can I just state that I do believe that men feel this is their world. And it’s true that they have been endowed with male power. And that male power is quite analytical and technical and I think it best manifests when it is inventive and creative. And, I have noticed that instead of being inventive and creative, often it’s not that. It’s negative. And I wouldn’t think that it would be negative if what they really expressed in male power was to be leaders and teachers and guides and things like this. I mean they really are endowed. But when they turn it into themselves to control the world, to control people, and then females! They don’t have a very positive view of her. Often they have utilized her, you see what I mean. They’ve never, well not ever, I can’t say this, but they don’t seem to promote womanhood or uplift womanhood. And that’s what I admired about John so much. He uplifted it here. He respected it. It was wife, mother of his children. It was mate. It was friend. And really, I didn’t want to be equal to him. I didn’t have to be equal to him and do what he did. That, I never considered. I don’t think like that. And whatever in the women’s liberation—that’s what they want. I didn’t want to be equal to him. I wanted to be a wife, to be that for him, that part of him. (A. Coltrane 1988)
Alice further elaborated on how shared family and spiritual life provided a basis for their mutual musical growth:
He, I felt, brought out the best in me musically, as his wife and mother of his children. Somehow he was also inspired to bring out the avant-garde music. I feel that it was always in him, being born with this gift, this God-given gift of music. It was there. Of course over the years, we heard it. We would hear these ways, these wonderful sounds coming from him. To me, as result of the association [their marriage], it fully manifested. There was no more question about direction. (ibid., emphasis mine)
Responding to these statements, Brandon asked, “Do you think it had something to do with the birth of the children as well?” Alice answered:
I think all of it is a part of it because he was always inspired. He was very much a family man, always at home, if he was not traveling and concertizing. I do believe that all of those factors contributed to his higher involvement, his higher innovation in music . . . As a result of our association, I saw him more one-pointed, focused in the direction he was going without question. I think there were questionings from others around him, associates, musicians. But he seemed to focus on his goals with a conviction. What we did was really to begin to reach out and look toward higher experiences in spiritual life and higher knowledge to be obtained in spiritual life. This is what we did. And our basic root was, of course, reading and hearing discourse, talk by spiritual leaders and teachers, as well as our own engagement in meditation. (ibid., emphasis mine)
Alice and John Coltrane shared a desire “to reach out and look toward higher experiences in spiritual life.” As a couple, they explored a variety of non-Western religious traditions and embraced the transcendent potential of jazz improvisation; these pursuits as a couple ultimately laid the foundation for Alice’s subsequent spiritual journey and the musical aesthetics she developed during her career as a bandleader. Their pursuits were also deeply embedded in the religious culture of the 1960s. Alice’s future artistic transformation and the spiritually oriented aesthetics of her late-modal and free-jazz explorations with her husband are best viewed in the context of this exploratory religious zeitgeist.
Although his canonical status as jazz guru—a reputation cemented by the platinum-selling album A Love Supreme (1965)—belies the fact, John Coltrane was not the first jazz musician to draw on spiritual subject matter for musical inspiration. Other famous jazz composers, such as Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus, had alluded to the black church much earlier in their respective works “The Black and Tan Fantasy” and “Prayer Meeting.” In the 1950s, this trend became increasingly popular as hard-bop players drew consistently from the gospel genre in order to differentiate and reclaim their music from that of the white “cool school.”4 It has by now become rather standard in both jazz scholarship and popular music forums to link black secular musical aesthetics to church practices, jazz not withstanding.5
Significantly less attention, however, has been paid to the influence of non-Christian religious affiliations among African Americans and how those ties have also had an impact on aesthetics. This is despite the fact that as early as the 1940s, many influential and innovative jazz musicians began to follow Islam and other non-Christian practices: the Detroit native Yusef Lateef converted to Ahmadiyya Islam in the early 1950s, as did the drummer Art Blakey; and McCoy Tyner was a Sunni Muslim for a period of time in the mid-1950s.6 By the 1960s, jazz musicians were drawing consistently from not only African American spiritual traditions and Islamic practices, but also East Asian and South Asian religions, as well as idiosyncratic spiritual concepts.7 Clearly, such musical and spiritual explorations of the East, Africa, and various cosmic realms distanced jazz from the traditional Protestant church as the locus of black ethnicity. Nevertheless, many of the same “functional dimensions” of African American sacred music persisted, to use Mellonee Burnim’s useful term. The new spiritual jazz continued to provide “a means of cultural affirmation, individual and collective expression, and spiritual sustenance” (Burnim 1988, 112).
Although jazz musicians referred to the black church and other religious practices in their music prior to John Coltrane, his spiritual impact in this regard was singular: he imbued the modal and avant-garde jazz improvisation of the 1960s with spiritual significance, and, in many respects, he succeeded in creating a new religion for jazz musicians based on what Alice described as “the entire experience of the expressive self” (interview with author, 2001). John encouraged Alice and his other band members to make extraordinarily personal statements. While the authenticity that he sought—“the entire experience of the expressive self” and “truth on your instrument”—was intrinsic to his spiritual philosophy, it also had extensive political ramifications during the civil rights era as a display of personal liberation and black cultural expression. Let me quote again Alice’s recollection of playing with her husband:
Of course, John Coltrane is the one who inspires everybody, if you were fortunate enough to be in his presence in those days. He would always encourage you to fully express what you had. Not half of it, because it’s not made that way, or three-quarters—the entire experience of the expressive self. Truth on your instrument. That just opens so many doors, so many avenues, so many vistas, so many plateaus. You could hear your sound, music, light, coming from the ethereal, heavenly realms. When you played in octaves that you would never go—your bass area, and your contrabass area, or your tenor area. You heard all kinds of things that would have just been left alone, never a part of your discovery or appreciation. (ibid.)
It is of great significance that John Coltrane’s spiritual vision was inspired by a concept of a supreme being more universal and inclusive than that of the Judeo-Christian tradition of his childhood. By the early 1960s, Coltrane found strength and solace in a well-reasoned, nonsectarian view of God, which Lewis Porter calls “a kind of universal religion” (1998, 211). Included in his spirituality was an array of world traditions: Zen, Zoroastrianism, the writings of Yogananda and Krishnamurti, and a commitment to daily meditation, all of which he explored with Alice.
By the early 1960s, John Coltrane’s “universal spirituality” became increasingly fused with his interest in world music, and he developed a multicultural theory of musical transcendence that had a lasting impact on Alice’s later career.8 In an interview with Nat Hentoff in 1961, Coltrane stated, “I’ve already been looking into those approaches to music, as in India in which particular scales are intended to produce specific emotional meanings” (quoted in Hentoff 1961). Coltrane was particularly fascinated with the music of the sitar player Ravi Shankar, after whom he named his second son. Shankar began concertizing in the West in the early 1950s and almost single-handedly popularized Indian classical music in America, inspiring a great many jazz musicians of the era.9 Coltrane had also befriended the Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji, one of the first proponents of West African traditional music in America, with whom he would speak at great length about the relationship between African tonal languages and drumming patterns.10 In the summer of 1963, the same summer he met Alice, John Coltrane discussed his interest in the magical, healing properties of music in an interview with French journalists (J. Coltrane 1963, 14).
The timing was perfect for Coltrane’s unique synthesis. The modal jazz forms that he had pioneered with the Miles Davis sextet during the late 1950s allowed for the superimposition of non-Western music. The static harmony and tonic pedals that defined modal jazz—found on Davis’s albums such as the 1958 Milestones and the 1959 Kind of Blue—allowed for the incorporation of music that relied on a drone, or an unchanging tonal center, a device common in Asian and African music. By the late 1960s, John Coltrane’s concept of musical transcendence was extraordinarily popular. His fans and fellow musicians had come to associate his spiritual views with the compositional devices he used on the album A Love Supreme and in other recordings from this period. Mantra-like melodies, static harmonies, pentatonic improvisations, dynamic ensemble interactions, and increasing freedom from metric constraints came to signify both a religious attitude and a new ecstatic spiritual practice in its own right. One should keep in mind, however, that John Coltrane never applied non-Western musical genres in an orthodox manner: he took aspects of these traditions and absorbed them into his own jazz-based modal structures. With their attendant transcendent or healing properties, these non-Western sources were filtered through a personal musical and spiritual philosophy of expressing inner truth. In short, John Coltrane’s creative ideology was deeply intertwined with his spiritual philosophy, which rested on three basic tenets and which Alice fully embraced. First, music making is based on personal spiritual expression, and the artist should be fully committed to expressing an authentic self as a musician. Second, music making should be universal, erasing aesthetic boundaries and proscriptions about style. And third, such musical universality requires branching out: it is inclusive, pluralistic, and multicultural.11
The personalized, eclectic, and global nature of John Coltrane’s spiritual and creative ideology was consistent with the new religious culture of the 1960s. Religion scholars have observed a profound transformation in American spirituality during the era. Religious identities that had long been rooted in “social sources of denominationalism,” such as class, region, race, and ethnicity, began to deteriorate as a product of greater social mobility in the period after the Second World War.12 Prior to mid-century, communities worshiped together “in ethnic enclaves that gave religious practice a distinct geographic identity” (Wuthnow 1998, 23). This earlier model was one in which “family, church, and neighborhood were closely integrated” (20). By the 1960s, this “spirituality of dwelling” had given way “to a new spirituality of seeking,” in which individuals began to “increasingly negotiate among competing glimpses of the sacred” (3).
Religious practice of the 1960s also became more “inwardly focused”: the “search for the spiritual went beyond doctrine, creed, or religion” and was concerned instead with “an inner world of truth and meaning” and “individualized authentic identity” (Roof 1999, 66). The philosopher Charles Taylor sees this as part of America’s “culture of authenticity,” tracing its roots to the rational and political individualism of Descartes and Rousseau, the heartfelt yearnings of the Romantics, the “committed inwardness” of Protestant Christianity, and Herder’s eighteenth-century notion that people had individual “essences.” As Taylor puts it:
Being true to myself means being true to my own originality, and that is something that only I can articulate and discover. In articulating it, I am also defining myself. I am realizing a potentiality that is properly my own. This is the background understanding to the modern ideal of authenticity, and to the goals of self-fulfillment or self-realization in which it is usually couched. (Taylor 1992, 29)
According to Taylor, this Western notion of “being true to myself” was connected to a political and spiritual “horizon of significance” during the 1960s, so that individual expressive acts could “offer a picture of what a better or higher life would be” and set “a standard of what we ought to desire” (ibid.).
However, another form of individualism should also be considered with respect to jazz avant-garde jazz, as it impinges on Taylor’s framework in important ways. Expressing individuality is a fundamental aspect of African American musical aesthetics. Scholars trace such musical features as the importance of the soloist within the collective, improvisation, and the requirement of having “your own sound” to premodern West Africa, not the modern West.13 Many of these musical traditions define jazz, its avant-garde variants notwithstanding. Furthermore, acknowledging these African musical origins was central to the spiritual jazz culture of the 1960s.
Scholars have also observed a renewed interest in Asian religions and their American cousins, sometimes called harmonial or metaphysical religions. During the 1960s, Eastern spiritual traditions were explored with new vigor—facilitated, in part, by the Asian Immigration Act of 1965, which led South and East Asians to bring their daily religious practices to U.S. soil.14 Technological advances, postwar affluence, and the media focus on foreign wars of liberation also produced a new global exchange in which “religious symbols, teachings, and practices” were easily “disembedded” and “reembedded” into one another, resulting in “religious pluralism within the individual,” “bricolage,” and a “mixing of codes” (Roof 1999, 73).
These trends in mainstream America held true for black America as well. However, the role of religion and the presence of religious leaders in the struggle for civil rights brought a new urgency to the issue of black spirituality. To quote Gayraud Wilmore, the late 1960s was “an unprecedented era of black theological reflection” (1998, 244). The political efficacy of the mainstream Protestant church was a topic of enormous debate. Proponents saw the church as the wellspring of all black institutions, and one of the richest elements in black culture and social organization (Frazier 1964; Fichter 1965). They viewed the 1960s as a renaissance in which the church could resume its traditional functions of challenging the goals of white America. Critics, however, complained that the church no longer lived up to the expectations engendered in its past, and that its fragmentation and complacency had led it to abandon the black underclass, which was facing ever-increasing economic and political hardship (Washington 1964; Clark 1964; Cleage 1972).
These debates were contemporaneous with the rise of new forms of Afrocentric spirituality associated with cultural nationalism: some examples are Ron Karenga’s Kwanzaa; an interest in Egyptology, as well as in forms of black religion such as Santeria; and, of course, the rise of the Nation of Islam. The expansion and assertion of black spirituality, however, was not limited to a return to African roots. For some black Americans, the new spirituality included a journey East to Japan or India, and into the realms of meditation and yoga.
This assertion of spirituality, even eclectic and Asian spirituality, was in keeping with the politics of Black Power. Though Black Power is typically associated with the political concerns of African American economic development, education, and even armed self-defense, it was also concerned with defining and asserting blackness as a cultural ideal. This, in turn, required a new spiritual foundation. Members of the Black Arts movement—the cultural arm of the Black Power movement—wrote ardently about the need for a black spiritual culture whose politics were consistent with the revolutionary agenda of Black Nationalism. In 1969, writing on the theme of spirituality emerging in the plays of Black Arts literary figures, Larry Neal asserted:
The Old Spirituality is generalized. It seeks to recognize Universal Humanity. The New Spirituality is specific. It begins by seeing the world from the concise point of view of the colonialized. Where the Old Spirituality would live with Oppression while ascribing to the oppressors an innate goodness, the New Spirituality demands a radical shift in point of view. The colonized native, the oppressed must, of necessity, subscribe to a separate morality. One that will liberate him and his people. (1989, 77)
In an essay called “The Religion of Black Power,” Vincent Harding enthusiastically proclaimed that “Allah and other gods of Africa enter into competition with Yahweh, Jesus, and Buddha . . . It is joyously difficult but part of the affirmation of Black Power that ‘we are a spiritual people’” (1968, 30). That this simple, unequivocal assertion of spirituality was not necessarily bound to Africa as a cultural or geographic homeland opened the possibility of myriad forms that religion and spirituality could take. “We are a spiritual people” was also frequently coupled with what Wilmore describes as “a new pride in the strange and wonderful beauty of being black and letting it all hang out” (1998, 225).
The cultural historian Melani McAlister has written persuasively on the political dimensions of African Americans’ interest in non-Western religions.15 McAlister sees such spiritual explorations among black Americans as a way of forming “an alternative sacred geography” that provides “alternatives to official policy, framing transnational affiliations and claims to racial or religious authority that challenged the cultural logic of American power.” She sees these spiritual pursuits as part of a larger project that encompasses “a re-visioning of history and geography in order to construct a moral and spiritual basis for contemporary affiliations and identities” (1999, 638). In her words:
The attempt to construct a new black culture was deeply intertwined with the search for religious alternatives to mainstream Christianity, a search that included not only Islam, but also a renewed interest in the signs and symbols of pre-Islamic and traditional African religions (such as the Yoruban religion) and the study of ancient Egypt. These influences were often mixed together . . . in an eclectic, sometimes deliberately mystical, mix. (ibid.)
Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, McAlister argues that cultural productions make meaning by their “historical association with other types of meaning-making activity” (2001, 8). She says that we need to “‘explain the coincidence’ that brings specific cultural products into conversation with specific discourses” (7). While Alice and John Coltrane were not explicit about the transnational politics of their music or spirituality, when framed within the “alternative sacred geography” of the Black Arts movement, their avant-garde explorations are rendered politically meaningful.
In May 1966, John Coltrane’s new quintet was scheduled for a live recording at the Village Vanguard, in New York and John offered Alice the position as pianist in his band. At first, she did not feel up to the task and was hesitant to join: “I didn’t know whether to accept . . . because I’m considering there are so many other people who’d be more qualified” (quoted in Toop 2002, 40). But soon she was making powerful, compelling statements in these new avant-garde musical environments. In fact, she never went back to playing typical twelve-bar and thirty-two-bar tunes. In an interview in the 1980s, she reflected on her musical transformation with her husband and the lasting appeal of avant-garde improvisation:
I really was quite conventional. I wasn’t innovative or exploratory. I saw music as conforming to the basic chord progressions that were being played by so many musicians around the country . . . I do not dislike it [the old style] but I prefer avant-garde music because it isn’t as restrictive . . . If you’re set in this 12-bar pattern, you don’t change from that; you stay within that confinement. For people with limited ability, maybe it’s a safety measure to play in that context. But for innovative people, that’s quite limiting . . . Avant-garde music to me is like journeying across the country until you come to a beautiful park. You say, “We’ll stop here for just a moment.” After a while you decide to go onward because you know of a nice area ahead, but before you leave, you see a lake that you didn’t notice before, and you decide to stay and experience that for a while. Sometimes your moment is there like an eternity. This type of thing is quite prevalent in my music. (quoted in Lerner 1982, 24)
In some respects, improvising on John Coltrane’s late compositions required that Alice chart very new territory. The expressive intensity and adventuresome nature of his musical templates called for a very different kind of musicianship than the three-minute bebop solos she had previously recorded as a side person with Terry Gibbs: John wished to do away with the conventions of fixed meter, fixed formal structure, and standard harmonic progressions. In both his original tunes and his reinterpretations of standard material, he would minimally suggest a melody, a mode or modes, and a texture, and then let his players explore their wider implications. Often, one rendition of a piece could last as long as forty-five minutes, and it was not unusual for individual solos to last twenty minutes.
One might imagine that such loosely structured environments require less skill on the part of the improviser; in fact, avant-garde forms demand great musicianship if the final results are to be successful. Gone are the “safety measures”—to use Alice’s term—of the cyclical form, stock phrases, and the clear beginning, middle, and end of a tune. With parameters open and ample time to explore, the improviser must generate his or her own logic. Furthermore, musical statements must be unambiguous and interesting for ensemble interaction to progress.
While John’s musical forms were different from anything that Alice had played before, her previous musical experiences had more than adequately prepared her. In her own band in Detroit in the early 1960s, and on the bandstand with Terry Gibbs, she had already explored modality in rather adventuresome ways. As a church keyboard player, she was accustomed to navigating loose formal structures that catered to “the dictates of the spirit,” and she had developed the necessary mental and physical endurance. As a bebop player and devoted student of classical music, she had acquired technical abilities adequate to keep up with her husband’s tempos. In short, playing with John Coltrane was not so much a break with her past as a Detroit pianist than it was an opportunity for Alice to fully realize the potential that had already emerged. John seemed convinced of this, even when Alice was not: “He said,” she explained, “‘You know you can do it, and I want you to.’ His confidence in me was so strong. One day he said to me, ‘This music is like a second nature to you. It’s just like it’s a part of you, a part of your life’” (quoted in Toop 2002, 40).
Ultimately, I believe that what made her musical transformation so smooth and surprisingly uncomplicated was that, even though the music she played with John Coltrane was avant-garde, she found herself in an extremely familiar musical situation. Given the spiritual intent of her husband’s music and what he was trying to achieve on an expressive level, Alice was able to step into the familiar role of church accompanist. She was also performing with a close family member, as she had been throughout her earlier professional life.
Apparently, John did little instructing. Rather than rehearse his musicians in a conventional manner, he provided an open-ended musical environment that fostered experimentation and personal growth. According to Alice:
There really was no practice. We didn’t really practice together like certain people who have to have two or three rehearsals a week . . . He gave freedom to musicians to develop themselves within the music he was bringing out of them. He would talk about music rather than demonstrate what should be done and what should go where. He was that way with the other group [the previous quartet] as well as with us. (quoted in Lerner 1982, 23)
John did, however, offer general statements that helped Alice blossom as a soloist: “When I first joined the group I was struggling with the music. Because he was a master, he saw that I was playing with only a few octaves. He told me to play the whole piano, utilize the range so I wouldn’t be locked in. It freed me” (A. Coltrane 1971, 42). For the most part, it seems that simply being in John Coltrane’s artistic presence inspired Alice’s very best playing:
It was the kind of experience that words do not do justice to. There was no one I had seen or heard of on Earth with a mentality and knowledge of music like his, as well as that genius level of creativity, and I still have not witnessed it anywhere else. Being with him in that kind of musical association, somehow there was no limit to how much you could excel. He inspired that kind of motivation, because there was so much freedom. He never said, “Don’t play like this.” I was encouraged to play the instrument fully, to give myself totally. (quoted in Lerner 1982, 23)
Listening to Alice’s improvisations on her husband’s free-form compositions, one might initially be struck by what seems a barrage of rapid-fire scales and glissandi. Even within these nonmetered, loosely tonal structures, however, there are several organizational principals at work that shape her solos, creating a sense of cohesion, punctuation, and excitement. “Manifestation,” her first recorded improvisation with John Coltrane, provides a window into many of the techniques she employs on her husband’s free-form compositions (see figure 2.1). Compared to her longer solos on live recordings, this three-minute miniature also offers a condensed version of her strategies as a soloist, and it is therefore a convenient place to begin a discussion of her playing in the Coltrane Quartet.
After John Coltrane’s aggressive exploration of the timbral effects produced by the tenor saxophone, Alice begins her solo with a tremolo figure. Here, we immediately see her investigating the textural possibilities of the piano—one of her major areas of development as a player with John. This first section of her solo (indicated in figure 2.1 as BLOCK 1) calms the previous intensity created by John’s dissonant explorations. She then plays a series of melodic cells with her right hand that suggests E major, while her left hand plays a repetitive figure in E major diatonic thirds. Soon, however, her diatonic left-hand intervals give way to rapidly shifting tritones and planning fourths (indicated as BLOCK 2). The sparseness of her left-hand voicing typifies the accompanimental techniques of modern jazz; her use of tritone shells is particularly characteristic of bebop and is prevalent in her earlier solos.
Her preference for perfect fourths in the left hand and the related pentatonic vocabulary in the right is unquestionably the inheritance of McCoy Tyner, who established the practice of using quartal harmonies in Coltrane’s Classic Quintet. But Alice uses these fourth structures in a personal, mercurial manner; her constantly shifting left hand adds tremendous contrapuntal interest to her solos. This unpredictable quality distinguishes her playing from that of Tyner, who usually interjects rhythms in more regular time intervals. As a clear case in point, one can compare her left-hand playing with her husband on “My Favorite Things,” recorded in 1966, with the popular version Tyner recorded with John Coltrane in 1960. Where Tyner keeps a steady waltz time, Alice obscures and again reestablishes the feeling of meter, which creates a sense of tension and release in her improvisation. Her ability to both swing at will and play in a more rhythmically abstract manner gives her an enormous range of expressive power here and elsewhere.
Fig. 2.1 Alice Coltrane’s solos on “Manifestation.”
As her left-hand figures become increasingly abstract, her right hand melodies explore the gamut of E tonality, making use of scalar figures belonging to E minor, E minor pentatonic, and E whole tone, with nondiatonic embellishment. This motivic and modal right-hand vocabulary is reminiscent of her playing on Gibbs’s tunes; however, with John Coltrane she is free to follow her inclinations without the bar-line interrupting her flow. As her solo progresses, her use of dissonance increases and she extends her range, playing simultaneously in the upper and lower octaves of the piano. At the height of musical intensity, Alice employs a crashing E pedal in the low register that grounds the solo and reestablishes the E tonality (indicated at the beginning of BLOCK 3 as CRASH). This low-register pedal technique acts as a punctuating device in her solos: in later pieces, it also serves to establish new tonal centers. Tyner boldly asserts octaves and fifths in this fashion; again, one of the better-known examples can be found on the 1960 recording of “My Favorite Things.” Alice wisely borrows from Tyner’s vocabulary here and uses this technique to rein in the frenetic energy of her own solos.
After reestablishing a sense of E minor, she moves again from simple to complex, employing increasing dissonance (indicated as BLOCK 3 and BLOCK 4). To end her solo, she plays a repeated rhythmic figure in octaves that Rashied Ali accentuates with his drums (indicated as BLOCK 5). Such readily identifiable rhythmic figures provide another stabilizing and punctuating element inside Alice’s torrent of improvisation and give the drummer a clear signal to respond.
Released in 1995, Alice’s work as a soloist on “Manifestation” was unfortunately unknown to the public. Her first major public debut with John Coltrane occurred with the recording Live at the Village Vanguard Again! in May 1966. (The title refers to one of Coltrane’s most dissonantly expressive albums of his middle period, an earlier live recording that he had made with his Classic Quintet, with the addition of Eric Dolphy on reeds.) Alice did not perform any solos on this date—which is not unusual, given the focus on the two saxophonists, and the fact that in previous sessions, the pianist McCoy Tyner had played only accompaniment. Alice’s playing on this recording demonstrates the same glissandi effects, dramatic pedal points, and colorful modality as in “Manifestation.” These effects, however, now served the soloist.
The critical reaction to her playing on this record, particularly her interactive ability as an accompanist, was complimentary. In the album’s liner notes, Nat Hentoff states: “Throughout, from the start of the album, there is the persistently apposite piano of Alice, John’s wife. Her value to the group, Coltrane says, is that ‘she continually senses the right colors, the right textures, of the sounds of the chords. And in addition, she’s fleet. She has real facility’” (1961).
In a July 1966 tour in Japan, Alice had the opportunity to further develop her solo techniques before a live audience. The tour was an affirming experience for the band members. Having witnessed the mixed, often negative, reception of avant-garde jazz in America, they found Japan’s hospitality and warm response a refreshing change. The drummer Rashied Ali explained: “When we came off the airplane they had life size posters of us . . . cut out to the shape of each one of us at the airport and then they took a red carpet and rolled a red carpet from the plane into the terminal for Coltrane. That’s the way they did it in Japan” (quoted in Porter 1998, 272).
The six tracks released as Live in Japan were made on two concert dates in Tokyo, one at Shinjuku Kosei Nenkin Hall on July 11, and the second at Shankei Hall on July 22. On these two evenings, the band explored extremely long, free-form versions of Coltrane’s earlier favorites—Mongo Santamaria’s “Afro Blue” and Rogers and Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things”—as well as Coltrane’s own compositions “Leo,” “Peace on Earth,” and “Crescent.” Most of the tracks are at least thirty-five minutes long, which gives the soloists ample time to stretch out. In each of Alice’s solos, one finds subtle references to the underlying compositions. In “Afro Blue,” her preference for F minor and the extensive use of the F minor pentatonic scale summons back the original melody. Although she ventures to E-flat and E periodically to add color and tension, this improvisation remains solidly in F minor. Her solos on both “Leo” and “My Favorite Things” likewise remain in one tonal area, as in the original versions. By contrast, her improvisation on “Crescent” is structured by rapidly shifting tonal centers accentuated by left-hand pedal points. With the exception of “My Favorite Things,” a tune characterized by its waltz time, none of Alice’s solos has a defined beat or groove.
Perhaps her most beautiful improvisation on Live in Japan is that from “Peace on Earth.” Here, Alice is left nearly alone by the rhythm section. With great liberty, she controls the color, range, and full dynamics of the piano. In this improvisation, we see a new musical identity emerge for her: that of concert pianist. Until this point in her recording career, the rhythm section and the needs of the soloist had driven her keyboard playing. She had not yet had the opportunity to make use of her classical training or demonstrate the subtlety of her technique. “Peace on Earth” showcases her command of the concert grand piano and displays the beginning of a more rhapsodic soloistic approach that she developed fully as a leader on her own projects. The chromatic alterations she uses on the subdominant chord (resulting in a variation of Lydian dominant) over a tonic pedal and the sumptuous swells we hear are reminiscent of the classical piano repertoire from late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, the repeated movements from the tonic to subdominant that essentially define this improvisation are also thoroughly saturated with a feeling of the blues and the African American church. This synthesis of soulful gospel and classical technique characterize Alice’s slow-tempo piano style in her husband’s band. This combination would also find a mature expression in her more elaborate works for large ensembles.
In 1967, John Coltrane’s health began to deteriorate—unknown to him, he was suffering from liver cancer—and he turned down invitations for several tours, preferring instead to document his ideas in the studio. With the exception of the newly released The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording, in which Alice’s playing is nearly imperceptible in the live mix, John Coltrane’s last albums with his wife feature pared-down improvisations. On the albums Expression (recorded in February and March of 1967) and Stellar Regions (recorded in February 1967), Alice extracts the best aspects of her Live in Japan solos to color these dense musical miniatures. There is an intimacy and immediacy in the quiet dynamics and motivic instrumental conversations between husband and wife, which are made extremely poignant by the knowledge of John Coltrane’s looming illness. Particularly moving are her accompaniment on “Jimmy’s Mode” and the solos heard on “To Be,” “Expression,” “Seraphic Light,” and “Tranesonic.”
By May 1967, Coltrane was experiencing intense pain in his abdomen, and a biopsy revealed cancer of the liver. According to Alice, he knew his chances were limited on the operating table, and he declined to have surgery. By mid-July, he could no longer eat, and he checked himself into a nearby hospital. She recalled: “Maybe I didn’t know how bad he felt because he wouldn’t tell me. I used to leave him alone when I thought he wanted to be alone. I was busy with the kids and I didn’t want to bother him, to get in his way, to bug him . . . He was such a strong man that he walked out the door himself. He was walking slow, but he made it. And then he went down so fast” (quoted in Garland 1969, 227–28). John Coltrane’s death was an overwhelming loss for Alice and her family, not to mention the larger jazz community and the listening public. What we see in Alice’s playing with John Coltrane’s late Quintet is the “manifestation” of her unfettered creative self, made strong by the depth of her commitment to her family, her husband’s musical vision, and a spiritual path of self-realization, which she would develop fully into her own deliberately mystical mix.
