Several years ago, following a long period of elementary meditating and reading of some of the diverse books on spirituality and world religions, I felt the deepest transcendental longing to realize the Supreme Lord. This longing within the depths of my heart was soon acknowledged, for within a short period of time I experienced the first rays of illumination and spiritual reawakening. On the physical plane these radiations opened new avenues of awareness in the brain cells; even subtler were the inner effects of light and the cognizance of a spiritual revelation taking place within me. —Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal
After her husband’s untimely death in 1967, Alice assumed the extraordinary task of carrying on John Coltrane’s musical, spiritual, and familial legacy. She never rebelled against this responsibility or tried to differentiate her work from his. On the contrary, she wrote and performed a great deal of music in his memory and continually referred to him—often as “the Father” or by the spiritual name she gave him, Ohnedaruth (compassion)—as her primary musical mentor. She also maintained John’s musical and spiritual philosophy and employed many of his creative strategies in her compositions. She even took up his signature practice of writing confessional, testimonial liner notes to accompany her music.
Because Alice made so little attempt to distinguish her music and her spiritual mission from those of her husband, particularly during her early years as a bandleader, she received many negative comments from members of the jazz establishment. For instance, John Litweiler’s criticism of A Monastic Trio (1968), her debut album as a bandleader, was that it was too derivative of John Coltrane’s musical concepts. Moreover, according to Litweiler, John Coltrane was not a musician whom one could or should emulate: “John Coltrane’s music was so very personal, the emotion and lyricism so much a part of the man, the externals of his art so seductive and misleading, that no other modern musician is such a potentially wrong influence on other musicians. There have been other John Coltrane-influenced pianists before this, but on the evidence of ‘Ohnedaruth,’ Alice Coltrane is the first to assimilate his message almost completely into a personal style” (1969, 22).
While that statement has some validity, I would argue that as John Coltrane’s devoted widow and spiritual partner, Alice was not concerned with artistic individuality—the sine qua non for critics’ praise in modern jazz—but rather with honoring her husband’s memory. And much to her credit, Alice actually made extremely constructive use of her husband’s musical example: instead of copying John’s improvisational lines or his phrasing style, as so many other artists did, Alice pursued his creative and spiritual ideology more broadly, ultimately inspiring her to produce extraordinarily innovative works.
As discussed in the previous chapter, John Coltrane’s creative philosophy rests on three basic tenets—which Alice fully embraced—of music making based on personal expression: expressing an authentic self as a musician; erasing aesthetic boundaries and proscriptions regarding style; and branching out in an inclusive, pluralistic, and multicultural manner.
John Coltrane’s creative ideology is manifested in Alice’s preference for musical freedom and in her treatment of other musicians. Following her husband’s example, Alice never returned to restrictive musical genres such as standards, bebop forms, or instrumental music with rigid tonal implications. She relied heavily instead on free meter, loose formal structures, and open-ended modality, and she encouraged timbral innovations from her instrumentalists. And like her husband, Alice created musical conditions in which her players could fully and spontaneously express themselves. For instance, when she conveyed her intentions to her band members, she did so in a nondictatorial, nondogmatic manner. Both jazz and classical players enjoyed and found uplifting the freedom and validation that she offered them. Her Impulse! producer, Ed Michel, explained her liberal approach in the recording studio:
She would usually just play something. At that period, especially among the New York players, they thought of themselves as the free guys. That was where it was headed. You would suggest a harmonic environment, with a bass figure, and open it up from there . . . Especially in the beginning she would do that. She shared that desire to take whatever form existed and find a place where it would naturally, organically open up into what was a tremendously empowering space for musicians, who had the capacity to deal with it. It was an astonishing experience. A lot of the L.A. studio string players, who were symphony guys, when they first encountered it, thought, “wow, what’s going on here?” and then ate it up. They loved it! (Telephone interview with author, 2001)
Along similar lines, even though Alice was on a decidedly spiritual path, she never made spirituality a requirement of her sidemen. As her former bassist Cecil McBee recalled, “She didn’t say ‘We’re going to play spiritual, this is going to be something that is meaningful.’ No, it was like, ‘This is the way it feels. This is the way the bass line feels, and I’m going to play this.’” Yet McBee conceded:
It was very, very spiritual. The lights were low and she had incense and there was not much conversation, dictation, or verbalization about what was to be. Her desire of your essence was all very, very tangible. The spiritual, emotional, physical statement of the environment, it was just there. You felt it and you just played it. It was very subtle but powerful. I can remember it to this day. It was all novel to me, but I knew that it was something very spiritual and very special. No doubt about it. (interview with author, 2001)
Throughout Alice’s career as a bandleader, John Coltrane’s “higher concept,” as she termed it, did indeed emerge. Nevertheless—and much to her credit—her unique voice always came through. Continuing the exploration of free rhythm, rapidly shifting modality, and flexible formal structures that she began with her husband, Alice succeeded in bringing her own aesthetics to bear on her compositions, charting a musically bold and spiritually directed course of her own design. Alongside pieces for piano and small jazz combo reminiscent of her earlier work with her husband, her LPS as a leader consisted of ethereal meditations for harp, hard-hitting improvisations on Wurlitzer organ, and compositions for orchestra and choir based on bhajans—the Hindu devotional hymns. By the mid-1970s, Alice had clearly distinguished herself as a powerful and extraordinarily original voice in the jazz world who could recruit as her sidemen many jazz greats of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as orchestral players from New York and Los Angeles, and her students from the Vedantic Center.
To understand Alice’s expanding compositional sensibility during years between 1968 and 1978, it is necessary to consider the nature of her spiritual transfiguration. Her work as a bandleader during this time can be divided into three periods that correspond to distinct stages in her artistic journey. While these periods are differentiated by her evolving musical aesthetics, they are also associated with progressive stages along her deepening spiritual path. During the first period, from 1968 to early 1970, Alice recorded A Monastic Trio (1968), Huntington Ashram Monastery (1969), and Ptah the El Daoud (1970). Except for her exploration of the concert harp as an improvisational vehicle, her music during this first phase is reminiscent of her collaborations with her late husband. In the second period, between late 1970 and 1971, she befriended the Indian guru Swami Satchidananda, recorded the album Journey in Satchidananda (1970), and traveled to India for the first time. Her liner notes during this period discuss the importance of her association with Swami Satchidananda and reveal a deepening interest in the religious philosophy of Vedanta, and in Indian music and culture. The third period, from late 1971 to 1978, is marked by extraordinary artistic individuation. Her works on the albums Universal Consciousness (1971), World Galaxy (1971), Lord of Lords (1972), Eternity (1975), Transcendence (1977), Radha Krsna Nama Sankirtana (1977), and Transfiguration (1978) feature powerful improvisations on the organ, compositions for orchestra, and arrangements of Hindu chants and hymns. This musico-spiritual phase reflects her own idiosyncratic religious synthesis and a newfound sense of creative omnipotence.
This first phase of Alice’s spiritual transformation coincided with the music she made shortly after John Coltrane’s passing. From the time of her husband’s death, she began to have extraordinary religious experiences. According to her description in her spiritual autobiography, Monument Eternal, the years 1968 to 1970 marked a period of spiritual purification for her, the first step on the path to spiritual enlightenment.1 During this period, she experienced insomnia and an inability to eat or communicate for lengthy periods. She even injured herself in several of her “examinations” and was taken to the hospital on more than one occasion. Employing the term tapas, a yogic concept for spiritual austerity, she described her experience thus:
My tapas in this lifetime initially began with increased waking hours and extended meditations. Long fasts were maintained and sleepless vigils endured. Extensive mental and physical austerities caused my body weight to fall from 128 to 105 within a few weeks; later it was reduced to 95 pounds. My physical tapas consisted of a series of examinations on my reactions and aversions, specifically to heat and cold, light and darkness, life and death, joy and sorrow—i.e., on the dualities of life-polarization. (A. Coltrane 1977, 17)
From a psychiatric perspective, it might appear that Alice was experiencing extreme depression or psychosis. Having recently lost both her husband and a half-brother to whom she had been close, and burdened with the responsibility of raising four small children, she would have had ample cause. However, she described this time as a necessary period of purification: “The mental and physical territories had to undergo purificatory spiritualization to bring about the expansion and heightening of my consciousness-awareness level . . . The Holy Spirit does not enjoy residing in an unclean heart” (ibid. 13, 24). While this period of extreme “spiritual suffering” took place during the years shortly following her husband’s death, she described her tapas as an ongoing process that has “never ceased” (8).
The albums she recorded during this period, A Monastic Trio, Huntington Ashram Monastery, and Ptah the El Daoud, were extremely introspective and solemn. A Monastic Trio (1968)—her first solo album for Impulse!—was an intimate expression of personal loss and a tangible reminder of John Coltrane’s musical and spiritual legacy. The liner notes also mark the beginning of her written communications with her audience, which would become increasingly extensive, mystical, and autobiographical.
The formal and improvisational techniques we hear on A Monastic Trio dominate her next two albums on Impulse! Recorded in the Coltrane Studio in Dix Hill, New York, with Rudy Gelder and Roy Musnug (her late husband’s producer and technician) presiding, the album’s session consisted of Alice Coltrane, on piano and harp, and John Coltrane’s former sidemen: Jimmy Garrison on bass, Pharoah Sanders on saxophone and flute, and Ben Riley and Rashied Ali alternating on drums. Of the nine tracks on A Monastic Trio, eight are in minor modes, and five make use of rubato chord progressions that swell and ebb with a definitive weightiness. Alice also composed several elegies for her husband, among them “Ohnedaruth” and “I Want to See You.” In the 1998 Cuscuna reissue of the album, the introduction to “The Sun” features the overdubbed voice of John Coltrane repeating the prayer “let there be peace and love and perfection throughout all creation, Oh God.” Other titles suggest her struggle and transformation in the face of tragedy, such as “Lord Help Me to Be.”
A Monastic Trio can be seen as the template for Alice’s compositional sensibility at the start of her solo career. Nine original compositions are featured on the reissued CD, employing five distinct compositional devices. Three of these devices are clearly related to John Coltrane’s musical tendencies, the first of these being the ostinato bass pattern that, while anchoring the composition tonally and metrically, demands adventurous risk taking on the part of the improviser. The solos that accompany these ostinato tunes result in modal mixture, expressionistic timbral exploration, and great rhythmic fancy. Such bass figures can be heard on the tracks “Lord Help Me to Be” and “Lovely Skyboat.” The second compositional device is the rubato chord progression, which allows the soloist to remain in one tonal area as long as he or she likes; this device derives from John Coltrane’s composition “Peace on Earth” and appears in Alice’s compositions “The Sun,” “I Want to See You,” “Oceanic Beloved,” and “Atomic Peace.” The third device is akin to a mantra or prayer. Similar to the rubato chord progression, it is played in free time but comprises a simple theme played by two or more instruments in unison or octaves. John Coltrane popularized this technique in his later recordings Ascension (1965) and Stellar Regions (1967). We can see Alice employing this mantra technique in her composition “Ohnedaruth,” in which the piano and bass share the theme.
While much of this work is derivative of her husband’s music, Alice did succeed in making musical statements during this period that were unique to her. These include some compositional devices on A Monastic Trio that have not yet been discussed and that diverge from John’s musical sensibility. The first is exemplified in “Gospel Trane,” a pianistic blues-riffing tune that brings to mind Alice’s training in the church. “Gospel Trane” is the only composition on the album to swing in a conventional sense. Eight-bar phrases, a rhythm break that sets up the blowing section, and a walking bass during the solo provide the compositional foundation. After the melody is stated, Alice departs from the rhythm section’s steady pulse and embarks on her own free-form pianistic journey. A somewhat disjunctive return to the melody concludes the piece.
We see this blues piano aesthetic again in her two subsequent albums. For instance, her piano pieces “Jaya, Jaya, Rama,” and “H.I.S.” on her second Impulse! album, Huntington Ashram Monastery (1969), are similar piano blues features with free blowing sections. Additionally, “Turiya and Ramakrishna” and “Blue Nile” from her third Impulse! recording Ptah the El Daoud (1970), with sidemen Ben Riley, Ron Carter, Pharoah Sanders, and Joe Henderson, are straightforward twelve-bar minor blues tunes at moderate tempos. The first, “Turiya and Ramakrishna,” is a gorgeous example of the piano blues tradition as it merges with a late-1960s modal aesthetic. Rather than journey into dissonance, her improvisation remains in E-flat minor and elaborates on the opening riff. Slow, pensive, and patiently articulated, this piano trio is one of the more moving and soulful statements of her early commercial recording career. Her superior capability here as a blues pianist speaks to both her upbringing in the church and the elegant blues influence that one can hear in so many great Detroit jazz pianists.
The final compositional technique on A Monastic Trio might be best described as a piano rhapsody; it can be heard on the solo piano track “Altruvista” and is similar in some respects to Alice’s classically influenced work in her husband’s ensemble. This piece, however, departs entirely from the theme-improvisation-theme structure that characterizes the majority of John Coltrane’s tunes and, on a larger scale, jazz in general. Here, Alice’s improvisational language departs from that of bebop, gospel, Coltrane, and jazz keyboard style, with its subservient left-hand voicings. “Altruvista” does not swing, nor does it rely on a blues-based melodic language. In its textures, modal exploration, and pianistic virtuosity, it resembles the piano compositions of Debussy and Ravel, though as an improvisation it is less formally structured than their music. In its timbre and use of range, it is reminiscent of Alice’s solo on “Peace on Earth” from the Live in Japan recordings. Interestingly, although it is one of the loveliest and most original pieces on the album, “Altruvista” was not included on the first release, perhaps because it resembled twentieth-century art music as opposed to jazz. “Altruvista” is steeped in the intellectual and cultural sophistication of Detroit’s black musical subculture, but also belongs to a realm of Alice’s personal creative fancy. Most important, as an unaccompanied work, “Altruvista” hints of things to come: later in her career, Alice came to prefer the total independence of playing alone.
A Monastic Trio was not merely Alice’s debut as a composer, it was also her debut as a multi-instrumentalist. The entire B side of the original LP features new compositions and improvisations for the harp (“Lovely Skyboat,” “Oceanic Beloved,” and “Atomic Peace”). The harp has never been a popular solo instrument in jazz; it has, however, been prevalent in new-age music, and Alice Coltrane has frequently been relegated to this musical category. The only individual to have achieved any prior success as a jazz harpist was another Detroiter, Dorothy Ashby, who had performed internationally with numerous Detroit jazz musicians, with some of whom Alice Coltrane had also played, such as the bassist Vishnu Wood. Like many of Detroit’s famous jazz musicians, Ashby was trained at Cass Technical High School, which had an active harp and voice ensemble. Alice Coltrane’s unusual confidence in the harp’s potential was most likely grounded in her exposure to Ashby, as well as her past success as a multi-instrumentalist with Terry Gibbs. Her decision to play the harp was inspired by the interest that John Coltrane had shown in the instrument. In a radio interview in 1988, Alice stated: “Yes, that’s why, he got me interested. He ordered that harp. I still have it today. His physical eyes never saw it. It took us a year to get it because they are practically handmade. He ordered a beautiful concert grand crowned harp. So he is really responsible for that being part of my life” (A. Coltrane 1988).
Self-taught on the instrument, Alice developed a unique style, relying extensively on pentatonic modality, glissandi, accented arpeggios, and pedal points. The harp offered Alice fresh sonorities and textures, and a new vehicle of expression. Speaking metaphorically of the harp’s qualities, she said in an earlier interview: “The piano is the sunrise and the harp is the sunset . . . All that energy, light, brilliance, and clarity that’s in the rising sun—or what we call rising; it’s actually us moving over toward the light—you can hear in the piano. Then listen to the sonorities of the harp, the subtleties, the quietness, the peacefulness; that’s like our sunsets. But the sun is always the sun and a person is always who he or she will be” (quoted in Lerner 1982, 27).
Many critics have erroneously attributed her florid piano playing to her training as a harp player. Alice’s harp style, however, is best described as an extension of the technique she was already exploring at the keyboard. Critics have also dismissed her harp playing for its imprecise quality. In his review of A Monastic Trio, John Litweiler wrote that “the harp side of this LP presents waves of sound, a wispy impressionist feeling without urgent substance” (1969, 22). The harp does indeed present instrumental limitations and challenges; in particular, on that instrument Alice has far less ability to execute individual lines, an ability that has always been one of the hallmarks, if not requirements, of modern jazz. Unfortunately, Litweiler’s assessment does not acknowledge the interactive and textural quality of Alice’s playing, or the daring behind her search for new sonic environments. These early timbral and gestural explorations on the harp were the precursors of her later sound experimentations on a much larger scale.
Many critics and listeners who expected to find the volume and aggressive intensity that characterized her work with John Coltrane on her first three Impulse! recordings were disappointed. For instance, in his review of Ptah the El Daoud, Ed Cole stated: “It seems incredible that a group so heavily stamped by the late John Coltrane would not be able to pull off an album, but that’s just what happens here. It’s not that this is not good music, because it is, but it doesn’t come close to the potential of the individual players. It seems that each subdued his talents to accommodate the others” (1971, 20). As a result, Alice Coltrane’s music did not have the political implications that one could feel in the music of her avant-garde colleagues. Musicians such as the bassist Cecil McBee, however, who played for Alice, could see the subtle value of her quieter aesthetic and its relevance to the political climate of the era, compared to the excess of the avant-garde musical statements that were then popular:
We were critical of the limits that were being placed on us. And we felt that our musical words could penetrate steel walls, so long as we said them with honesty, and perseverance, and creativity from the deepest [part] of ourselves. So we were political in that way. But things were rather novel, as far as civil rights were concerned. There were those who were much more eloquent than we were with words, like the Malcolm Xs and the Martin Luther Kings, the Angela Davises. We let them have that verbally, but we said it in music. And we were able to say it in music. We got across equally as well as they did with what we expressed. So Alice Coltrane, when she arrived, was more subtle in her statements, from a very spiritual point of view. She was very quiet, expressing the various sounds and waves of spirits and essences of the gods and the earth. Where we were trying to come from, with the loudness and bombast of our music, she made these statements in a more delicate, graceful, articulate, and uniform way than we did. (interview with author, 2001)
Although Alice Coltrane’s commitment to her husband’s creative ideology and avant-garde music would ultimately take her down extremely original musical paths, what we see in her first three records as leader—A Monastic Trio, Huntington Ashram Monastery, and Ptah the El Daoud—are still tunes that remain well within the fold of John Coltrane’s compositional and improvisational aesthetic. These early LPS do not display the originality of her later work in the 1970s. Nonetheless, we do see a developing composer exploring new timbres and instrumentation, the relationship between structure and freedom, and the potential of quieter dynamics.
According to the bassist Vishnu Wood, a musical colleague and fellow Detroiter, in 1969 Alice was still suffering emotionally in the wake of her husband’s death. At the time, Wood was attending the lectures of Swami Satchidananda (1914–2002) on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Hoping that exposure to the swami’s teachings would help to lift Alice from depression, Wood introduced them to one another. By early 1970, Alice had become a friend of Swami Satchidananda and regularly visited him to receive spiritual inspiration and guidance.2
It appears that her association with the swami was deeply healing. Emerging from her “spiritual austerities,” she recorded Journey in Satchidananda in November 1970 and dedicated the album to her new guru; his poems, photos, and teachings adorn her subsequent Impulse! recordings. In her liner notes for Journey in Satchidananda, she wrote:
Direct inspiration for Journey in Satchidananda comes from my meeting and association with someone who is near and dear to me. I am speaking of my own beloved spiritual preceptor, Swami Satchidananda. Swamiji is the first example I have seen in recent years of universal Love or God in action. He expresses an impersonal love, which encompasses thousands of people. Anyone listening to this selection should try to envision himself floating on an ocean of Satchidanandaji’s love, which is literally carrying countless devotees across the vicissitudes and stormy blasts of life to the other shore. Satchidananda means knowledge, existence, bliss.
Journey in Satchidananda—Alice Coltrane’s fourth album for Impulse!—expresses a new timbral and world-music aesthetic. This LP is an important transitional album between her first three Impulse! projects and her subsequent recordings, which reveal a more personalized aesthetic. With the exception of Cecil McBee on bass, the distinctive members of John Coltrane’s former band—Rashied Ali and Pharoah Sanders—again grace the LP. But the sound of the ensemble is markedly different. For the first time, Alice used the tamboura, an Indian string instrument customarily tuned in fifths and octaves, to provide a hypnotic wash of harmonics. From then on, the droning reverberations of the tamboura would become a kind of musical signature for her, invoking the classical and folk music of South Asia as well as the spirituality that the West had come to associate with Indian musical traditions.
Journey in Satchidananda also features the oud playing of Vishnu Wood on the track “Isis and Osiris.” The oud is a plucked lute associated with Arabic music from the Middle East and Northern Africa; Wood played it in an idiosyncratic style. Though the oud was not an instrument played in ancient Egypt, Alice uses it as an instrument to invoke Egyptian gods and goddesses, one of her many creative, yet inauthentic uses of world-music sources. “Isis and Osiris” is largely unmetered and features the bass playing of Charlie Haden, whom Alice would hire for several later dates. Although oud, harp, bass, drums, and soprano sax would never be played together in traditional settings, Alice combines them here, with beautiful textural results. These experimentations and juxtapositions of musical idioms characterize her future compositions.
Although the album was innovative in its textural conception, Alice relied on compositional devices from her first three Impulse! albums. For four of the five tracks on the album, she composed memorable bass ostinato patterns, over which she and Sanders play largely pentatonic improvisations. She also invoked the memory of her husband quite explicitly in the tune “Something about John Coltrane,” a blues-inflected piano feature that expands into a free-meter improvisational section, allowing her band members ample time to stretch out. Although the influence of John Coltrane can still be heard on Journey in Satchidananda, the musical and spiritual culture of India clearly emerge here as a dominant influence in her music.
To understand how India became a spiritual and musical source that Alice regularly drew upon, one must look to her relationship with Swami Satchidananda. Although Alice had been reading Hindu spiritual literature before their encounter, it was the swami who introduced Alice firsthand to the religious and musical culture of South Asia. Following his example, she eventually became a swamini herself. The relationship that developed between them is of interest for the striking impact it had on her spiritual views, aesthetics, and future path. More generally, their friendship also demonstrates the influence of Indian spiritual traditions on African American musicians during the 1960s.
Perhaps because of the great degree to which Indian spiritual traditions have influenced America’s elite white society, scholars have underplayed the extent to which the traditions have also influenced blacks in the United States. Hindu teachings—albeit in an exoticized form—have been part of mainstream American culture since the late nineteenth century, finding a particularly strong foothold in Northern intellectual circles. American interest in Indian spiritual traditions can be traced to the Transcendentalists, such as the influential thinkers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who mixed together elements from a variety of religious sources in their writings. In particular, Emerson, in his 1841 essays “The Oversoul” and “Spiritual Laws,” popularized the Indian metaphysical beliefs that the world, God, and human beings all participated in one substance, and that beyond the illusion of matter lay the reality of the spirit.
Several decades after these essays were published, the Russian émigré Helena Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society, whose primary mission was the study of comparative religions. Blavatsky invited Swami Vivekananda to speak at the World Parliament of Religions, an extension of the 1898 Chicago World’s Fair. The first Hindu monk to lecture in the United States, Vivekananda’s discourses on the philosophy of Vedanta, and the subsequent establishment of centers for Vedic study, inspired a generation of American intellectuals. In the 1920s, Paramahansa Yogananda, one of Vivekananda’s brother monks, established the Self-Realization Fellowship in the United Staes. It remained the primary American center for the study of yoga until the 1960s.
There is some evidence to suggest that these concepts filtered into the spiritual philosophies of several black religions in Harlem during the 1930s. In Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History, Philip Jenkins proposes links between the late-nineteenth-century “harmonial” movements of New Thought and Theosophy and black religious figures such as Father Divine and Sweet Daddy Grace. Jenkins also points to the highly eclectic and “metaphysical” orientation of such groups as the Church of the Living God and Negro Masonry (2000, 101).
A more direct African American cultural encounter with India occurred when the Reverend Howard Thurman and his wife, the musician and social historian Sue Thurman, led what they called a Christian Negro Delegation to India in 1935. There they met with Mahatma Gandhi and conversed at length about religion, colonialism, and racial issues in the United States. Howard Thurman’s subsequent writings were greatly influenced by Gandhi’s commitment to nonviolence. Thurman’s work, in turn, influenced Martin Luther King Jr., who was said to have carried a copy of Thurman’s 1949 Jesus and the Disinherited with him in his briefcase.3 Sue Thurman went on to lecture about Indian civilization and raised funds in these lectures so that several African American women could study at the school of the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, in West Bengal. In later years, Howard Thurman founded one of the first racially integrated churches in the United States, the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, in San Francisco.
In addition to these spiritual affiliations with India, African American radicals who sympathized with India’s struggle for independence from British rule also forged more immediate political allegiances with India in the early part of the twentieth century. In The Karma of Brown Folk, Vijay Prashad notes that “the stamp of radical India was made popular in the black press” by such figures as W.E.B. Du Bois, who wrote: “the people of India, like American Negroes, are demanding today things, not in the least revolutionary, but things which every civilized white man has so long taken for granted, that he wishes to refuse to believe that there are people who are denied these rights” (quoted in Prashad 2000, 39).
In the early part of the twentieth century, the study of Indian religion also became a legitimate academic subject. Religious scholars of great intellectual ability—many of them Europeans, such as Mircea Eliade, Carl Jung, Gershom Scholem, and Henry Corbin—popularized the study of comparative religion in American universities. Their pursuits were bolstered by the work of structural anthropologists who explored myths and the principles by which they functioned to organize the societies of non-Western cultures. By midcentury, the study of Hinduism had become common on college campuses. Interest in India’s classical music also emerged during this period, largely through the efforts of Yehudi Menuhin, a world-renowned violinist who promoted the the Indian virtuosos Ravi Shankar, Bismilah Khan, and Ali Akbar Khan, whose recordings were issued by Nonesuch Records. The so-called British rock invasion also put India and its musical and spiritual culture on the world map for Americans. George Harrison of the Beatles popularized the sitar and the teaching of his Indian guru, Mahesh Yogi, and other musicians and artists quickly followed suit. Besides John and Alice Coltrane, other well-known jazz artists whose study of Indian spiritual paths influenced or fused with their musical practice include Don Ellis, Paul Horn, and John McLaughlin.4
But despite the ways that India had infiltrated the American consciousness, Hinduism largely remained an exotic and occult religion in the United States. Unlike the Judaism, Islam, and Greek Orthodoxy practiced by immigrant groups, Hinduism in America remained an export religion until quite recently. It was not until well after the Asian Immigration Act of 1965 that South Asians became a significant presence in America, bringing their religion with them. In the wake of the 1965 law, several influential Hindu swamis arrived in the United States; they have largely been responsible for the present popularity of yoga in this country. Alice’s guru was one of them.
When Swami Satchidananda arrived in the United States in 1967, he was fifty-three years old and a well-known spiritual teacher in his own country. For nearly two decades, he had studied and served under Swami Sivananda, whose writings Alice had read prior to meeting her guru. Swami Satchidananda had also traveled widely in India, establishing several branches of his master’s Divine Life Society, an organization and network of retreat centers founded in 1936 that were committed to “a world-wide revival of spirituality through publication of books, pamphlets and magazines dealing scientifically with all the aspects of Yoga and Vedanta, universal religion and philosophy, and ancient medicine” (http://www.dlshq.org, accessed December 10, 2007).
At the invitation of writer and filmmaker Conrad Rooks, whom he met in 1966 in Ceylon, Swami Satchidananda came to New York, where he was the guest of the artist Peter Max. The swami attracted a group of American supporters and devotees, many of them artists and intellectuals, and quickly became something of a celebrity. He began lecturing weekly at the Unitarian Universalist Church on the Upper West Side and, soon after, founded the first Integral Yoga Institute at 500 West End Avenue. By 1968 his renown was such that he was interviewed by Life for its issue titled “The Year of the Guru,” and his lecture at Carnegie Hall drew a full house. He also opened the 1969 Woodstock festival.
Swami Satchidananda’s primary mission was the promotion of understanding among world religions and of selfless service to humanity. He felt that for worldwide peace to exist, individuals had to develop their capacity for unconditional love. To facilitate this, he developed the path of Integral Yoga, which encompassed leading a disciplined and balanced life; contributing to community projects; practicing meditation, pranayama (breathing techniques), and asanas (postures); and cultivating a personal relationship with the divine. He also assured his students that abiding happiness was a true possibility in their lives.
African Americans were a minority among Swami Satchidananda’s devotees during the late 1960s, as they are today. Unlike other Eastern religions such as Nichiren Buddhism and Islam, which have large working-class and minority followings, Hinduism and yoga have generally attracted middle-and upper-class European Americans. Alice Coltrane’s decision to explore Swami Satchidananda’s teachings may reflect a certain middle-class consciousness on her part. However, her capacity to search for spiritual and philosophical knowledge in a predominantly European American context is testimony to her seeking spirit and her unwillingness to accept limitation and boundary, which had thus far propelled her through life as a professional musician. Furthermore, as an extraordinarily self-disciplined, independent, and inner-directed artist with a strong predilection for religious expression, Alice was uniquely suited to pursue the yogic and devotional lifestyle that the swami advocated.
By the late 1960s, it appears that Alice had also independently come to question the Christian teachings of her youth and found the Hindu belief in reincarnation sustaining. In 1971, she stated: “The Western Church has failed, especially with young people. It was set up to serve needs it’s not meeting. Ask a Swami Hindu monk or someone else from the East about life after death and you’ll get answers that are real about direct experience, about looking to God. It has helped me to go on” (1971, 42). More important, Alice found the concept of self-realization, an essential doctrine of Advaita Vedanta taught by Swami Satchidananda, deeply liberating.
Advaita Vedanta is a system of belief in which the self (the atman) is identical with the absolute (Brahman).5 According to Vedanta, the absolute is without any attributes or qualities that can be specified or delimited. However, the absolute can be manifest in partial and lesser forms, such as a multitude of gods and images to which one might offer devotion. Although Advaita Vedanta allows for allegiance to many deities, liberation (moksha) is to be ultimately attained through knowledge of the self, which is also knowledge of the absolute. In an interview, Alice explained the appeal of this religious doctrine and how it differed from the institutionalized Christianity of her youth:
The Eastern philosophy gives the aspirant the chance or opportunity to develop himself . . . Somehow the experience that I had, and I’m not going to speak for everybody, I’m speaking for myself . . . you go there and you hear the service and you get the instructions: prayer, to be faithful, trust, ask God’s blessings. Yet, it never tells you what you can become—More Christ-like, more Christ-Conscious! There are certain wonderful statements made by Christ, “Greater works, shall ye also do,” “I and my father are one.” How is it that you can decide how this should be understood? If his word is the law then if he says, “Greater works shall ye also do” let me believe that! . . . He told you about your potentiality, your higher spirituality, but the church says get under that. Be less than [Christ]. I’m not stating we should be more than Christ, but you know, really. He says you have a higher, a greater potentiality. “I’ve fed five thousand. I want you to feed five million!” . . .
To get self-realization. To get self-actualization, fulfillment. That’s the point. And it isn’t selfish—that term. It just means that you go to your fullest and highest potential, and not be limited by some tenants of some doctrine that says that we come here, here’s the minister, and that we pay our tithes and go home and go back to your job or business or whatever and do everything you want. (A. Coltrane 1988)
In its inclusiveness and emphasis on personal potential, Vedanta is similar to the spiritual and creative philosophy that John Coltrane developed. It can also be seen as deeply rooted in the harmonial traditions of the nineteenth century, and in America’s culture of authenticity. Interestingly, one also sees the language of self-realization in comments made by other experimental jazz musicians of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In his study of the Chicago-based black artists collective the AACM (the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), George Lewis calls attention to the centrality of this concept among the collective’s members. Lewis cites saxophonist Joseph Jarman in particular, who explained, “Up until the late sixties, we were always categorized, and it was only possible for you to self-realize certain situations. But then we began to realize that if you began to self-realize, you became a universal property, and then you must use the whole spectrum of conscious reality” (quoted in Lewis 2001–2, 110). Such comments lead one to believe that this spiritual doctrine was pervasive in the avant-garde jazz subculture, and not limited to Alice and the New York jazz scene.
Shortly after recording Journey in Satchidananda, Alice Coltrane joined her guru in India on the last leg of his world tour, making her first pilgrimage to holy sites in that country. As she mentioned in her liner notes to the album: “Bombay will be the first stop on my five-week stay in India beginning in December, 1970. I will be visiting New Delhi, Rishikesh, Madras, and the country of Ceylon”—thus the name of one track, “Stop over Bombay.” According to Shanti Norris, who was Swami Satchidananda’s personal assistant at the time, Alice’s tour of India with the swami was quite intimate: “That particular trip was not a group trip. This was Swamiji traveling with one or two assistants. Those were the days when it was really informal and it was very wonderful. And though it was informal, the nature of their relationship was certainly teacher and student” (Norris 2003).
In New Delhi, Alice attended the World Scientific Yoga Conference, a meeting of gurus, scholars, and students. She spent several days in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) at a spiritual retreat, journeyed to Rishikesh to visit the Ganges and Swami Sivananda’s Divine Life Society, and spent time in Madras attending lectures and celebrations and visiting temples. Alice brought a harp with her to play at several public birthday celebrations for Swami Satchidananda. Norris recounted: “She literally bought a seat for it on several trips because we went from Delhi and then back to Madras and then to Ceylon or something like that. It was stunning to people there, that somebody came from the West to play, who’s also African American, who brought this harp with her! Just imagine all that, and this is back thirty years ago. At that time, even any Westerner was greeted with great appreciation and interest and fascination. She made quite an impression—but she was always very modest” (ibid.).
On this trip with Swami Satchidananda, it is likely that Alice heard Indian classical and popular devotional music in its traditional context for the first time. Although the swami was not a musician himself, he encouraged and supported the arts and believed in music and chanting as a form of yoga. Norris explained: “I don’t think I’ve ever been to India with him where I didn’t go to chanting things, and Bharata Natyam, and classical music. Even though Swamiji wasn’t so much of a musician himself, he was always an advocate and a supporter of the arts and the classical traditions, particularly those of South India” (ibid.). During the satsangs, or community gatherings, of the Integral Yoga Institute in its early days, members would practice kirtan: they would chant traditional mantras and sing Hindu devotional hymns as a form of sadhana, or spiritual practice. In Sanskrit, kirtan literally means “telling, repeating, or praising.” As a musical term it is often used interchangeably with bhajan. In the most general sense, both refer to South Asian religious music in the form of an antiphonal song of praise or devotion to a deity.
Apparently, early in her studies with Swami Satchidananda, Alice Coltrane took to chanting. However, she added a quality of personal expression that moved Norris and has since moved many others:
For me, she brought a kind of jazz element to traditional chanting. Whether or not that’s actually true, for somebody who can analyze musical styles, I don’t really know. But for me, I love really rocking out, devotional chanting. To this day she is one of my favorite all-time people. If I heard anywhere that she was leading a kirtan, then I would go in a second. Because she brought something different to that. There are places in India you can go where people really rock out and really chant, and still her chanting is different. It’s that and some other element. Which is her, you know, uniquely her. Which is phenomenal, in my opinion. (ibid.)
After returning from India, Alice regularly arranged and adapted traditional Indian chants and hymns for various ensembles. The antiphonal, flexible, and improvisatory formal structures of Indian devotional music and its ecstatic nature are similar to those of both gospel and jazz music. Upon this aesthetic and sacred common ground—an enduring point of contact between African American and South Asian religious music—many of Alice’s later hybrid musical concepts are based.
In the liner notes to the album Universal Consciousness (1971), the first LP that Alice Coltrane (now known by her new spiritual name, Turiya) recorded after her trip to India, she emphasized the importance of her pilgrimage: “Having made the journey to the East, a most important part of my Sadhana (spiritual struggle) has been completed.” Her trip to India—her “Journey in Satchidananda,” if you will—had a dramatic impact on her spiritual evolution and her related aesthetic sensibility. After her return, her new creative goal went beyond that of making music in a technical or artistic sense: she was now determined to express “extraordinary transonic and atmospherical power,” which could send forth “illuminating worlds of sounds into the ethers of this universe.”6 As evidenced on the last group of albums she made for Impulse! and Warner Brothers—Universal Consciousness (1971), World Galaxy (1971), Lord of Lords (1972), Eternity (1975); Transcendence (1977), Radha Krsna Nama Sankirtana (1977), and Transfiguration (1978)—the experience of her spiritual awakening could no longer be contained within the timbral palette of the jazz rhythm section, even at its most expressive and avant-garde. She began to explore the combined potential of the rhythm section, orchestral strings, tamboura, harp, piano, percussion, and her newfound improvisational vehicle, the electric organ.
The Wurlitzer organ, which she used for the first time on the album Universal Consciousness, allowed Alice to express a tremendous amount of emotional power and raw energy. Her decision to explore the organ was directly related to her interest in Indian music. In a 1971 interview, she stated: “If you go to India or other parts of the East, they’ll use something like a harmonium, called a shruti box, to make a drone sound. The tambura also produces a drone that sounds on and on. That’s organ!” (quoted in Lerner 1982 24–25).
The cutting sonority and the flexibility of the Wurlitzer organ allowed Alice both musical independence and the ability to permeate the dynamics of a large ensemble. This independence freed her to explore greater compositional and improvisational parameters. Unlike her choice of concert harp, which had been motivated by her husband’s interest in the instrument, her decision to play the Wurlitzer came to her in a divine vision. She stated in an interview that she had originally purchased a Baldwin portable organ. She continued: “In one meditation it was told to me that the organ had reached an age where it wouldn’t serve properly, and the precise instrument I should get was revealed to me. I could even read the insignia right there on the wood. So I went out to find the Wurlitzer I now have. I didn’t need to do any research; it was just conveyed to me” (ibid., 24).
The Wurlizer, on which she would rely extensively, also gave Alice entry into the amplified sound of fusion and rock music that had come to dominate popular improvisational music, exemplified in her powerful playing with Carlos Santana in 1974 on their album Illuminations. However, it is highly doubtful that her decision to go electric was commercially motivated. Rather, it appears that as she emerged from the darkness of her spiritual battle, she needed to find a more complete instrument that could convey her newfound strength. She explained:
If the father [John Coltrane] had remained on this earthly plane . . . I’m sure I would have stayed with the piano, because it was very complementary to what he was doing. He had the power, intelligence, the skill, the knowledge to carry on. He didn’t need anyone else so the piano served as a nice quiet complement, though it wasn’t a necessity to his music. As I continued in my music after the Father left, I found other keyboard instruments a necessity, because I did not want to have to depend on anyone either. When I started playing organ—and it’s the truth; I hope I’m not misunderstood—I found that I didn’t need anyone! When you have two or three manuals and complete bass in the pedals, if you play it the right way, you don’t need any percussion. Not that drums and bass aren’t welcome. I appreciate the skills of people like Reggie Workman and Roy Haynes, those kind of people. They are very great musicians and contributors to music. But I tell you, when I began to play the organ, there came the freedom and understanding that I would never have to depend on anyone else musically. (ibid.)
True to her words, her organ improvisations can stand alone as testament to her newfound autonomy as an artist. With the possible exception of Sun Ra, no other avant-garde musician has explored the potential of the instrument to such an extent.
As Alice Coltrane committed herself fully to expressing her experience of the absolute, her compositional sensibility became increasingly daring. I believe the artistic originality that emerges in these albums was directly related to the ways in which her mystical experiences had been validated by her guru and her experiences in India. In trying to express the absolute—in the sense of Brahman as unbounded, all-encompassing, and inclusive—she was moved to reach beyond the musical boundaries of the jazz genre and fully explore other traditions and styles. She also came to rely on extremely personal communications with the Lord for inspiration and musical direction.
After 1971, Alice’s commentary in her albums included elaborate descriptions of the stages that the soul passes through in its spiritual evolution, the nature of the outer galaxies of the universe, and conversations with God and his various musical and spiritual emissaries. These exegeses provide a particularly vivid window into her deepening mysticism and, like her music from this period, draw from an array of increasingly disparate sources. The liner notes for the second track on Universal Consciousness, “Battle of Armageddon,” were the most extensive and syncretic of her recording career:
This Great spiritual battle takes place within the nethermost regions of the human soul, literally, every day. The conflagrations of the satanic forces of evil will wax strong until the day when the God-spirit within one’s own heart deals the final death-blow which annihilates his enemy (ego), burns the raging flames of sins to ashes, and purifies one’s lower nature.
Many manifestations assist the soul in this war. Beings like El Daoud, who is the chief Lord of Purgatory, and Swami Savananda will aid you. Mother Kali, The Universal Mother, will impart her Shakti (Energy). Jesus Christ will bear witness to the execution, Sri Ramakrishna will give to you the key that unlocks the secret chambers where funeral cake is served. Baha’u’llah will open up a well-spring of Life, from which flows the Divine Elixir.
Tao, the Great, who knows the Way, will bombard and destroy the whole regime of sea and air forces (abyssal and astral forces) of hate and enmity, while Hanuman, a master warrior during the days of the Ramayana, will lead regiments of heavily armored combat tanks, whose devastation so checkmates and demolishes all attacks by the foe that no army of demons (ill-will and evil) on this earth (terrestrial) can withstand its onslaught.
Ohnedaruth (John Coltrane), who since for years past repaired to a City of shining radiance, situated near a point in space where stands a mammoth Colossus of Three Worlds, will sound the valorous hymn to the dead in war, “Taps,” on a flute (body), i.e., Tapas: austerity-ascetic discipline. After all unrighteousness, anger and sorrow have been crucified to death, Zoroaster, Moses, and Mohammed will gently remove your body (bondage) from the cross and carry it before the view of your mother and father, i.e., Mary and Joseph: Isis and Osiris. Isis then removes her veil (Isis unveiled, reveals the naked Truth, which includes initiation into the Mysteries), at the glorious sight of her son’s Crucifixion. Tearless Mary: Isis, watches the Mummification (wrappings used to cover the most heinous crimes committed by everyone, and never a single iota or vestige of such acts may ever be divulged to anyone, Ad Infinitum, forevermore). The Vault-keeper lowers the sarcophagus down into the Mastaba Pit (where sins are entombed and eternally incarcerated and consumed into the fire of that great Crematorium), then secures the final bolt that locks the Crypt.
Sri Aurobindo, the all-informing source of the universe, whose center is omni-directional, will maintain constant observation, and will keep fully open all Intrafractory Light (Rays or beams of astral light whereby masters and God-like beings freely traverse). Sphinx will encourage and protect you during your interment before Resurrection. Lord Buddha will never leave you. Then, after the final victory is won over death (loving things of the world, and not one’s Maker), May the Creator, who is most high Bhagavan God and Lord, take His Seat, i.e., His Sita: wife (Bride, Christ, in marriage, Coronation) in your heart (His Home).
The above quotation is a potent example of Alice’s use of multiple sources, which are unified and justified by what is for her the seamless and transcendent nature of the mystical experience. Though it is difficult to draw direct comparisons between her poetry and her music, her recorded tracks can be seen to demonstrate a similar aesthetic during this period. Starting with the album Universal Consciousness, Alice began to explore what she termed “a totality concept.” In the liner notes for the title track on the album, she explained:
Universal Consciousness literally means Cosmic Consciousness, Self-Realization, and illumination. This music tells of some of the various diverse avenues and channels through which the soul must pass before it finally reaches that exalted state of Absolute Consciousness. Once achieved, the soul becomes re-united with God and basks in the Sun of blissful union. At this point, The Creator bestows on the soul many of his Attributes, and names one a New Name. This experience and this music involve a Totality concept, which embraces cosmic thought as an emblem of Universal Sound.
On the album Universal Consciousness and, arguably, throughout the rest of her recording career, Alice expresses this “totality concept” by juxtaposing an array of musical identities that might not commonly appear together: contrasting instruments, a mix of composition and improvisation, and jazz, classical, and world-music sonorities.
Universal Consciousness is an example of both the breadth and array of compositional techniques found on Alice’s recordings between 1971 and 1978. Two works on the album, “Battle of Armageddon” and “The Ankh of Amen Ra,” are duets for drums and Wurlitzer. The music that depicts “Battle of Armageddon” is an avant-garde, up-tempo, free-meter duo. Resembling John Coltrane’s composition “Leo,” which also featured the mercurial drumming of Rashied Ali, the piece is a virtuosic romp for both players built on the repeated transposition and rhythmic variation of a single motif. An incessant and unrelenting movement forward characterizes the music. Here John Coltrane’s influence is clearly part of the aesthetic. But with Alice’s buzzing, warbling voice on the organ, she claims the tune as her own. “The Ankh of Amen Ra” is dedicated to her sister and includes a prayer to Amen-Ra, the ancient Egyptian god: “Amen-Ra bear us safe passage across the River Styx.” The organ theme reverts to a comparatively conventional metered pentatonic melody, which Alice enhances with electronic effects and a driving, syncopated left-hand figure. Both are compelling, hard-hitting improvisations that defy the sexist criticism her first three albums received.
Alice also set the Wurlitzer in other, more complex environments, with a small string section, the harp, and a rhythm section. For these organ features, she composed innovative formal structures quite unlike typical jazz and blues forms. For the track “Universal Consciousness,” she fused the sound of harp and strings and contrasted that sonority with the organ, producing an overall ABA free-meter form, with her up-tempo keyboard playing sandwiched in the middle. In an otherwise dissonant environment, several precomposed violin figures provide the organizational framework for the A section. The first is a tremulous motivic figure that gradually becomes longer and more complex. The second figure is a sustained unison that has the effect of neutralizing the previous agitation, and the third is a bold, angular motive. After the second figure is stated, the string parts separate, so that each of the four violin players (LeRoy Jenkins, Julius Brand, Joan Kalisch, and John Blair) explore different musical identities such as pizzicato, arco scrubbing effects in the middle and lower registers, harmonics, and free melodic improvisation. While the strings play, Alice complements the activity with unifying arpeggios on the harp. According to her liner notes, these three tracks each display the arduousness of spiritual purification.
Countering the fierceness of these tracks are three others—“Oh Allah,” “Hare Krishna,” and “Sita Rama”—that display the more blissful aspect of spiritual attainment after struggle: the sunshine after the storm. In the liner notes, Alice wrote: “Oh Allah” is a prayer for peace, unity and concord. The strings helped me to voice this plea, ‘O Mustafa Lord Allah, bring forth us all together again. We can depend on You to envelop us in Your all-embracing arms of universal harmony, tranquility and love.’” The strings twice play an evocative, metered introduction at the top of their register. Then Alice establishes a pleasant E Dorian environment with the sweet and trembling organ melody that she played upon entering and the two planning chords, Em7 and F#m7, that support the organ solo. A conversation between strings and Wurlitzer ensues, backed by the rhythm section. The organ theme is, as Alice indicated, like a plea.
“Hare Krishna” and “Sita Rama” are the most strikingly original compositions on the album. Each is based on traditional Indian chants, which Alice described in the liner notes:
“Hare Krishna”
This mantra (chant) is known as one of the greatest and highest of all mantras. Within its structure can be found three of the most powerful names of God, i.e., Hare, Krishna, and Rama. These names are among the best and most beloved of God, and so dear to Him. Saints proclaim that the power of this mantra alone can confer illumination on anyone according to the degree of his faith. This music irrefutably transports my soul to one of the highest pavilions in creation. Near the spatial mansions of the Most High Paradise, I soar to the abode of the Exalted One, where up in the Gold Room, I lied down in perfect repose.
“Hare Krishna”
Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama
Hare Hare, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna
“Sita Rama”
This hymn is sung in nearly every home throughout India. It was the favorite of that great soul, Mahatma Gandhi. India is the birthplace of more than ten known incarnations of God. Sita is the wife of lord Rama. While in India, I saw mother Ganges River, and my father Himalayas, whose peaks are the highest in the world. “Om shanti.”
The Upanishads say: “whoever utters 3½ crores (35 million) of times this Mantra composed of 16 names becomes freed at once from all sins. He is released from all bondages and gets Mukti (Liberation).
It is extremely difficult to trace the origins of kirtan and bhajan melodies in India. This poses an interesting challenge when it comes to analyzing Alice’s works based on the genre. Set to texts by poet saints, these chants and hymns have been passed down orally for hundreds of years, and they have been changed and adapted to fit local styles. Kirtan wallahs, singers who specialize in leading devotional singing, have also composed new bhajans based on their own poetry. In the written collections of kirtan that have been assembled to facilitate group singing, it is extremely uncommon to find either written notation or authorship; one finds only text. This allows the musical experience to be flexible, evincing improvisation on the part of the song leader and ecstatic expression from the participants.
I have been unsuccessful in locating the specific tunes to which Alice is presumably referring. It may be that she has adapted the traditional melodies so much that they have become unrecognizable—or perhaps I simply have yet to find the source material. Nonetheless, the manner in which she appropriates these chants is fascinating. These adaptations of Indian devotional music are altogether different from those of the more widely known Western musicians who traveled to India in the 1960s to study devotional music. Figures such as George Harrison, or the currently popular Krishna Das, have kept the original source melodies intact, using them as the basis for folk-rock arrangements for European American group singing. By contrast, during her career as a bandleader, Alice saw the potential of Kirtan as a transcendent, avant-garde vehicle for rhythm section and orchestra. Thus, rather than simply arrange the traditional hymns, she created a new devotional genre modeled as much on the participatory and functional aspects of the music as on the original melodic material. To the best of my knowledge, no other jazz or classical composer has used Indian devotional music in this fashion.
In Alice’s adaptation of “Hare Krishna,” the entire ensemble plays an opening rubato theme in unison, while Rashied Ali adds a patina of cymbals and bells. Similar to the Coltrane-influenced mantra device of her earlier recordings, this majestic orchestral effect became a standard, perhaps slightly overused, practice on her subsequent recordings. The opening melody appears to be an invocation and could very well match the text “Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama.” The exact scansion, however, is difficult to determine. The organ enters, playing a theme in E major while the ensemble sustains a drone. The trills and curlicues of Alice’s melodic line depart from the language of both jazz and classical music. They appear to be an approximation of gamak, or the ornamental figures that characterize Indian raga. The organ theme beckons an antiphonal response from the orchestra, and a second unison orchestral figure emerges. Gradually, Alice’s organ solo emerges, embracing dissonance. This entire rubato form is then repeated, like a song with various strains in which the verses comprise a free-jazz environment for organ and rhythm section.
“Sita Rama,” her second Kirtan arrangement, is perhaps the most Indian of her tunes thus far considered. The strings are absent here, and the tamboura and drums begin by establishing the drone. Another slowly expanding organ improvisation emerges resembling alap, the unmetered melodic exposition of raga in classical Indian music. This is followed by a more clearly defined melody that becomes the basis of improvisation. This structure is quite typical of Indian improvisational music. However, the entire conception is literally jazzed up with the sound of the rhythm section and overdubbed harp arpeggios. After this sonic environment has been established, Alice closes with an entirely new ethereal musical moment, using only harp and percussion.
Universal Consciousness is among the best of Alice’s commercial recordings. Her string arrangements are highly inventive, resembling neither the settings nor the background figures of mainstream jazz standards. Nor do they resemble the high modern works of Gunther Schuller’s third-stream projects or the idiosyncratic arrangements of other avant-garde composers, such as Ornette Coleman. Alice’s semicomposed, semi-improvised compositional structures are also unique. The overall freshness of her approach, the combination of musical elements, her own daring Wurlitzer improvisations, the tremendous work of her sidemen, and the general balance and contrast of compositions are stunning. Nonetheless, despite the positive reviews it received in Down Beat, the album is little known among jazz aficionados, even fans of avant-garde jazz. Hybrid in its conception and situated between her derivative early albums and her more heavy-handed orchestral projects, Universal Consciousness has not received adequate praise or recognition.
Alice’s two remaining albums for Impulse!—World Galaxy (1971) and Lord of Lords (1972)—are similar in their “totality concept” to Universal Consciousness. Here, however, Alice explores the potential of a full orchestral string section with varying results. On World Galaxy she arranged her late husband’s signature tunes “My Favorite Things” and “A Love Supreme” with all the strings playing the well-known thematic material in unison. Voiced in such a fashion, the original compositions lose the trance-like quality that made them originally so appealing. She also wrote several works for Lord of Lords based on long, unison, blues-based melodies for strings, specifically “Andromeda’s Suffering,” “Sri Rama Onhedaruth,” and “Lord of Lords.” Although she contrasts these homophonous pentatonic invocations with exciting moments of dissonant, free improvisation, there often seems to be no middle ground. Successful in small jazz ensembles, this mantra technique is a rather heavy-handed device for a full string section. Absent on these orchestral tracks is the spontaneity and contrapuntal interest of her scaled-down string arrangements on Universal Consciousness.
It seems that Alice was aware of her shortcomings as an orchestral composer and welcomed the opportunity to develop her techniques further. As many classical composers have done, she chose to explore and arrange the works of symphonic masters. On Lord of Lords, she adapted excerpts of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite and the famous “Largo” of Dvorak’s New World Symphony. Her choice to tailor these compositions rather than those of other nineteenth- or twentieth-century composers is rather compelling from a musicological standpoint. Both Stravinsky and Dvorak drew heavily on European folk melodies and successfully incorporated ethnic traditions into an art-music aesthetic. Perhaps on some level, Alice was attracted to the boundary-crossing dimensions of their work, which was similar to her own. Of course, Stravinsky’s polytonal explorations, mastery of timbre and orchestration, and genius in disguising and displacing meter, were of particular interest to jazz modernists such as Charlie Parker and Miles Davis as early as the 1940s.
In her adaptations of both Stravinsky’s and Dvorak’s work, Alice boldly proceeded to absorb their compositions into her own aesthetic framework. From Stravinsky’s Firebird, Alice adapted material from the “Introduction” and the “Final Hymn,” the most lyrical of the suite’s eleven movements. In the written portions of her arrangement, she kept quite close to the score. However, in the absence of woodwinds in her own ensemble, she plays their themes on the organ. In fact, she arranged nearly all of the melodic interest and solo excerpts for herself. At the end of the “Introduction,” she inserted an interlude for improvising organ, backed with partially improvised and partially notated string figures. From these emerge the theme from the final movement, which is also played on the organ. Here she diverged only slightly from the formal aspect of the score in the “Final Hymn.” In the final coda, however, she allowed for freely improvised textures.
Given Stravinsky’s appropriative tendencies as a composer, there is a wonderful irony in the manner in which Alice has molded portions of Firebird into a free-jazz improvisation and made her voice on the organ central to the work. This is an act of daring requiring an enormous sense of creative license. As a mystic composer, Alice was conveniently relieved of the full burden that attends such artistic risk taking. In her liner notes to “Excerpt of Firebird,” she wrote:
On March 20, 1972, I was blessed with the good fortune of receiving a visitation from the great master composer, Mr. Igor Stravinsky, whom I had never met before in life. After a warm and intimate discussion on the subject of music, he said: “I want you to receive my vote.” I did not fully understand his meaning. He then presented me with a small glass vial containing a clear, colorless liquid. He was seated in a comfortable armchair; he held me close and said, “Daughter, this vial was for your grandmother, but instead, I kept it in reserve for you.” He then asked if I would like the elixir, I said yes. As he walked away for it, I began to drink from the vial. To my surprise it was difficult to swallow. When it was finished, Mr. Stravinsky returned. Since that time, I have kept the album photograph from Mr. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in my room. As opposed to this photograph, he had the appearance of an elderly man, but none of the weariness or age lines shown on his face.
Since that time, it has been incumbent on me to proceed forthrightly into the great master Stravinsky’s works. Divine instruction has been given me throughout the entire arranging of this music, even down to the smallest detail. Ohnedaruth, when he was John Coltrane, seven years ago, introduced to me the music of, as he termed it, “a Universal musician and composer,” Mr. Igor Stravinsky.
Clearly Alice derived enormous authority from her personal communications with the divine. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, the divine could manifest through various emissaries or gurus for her: even a figure such as Stravinsky could be seen as a messenger of musical wisdom. In her mystical orientation, then, an enormously wide-ranging set of musical influences could be spiritualized and absorbed into her aesthetic.
“Going Home,” Alice’s setting of Dvorak’s “Largo,” is equally fascinating, particularly for the manner in which she has reappropriated the African American musical sources that the composer originally borrowed. Written in 1893, Dvorak’s Symphony No. 5 in E minor hails from his American period, when the Czech composer was living in the United States and incorporating themes from black American and Native American sources in his own compositions.7 The theme of the “Largo” was most likely modeled after the spirituals that Dvorak’s black American composition student Harry Burleigh had sung for him. It may also have been based on selections from a vocal collection called Negro Music that had been in Dvorak’s possession (Beckerman 2003, 132).
In 1922, roughly thirty years after the debut of the New World Symphony, William Arms Fisher, another of Dvorak’s former students, set the “Largo” as a song and titled it “Going Home.” “Going Home” soon became a popular gospel hymn and several decades later became a jazz standard:
Goin’ home, goin’ home, I’m a-goin’ home;
Quiet like, some still day, I jes’ goin’ home.
It’s not far, jes’ close by, through an open door,
Work all done, care laid by, gwine to fear no more.
Mother’s there, spectin’ me, Father’s waitin’ too,
Lots o’ folks gather’d there, all the friends I knew,
All the friends I knew. Home, home, I’m goin’ home.
Rather than playing “Going Home” as a gospel arrangement, Alice maintained the symphonic aspects of Dvorak’s “Largo.” She copied his string orchestration, chord voicings, and many of the formal aspects of the original. However, she reclaimed the work by adding a solo harp introduction based on the movement’s second theme and inserting an organ solo where the development section belongs. Strikingly, she also varied the movement’s thematic material. She arranged the original English horn passages, which carry the melody, for the organ. In her highly personal treatment of the melody, she used the language of the blues and her gospel-inflected jazz touch at the keyboard. Compare the two following versions of the melody below. The first (figure 3.1) is a simple reduction of the A theme of the “Largo” and the second (figure 3.2) is Alice’s interpretation of the same material:
Fig. 3.1 The A theme of Dvorak’s “Largo.”
Fig 3.2 Coltrane’s interpretation of Dvorak’s “Largo.”
Notice how Alice expands the melody by extending and elaborating two-beat phrases. Notice also the extensive use of pick-up notes, blues inflection, and the freedom of ornamentation in her version, all of which can be seen to constitute an African American singing and playing style. Though Dvorak based his “Largo” on black American musical sources, he captured none of this spontaneity and rubato phrasing style in his symphonic arrangement. I see Alice’s variation of this theme as an African American reclamation of the melody.
In the liner notes for “Going Home,” Alice reflected on the enduring value of African American spiritual music. She also appeared to contemplate her own relationship to the religious traditions of her youth and her connection to an African American past:
Going Home is a gospel-oriented spiritual that is sung in homes and churches throughout the United States today. It was one of my parents’ favorite songs. Gospel and Spiritual music are some of the greatest Attributes of the Creator to have been bestowed abundantly upon the children of the Nile, i.e., African Americans.
A classical composer, Anton Dvorak, heard this music and built it into a concert piece within the context of his “New World Symphony.” He titled it “Largo.”
One day I asked the Lord about coming Home at the end of my life. The Lord said to me, “Turiya, you will not have to come home, you will Be Home.” Be and Being are some of the Absolute aspects of the Creator. Man tries, he hopes and struggles, he searches and dreams, he gets confused; but not so with the Almighty Infinite Lord. There is not a modicum of strife or struggle, no hopes or expectations, no trials or errors or fears. A soul who can Be one with the Lord will discover that his true identity is that of a God-like being, resembling in likeness and appearance, and expressing in the creativity the majesty and Perfection of his creator.
In questioning the Lord about “coming home,” her commentary suggests a certain ambivalence regarding her own musical and spiritual path. By the end of the passage, however, Alice has found strength and sustenance once more, in a simultaneously personal and transcendent experience of the divine.
Lord of Lords was the last album that Alice Coltrane made for the Impulse! label. In the three years before Eternity, her next commercial release with Warner Brothers in 1975, a series of great changes again took place in her life. She moved to California, settling first in the Bay Area and then in Woodland Hills, near Los Angeles, where she lived the rest of her life. More important, she obeyed the call to renounce the secular life and become a monastic. Between 1972 and 1975, her time was increasingly spent ministering to a burgeoning group of religious aspirants who sought her teachings and wisdom. Gradually her life as a professional musician gave way to her life as a guru. She did, however, make two albums as a side person before 1975, first playing harp for Joe Henderson on The Elements in 1973, and then writing string arrangements and playing harp and Wurlitzer organ for Carlos Santana on their album Illuminations in 1974.
In the early seventies, A.B.C and Impulse! were undergoing large administrative changes. Ed Michel, Alice’s Impulse! producer, followed her when she made the move to Warner Brothers. He explained: “A lot of artists got dropped, a lot of contracts expired and weren’t renewed. Various people had been poaching for Alice, because they knew her contract was coming to an end. Bob Krazner signed her at one point, and I think he was instrumental. He wanted to sign four artists from Impulse! and move them over to Warner. Alice was the only one that went” (telephone interview with author, 2001). Needless to say, Alice’s artistic persona during this period was quite eccentric. Michel put that in context:
Some people thought she was really weird and far out. Some people thought Richard Nixon was really far out! . . . Remember, the late ’60s to mid-70s was the most open period in American commercial music and radio. Astonishing things were being broadcast. Everybody could record and put things out and it was a wonderful time for the music. There was an openness. Distributors, who were often the bottleneck, were much more willing to take things on. (ibid.)
Despite the comparative flexibility of the recording industry, Alice’s “totality concept” posed a problem for Warner Brothers. The music that Alice produced was not what the label had expected. In this late period of her commercial career, her albums tended to lack a unifying musical concept. For instance, Eternity (1975), Alice Coltrane’s first Warner Brothers release, featured a miscellaneous array of experiments, some reflecting her prior work on Impulse! and some altogether new. The first track, “Spiritual Eternal,” is a 12/8 blues for organ and orchestra with a studio horn section. Aside from her mildly dissonant organ improvisation, this track—with its trumpet and sax choir, catchy theme, and swinging rhythm section—might well fall within the genre of rhythm and blues. “Wisdom Eye” follows, a koto-like solo piece for harp whose only connection to the prior track is the use of minor pentatonic. The third track, “Los Caballos,” diverges yet again in its aesthetics. Here Alice attempts to convey her new love of horses in a rhythm-section tune featuring Charlie Haden on bass and several Latino musicians on timbales and hand percussion. The remaining tracks are equally contrasting. “Morning Worship” is a free-form jazz improvisation for organ, bass, drums, tamboura, and wind chimes, dedicated to the goddess Kali. “Spring Rounds” is an orchestral adaptation of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, similar in conception to her setting of Firebird. “Om Supreme” is her first recorded track with a choir.
With such a wide and unconventional array of material on her first three Warner Brothers albums, it is no wonder that the label was somewhat concerned. It is generally difficult to find listeners with such eclectic tastes. As Michel explained, “Warner Brothers wasn’t really crazy about it. They were much ‘pop-ier.’ They knew Alice was selling and wondered why she was doing something different. I would get calls from various people, ‘Hey why don’t you do this? Why don’t you do that?’ And, of course, I would reply, ‘Why don’t you do this and why don’t you do that and leave me alone! Leave my artist alone! You signed my artist—trust my artist. If you don’t like my artist, someone else will sign my artist!’” (ibid.).
With respect to the trajectory of her career, “Om Supreme” is perhaps the most important track on Eternity. Here Alice composed a vocal work that drew from bhajans. Combining English and Sanskrit phrases, she wrote her own lyrics, which described the different lokas, or planes of existence, in the Hindu cosmology. “Om Supreme” forecasts her future adaptations of Kirtan with her students at the Vedantic Center at Sai Anantam Ashram in the choir; however, it lacks the ecstatic quality that her devotees would bring to her later adaptations of bhajans. Following the suggestion of Ed Michel, Alice hired professional singers for the session, European Americans who sang in an extremely restrained, enunciated style typical of the Cambridge Singers. Though the choir is quite good, its lack of freedom and blues inflection sound awkward next to Alice’s Fender Rhodes piano. A huge stylistic disjuncture occurs when the choir enters after a lengthy gospel introduction at the keyboard. This was the only time she used classical singers in her vocal arrangements. After “Om Supreme,” she relied on the voices of her students, the majority of whom were African American men and women with gospel and blues-based musical backgrounds. On her next two Warner Brothers albums, Transcendence (1977) and Radha Krsna Nama Sankirtana (1977), she recorded two sides of traditional Kirtan for her choir and the Fender Rhodes. These works will be discussed at length in the concluding chapter, as they are the forebears of the bhajan ritual that structures spiritual life at her ashram in Agoura Hills.
Alice came to rely almost exclusively on her vocal adaptations of traditional bhajans in her Avatar recordings of the 1980s and 1990s. But she remained committed to and supportive of instrumental avant-garde music. In fact, the last commercial recording she made before her long hiatus from public performance was not a Kirtan album, but a hard-hitting trio project that evoked both her playing with John Coltrane and the avant-garde music of her earlier years. Transfiguration (1978), her farewell to the jazz business, was a live album featuring Roy Haynes on drums, Reggie Workman on bass, and a small string section. Despite her return to this jazz template, the spiritual intent of the music was central to the project. The liner notes to the title track explained that “‘transfiguration’ transforms every musical statement in this piece from a mere expression of one’s mental prowess and musical capabilities into an offering of love and devotion in adoration and glorification of God, the Supreme Lord.”
Of the five tracks on the album, two are piano features and three are driving, free improvisations for organ and rhythm section. The first piano feature, “One for the Father,” is a memorial to her husband reminiscent of her playing on A Monastic Trio; it is a solo rhapsody built on a rubato blues progression and minor pentatonic elaborations that displays her command of the concert grand piano. The second is a composition for piano and strings entitled “Prema,” based on the minor pentatonic melody of “Om Supreme.” “Transfiguration” and “Affinity” are her own tunes based on pentatonic modality, and “Leo” is a spectacular trio version of her husband’s famous composition.
Her introduction to “Leo,” entitled “Krishnaya,” is perhaps the most touching moment on Transfiguration, a moment that displays both where she has been and where she is headed musically and spiritually. Sitting at her organ in front of a large live audience in her orange robes, she plays a lovely plagal progression over which she thanks her sidemen and introduces her husband’s piece. For a quiet moment, before unleashing a tremendous force of creative energy, she “has church,” in the concert hall. As “Leo” ensues, she plays in a furiously motivic fashion reminiscent of her husband’s late improvisatory style. Her up-tempo keyboard work here is the most exciting of her commercial career. With its rapid-fire transpositions of short figures; its long modal passages, rhythmic play, and timbral inventiveness; its sustained energy and burning pace; and the unrelenting support of Roy Haynes and Reggie Workman, she takes leave of the jazz business with a truly breathtaking swan song.
