Bhajan chanting extols the magnificence and the holiness of God. It celebrates the divine glories of the Lord. Chanting consists of worshipping God through song and music . . . Chanting removes agitations or vrittis from the mind, and brings peace. It edifies one, uplifts the spirit, purifies the atmosphere, and elevates the consciousness. —Alice Coltrane, Mantra
In 1976, Alice Coltrane had a revelation in which she received divine instruction to renounce secular life and don the orange robes of a swami, or spiritual teacher in the Hindu tradition. Thereafter, she was known as Swamini (the feminine form of “swami”) Turiyasangitananda; she translated her “anointed” name from Sanskrit as “the Transcendental Lord’s highest song of bliss.” Typically, a Hindu monk or guru ordains a swami into a recognized lineage; however, according to Alice, her initiation came directly from the Lord, resembling the call to preach in her family’s Baptist faith. In the last interview she granted before passing away, Alice recalled her experience:
It started with taking sanyas. That was a total mystical experience. It was God’s deliverance of his anointed mercy on me. I was told the night and time, and to be prepared, so I got ready and put on a white dress and all, and I noticed when the time came, the colors of orange were poured into the cloth of the dress I was wearing. And I just watched it happen. I just watched everything go into that beautiful saffron color. And my name was given, of course, and the whole outline of the duty, the work and mission were also revealed.
One of the directives given to me was to start the Ashram . . . At first, I don’t think my idea was on sanyas (renunciation) as much as it was on having the availability to seek the Lord, to be able to study spiritual scriptures and just to really immerse myself in living the spiritual life as much as possible. My children, I had raised them, my husband had passed some years ago. I had reached a point where most of my duties as a householder were fulfilled. It gave me the time to want to see, to want to strive, to want to devote quality time, because, you know the work of a woman is so full! I mean it’s sometimes twenty-four hours. So once that was reduced, I had additional time that I could apply to the path, and that’s what I’ve been doing. (A. Coltrane 2006, 36–38)
Alice’s liberty from her “duties as a householder” and her freedom from an established religion allowed her the opportunity to develop a sui generis spiritual practice. As part of this pursuit, she began composing and adapting bhajans (Hindu devotional hymns) for the handful of spiritual followers that she had attracted in San Francisco during the early 1970s. Today, these hymns form the basis of musical worship services at Sai Anantam Ashram, the alternative spiritual community that Alice established in 1983. They are sung twice a day during the week, and once a day on the weekends.
In total, Alice made five studio recordings of these bhajans, the majority of which are noncommercial and fairly difficult to obtain. The earliest can be found on the B sides of Transcendence (1977) and Radha Krsna Nama Sankirtana (1977), both on the Warner Brothers label. Alice’s arrangements of “Sivaya,” “Ghana Nila,” “Bhaja Govindam,” “Sri Nrsimha,” “Govinda Jai Jai,” “Ganesha,” “Prema Muditha,” and “Hare Krishna” on these albums feature her choir and her lively accompaniment on her Fender Rhodes piano. In her liner notes, she thanked her students at the Vedantic Center “who have lifted their voices and hand percussion in praise and adoration of the Supreme Lord.” The remainder of her bhajans can be heard on Divine Songs (1987), Infinite Chants (1991), and Glorious Chants (1995), all released on Avatar Book Institute, an independent label affiliated with the Vedantic Center. They feature Alice on keyboard, her choir, and a small string section, processed evocatively with studio effects and overdubbing. With the addition of Turiya Sings (1982), a solo album recorded in a marathon fifteen-hour session in which Alice chanted Hindu mantras by herself, these Avatar releases were the only recordings she made after leaving the commercial music industry in 1978, until she resurfaced with her final jazz album, Translinear Light, in 2003.
Quite remarkably, at Sai Anantam Ashram, Alice’s bhajans have come to function as part of the religious ritual. According to the religion scholar Catherine Albanese, religious rituals “act out the insights and understandings” in a given belief system; they “serve to bring the community together”; and they “structure the daily lives” of members (1999, 10). Alice’s bhajans perform all of these tasks for ashram members, but what makes the hymns unique is that they enact her singular spiritual philosophy. To gain a nuanced appreciation of the hymns—their organic evolution, their hybrid devotional aesthetics, and the ritual function they serve—it is best to view them in the context of a community that has revered Alice as a guru and has followed her teachings. First, however, one must have some idea of the nature of her belief system.
While it is beyond the scope of this book—and perhaps beyond anybody’s capabilities—to systematize Alice Coltrane’s unique spiritual philosophy, a core set of beliefs permeates both her ashram’s website and the spiritual treatises that she wrote during her monastic period: Monument Eternal (1977), Endless Wisdom I (1981), Divine Revelations (1995), and Endless Wisdom II (1999). Chief among these beliefs are the notions that the soul of each individual is divine; that enlightenment, or “God-realization,” is a possibility here on earth; that establishing a personal, devotional, and unmediated relationship with the Lord is a prerequisite for spiritual advancement; and last, that God does not belong to any one religion. Within this spiritual framework, Alice acted as “an instrument of the lord” and produced pages of “direct writing” and divinely inspired music that functioned as “free-telling” vehicles of transcendence, to borrow from William Andrews (1986a, 290). And quite remarkably, she integrated these beliefs into a lived religion and a devotional music practice at her ashram.
Alice was a spiritual maverick with respect to her Protestant upbringing. One sees this most clearly in the Hindu concepts that pervade her writings and teachings. Nevertheless, crucial aspects of her faith remain consistent with that of her evangelical sisters, past and present. Alice believed that “the essence of eternal bliss and happiness is within him, in the human heart—the earthly home of the soul, one’s own true self” (1981, 22). This unshakeable belief in the soul’s inherent divinity is consistent with the spiritual views maintained by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century black female preachers. As opposed to a theology that focused on “the casting off of sin,” black female preachers have been primarily concerned with “reclaiming . . . an original blessing” (Connor 1991, 4). Typically, this “sacralization of identity” comes about through a process of conversion and the sublimation of personal identity. As Jean Humez writes, “in an apparent paradox familiar in religious thought this denial of her individual self enabled her to make the strongest possible assertion of the power and reality of her inner strength and knowledge” (1981, 2).
This denial of self and assertion of divinity has also allowed female preachers to maintain their private lives while fulfilling extremely public roles. In her study From Sin to Salvation: Stories of Women’s Conversions, 1800 to the Present, Virginia Brereton explains that “one advantage of the absence of individual voice or of interest in personal circumstances was that converts could speak or write publicly of their deepest, most shattering moments, without really giving up their privacy” (1991, 18). Alice similarly surrendered attachment to her worldly and individual identity in order to serve God. Ultimately, and paradoxically, this allowed her to maintain her private life and that of her family, while remaining in the spotlight. In her last interview, she stated,
After a while you just aren’t involved in the personality. God teaches us to be selfless and egoless, so you aren’t involved with personal distinctions. You are really about the work, service, duties, and my concentration is on that greatly. We have to be selfless in our service so we can truly dedicate our life to our work, spend our lives seeking the Lord and living in obedience to the will of the Lord. Devotion and selflessness are such requirements. Because if we are self-interested or involved with our own importance, our own aim, we cannot serve the Lord that way. (A. Coltrane 2006, 37)
While Alice fervently preached that the soul was divine, she also maintained that realizing of one’s divinity was a possibility here on earth, arguing that “perfection and freedom can be experienced not only in the heaven worlds, outside or around this universe, but right here on earth” (1977 36). She described this state as “Absolute Consciousness” or “Self-Realization,” which “affords a kind of freedom in which the soul lives and moves around like a sovereign of this universe” (27). Belief in the possibility of enlightenment in this lifetime distinguishes her spiritual views from those of evangelical Christian women, whose eschatology has traditionally offered only “the promise of a rich and glorious afterlife” (Haywood 2003, 23). However, Alice’s zeal to testify to the existence of heaven was equally passionate. For her, “liberation from the bondage of the external world” should be the very goal of life (1981, 23). In part because she herself claimed to have experienced this state, there is urgency and passion in her writing and musical expression. It is as if everything she did asked the question: “why would anybody want anything else if this is a possibility?”
Nevertheless, Alice found the journey to self-realization a demanding one that required great self-discipline, effort, and introspection. To achieve this state of “Absolute Consciousness,” one must purify one’s mind and actions. Alice also claimed to have experienced this arduous process. In fact, the most dramatic aspect of her spiritual autobiography is the description of tapas, or self-imposed austerities, that she endured between 1968 and 1970: “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” (1977, 17). She also described extreme “mental tests” that included enduring deafening sounds, extreme vibrations, disorienting “out of body” experiences, and bewildering encounters with spirits (ibid., 19). The benefits of Alice’s self-imposed austerities were “spiritual perceptions . . . bestowed by the Lord.” She claimed to be able to see into the future, hear people’s thoughts, visit souls who had passed away, detect ailments in animals, levitate and travel in her astral body, and rapidly assimilate huge amounts of information, such as new languages and texts. She also claimed to have insight into her previous lives: “One of the highest experiences of my existence occurred about 500,050 years ago, during the Dvapara Yuga, the period of time which was before the Kali Yuga. I received transcendental Vedic knowledge direct from the mouth of Bhagavan Lord Krishna” (44).
In addition to documenting the arduous aspects of spiritual transformation and the powers Alice experienced, much of Monument Eternal was an attempt to share the joy of a personal devotional relationship with God. Here, and elsewhere in her writings, she stressed the necessity of establishing and maintaining this relationship. Along with belief in the soul’s divinity, this formed the core of her theology. Quite often, she lapsed into ecstatic language reminiscent of Sufi poetry to describe the intimacy she felt with the divine:
The Lord often tells the spiritually awakened ones about divine light and universal love, by stating to them that “Mother earth loves to feel your bare feet upon her breast, the wind loves your face, your hair . . . the sun loves the measurements of your back; flowers and other plant spirits rejoice upon receiving natural rain, or water. Trees swing and sway with joy when I assume the form of the initiating spirit who will bring forth the blossoms of spring and the fruits of summer. (11)
To close the book, she wrote:
What is monumental and eternal to me is to feel the Lord’s play and hear the Lord’s laughter or talk. Why, just this morning the Lord said to me: “Hey Turiya,
At dawn, sit at the Feet of Action.
At noon, be at the Hand of Might.
At eventide, be so big, that sky will learn Sky.” (53)
While the path to self-realization required establishing a personal, loving relationship with the Lord, God was for Alice a universal concept that lay outside any single religious tradition. In the faith that she followed, the Lord was manifest in a multitude of names and forms: Krishna, Rama, Jesus, and the Buddha were all valid incarnations. And, by extension, all religions were viable paths to God-realization. This notion is quite unlike that of her Christian upbringing. In the Baptist faith, God is transcendent, and the only way of finding union with him is through Jesus Christ, the redeemer. By contrast, Alice’s view of God as both “one and many” is foundational to Hindu theology and finds its basis in the verse from the Rig-Veda: “the Truth is one, the wise call it by many names.”1 For instance, concerning the oneness of God, Alice wrote:
I am all that there is. There is naught beside Me, or like unto Me. There is naught beyond beneath or around Me, other than My Own Self. Apart from Me, no man, cosmic god, or whatsoever else knows or can measure the length, breadth or depth of my Being, and no man, cosmic god, or aught whatsoever else know or can probe the magnitude, volume or the depth of My Excellences, Glories, or My Mysteries, in as much as I am higher than the highest height, deeper than the deepest depth, vaster than the vastest expanse, and I am extended above the transcendent to the comprehension of all created minds. (1981, 37)
Concerning “the manyness of God,” she wrote:
Millions of Forms have I, and millions of formless forms have I, nonetheless My billions of Names far surpass them all for verily more than the stars in the firmament, more than the worlds in the universes, more than all the living entities therein and more than all of the atoms in the vast expanse of space therefrom are My wondrous infinite Names. (ibid. 187)
In the early 1970s, Alice moved to California and began to share her convictions with other spiritual aspirants. Inspired by her writings and her example, a small group soon gathered to chant with her and study the philosophy of Vedanta in the Bay Area. From the outset, satsang, or community worship, consisted of singing Alice’s adaptations of bhajans, studying Vedic texts, and listening to her spiritual discourse. This has remained the central community practice ever since.
As her following expanded, Alice founded the Vedantic Center in 1972, which was initially housed in a San Francisco storefront. In the mid-1970s, she moved to Woodland Hills, California, and reestablished the Vedantic Center next door to her home. Many of her students from the Bay Area followed, to pursue her teachings and continue their worship together. In 1983, Alice purchased fifty acres in Agoura Hills, a town neighboring Woodland Hills (where she continued to reside), and founded what was then called Shanti Anantam Ashram as a place where her students could live and worship together according to the core principles taught at the Vedantic Center.
During the late 1980s, Alice had a revelation in which Sathya Sai Baba was declared the true avatar of the age. Consequently, in 1994, Shanti Anantam Ashram was reinaugurated as the Sai Anantam Ashram, which, in effect, made it a Sathya Sai Baba affiliate. Sathya Sai Baba is an Indian guru with an international following of several million people, most of them South Asian.2 With its focus on singing during satsang, or religious gatherings, which include bhajans sung in honor of Sai Baba, Alice’s ashram is similar to other Sai Baba centers. However, in all other respects it is unique, and it functions autonomously as a nonprofit organization. The ashram’s mission statement reads:
The Ashram serves as a sanctuary where seekers of all faiths can receive and experience the sublime teachings on spiritual life. Students and residents of the Ashram are instructed to reflect spiritual values of modest dress, vegetarian diet and correct ethical behavior. The practices include meditation, scripture study, selfless service and chanting of God’s Holy Names. (http://www.saiquest.com, accessed June 13, 2009)
In addition, Alice’s writings, not those of Sai Baba, provide the creed at the ashram:
The Sai Anantam Ashram appreciates the contributions of spiritual wisdom and insight from other faiths and religions. Studies undertaken at the ashram include not only Vedantic or Vedic scriptures, the oldest of the world’s literatures, but also exemplary narratives and scriptural texts from more recent revelations of God found in the Bible and in the Islamic and Buddhist texts.
The Vedas teach that the purpose of human birth is for making spiritual advancement toward the highest perfectional stage of life, which is devotional service rendered unto the Supreme Lord. Charity, kindness, selfless service, spiritual discipline and a dedicated life of devotion can bring one toward the supreme goal of life and attainment of divine realization of the Supreme Lord . . .
A serious disciple who engages in dedicated, devotional service daily, who is selfless, moral, meditative, tranquil, disciplined and reverentially given unto the recitation of japam, mantram, and prayers I shall sanction it be that such a soul may go forth onward unto achievement of the Supreme Goal of divine realization. (1981, 70)3
Alice’s paramount role as guru further distinguishes Sai Anantam Ashram from other Sathya Sai Baba centers. While Alice’s students read Satya Sai Baba’s discourses, revere him as an avatar, and made pilgrimages with her to India to see him, until Alice’s death she was their personal guru, Alice, the one who answered their questions, looked after their spiritual well-being, and encouraged their spiritual progress on regular basis. To capture the appeal that Alice had for her students and their faith in her, I offer the words of Radha Reyes-Botafasina, a student who currently lives at the ashram and has been following her guidance for nearly thirty years:
Swamini was a God-realized being, which is not to be taken lightly. We felt so fortunate to be in her presence . . . What she gave, what she taught us was skills: how to live in this world and the world beyond this world—how to relate to people, how to serve people. She taught us to understand that life is not a fairy tale. You have challenges because maya [illusion] is there. Confronting those obstacles, that’s your job. In India, you see someone down and out, and they’ll say, “Well, that’s my karma.” Here in the West everything is supposed to follow this rosy plan. And when you’re challenged you don’t expect it, you don’t understand the reason for the challenge.
There’s nobody like Swamini. She was the blessed reassurance, and the blessed assurance as well. Because anything that ever needed to be resolved, well, the buck would stop right there. Swamini said it. It was good enough. There was no questioning. For our family lives, for our children, for their needs, whatever it was. You know, we do what we have to do as human beings, practically, but if we needed more divine guidance, this was it . . .
She always knew the answers, it was whether or not she was supposed to tell you at the time. She would encourage us to “please meditate first. Don’t be so dependent!” And then, if you have a question on your meditation, on what you’ve seen in your meditation, then you can ask, but at least you’ve made the effort. She would always say on Sundays, “pray that you can go beyond salvation, beyond liberation, beyond self-realization, go all the way to God realization.” You know, it’s not easy. (interview with author, 2007)
Ms. Reyes-Botafasina’s comments may seem out of the ordinary in our culture; however, in the Hindu tradition, gurus are accepted figures who act as conduits to divine knowledge. In their role as enlightened teachers, they facilitate the spiritual advancement of their students. In India, the guru-disciple relationship is common. In America, however, having a guru tends to be an alien concept, perhaps even a mistrusted one. This may be due to the stark individualism of Anglo-American Protestantism, but it is probably also a response to the cults and failed social experiments that arose during the 1970s, in which guru figures were negatively implicated. Although herself a celebrity, Alice seems to have escaped the scandal and notoriety that has plagued many other leaders of alternative spiritual communities. This is partly due to the fact that she kept the life of the ashram well under the public’s radar screen, a feat made possible by her generous financial backing, which meant that the community did not need to attract new members or raise funds for the upkeep of the ashram’s land and infrastructure.
Over the last several decades, members of the community have included both ashram residents and those who live elsewhere but come to services weekly. Most are black, middle-class, educated adults, though there are European Americans and Asian Americans. Those living at the ashram now number roughly twenty. When Alice came to play the organ and deliver her spiritual discourse for Sunday services in the summer of 2002, I counted roughly fifty people in attendance. Today, with their guru no longer living, attendance at services is dwindling.
In addition to maintaining the ashram worship and study schedule, and carrying out various community services—such as taking care of the grounds and the temple, working in the bookstore, and answering correspondence—adult members hold day jobs. They live in separate rented family units, as individuals or married couples, and their children go to local schools. Far from cultish, their lives are like those of most people in America except for their commitment to spiritual life at the ashram. I should also add that a number of community members are or were professional musicians. With their own musical backgrounds, they maintained the daily musical rituals when Swamini was not present during her lifetime, and they now continue the practice of bhajans in her absence.
During the early stages of her life as a swami, Alice never required that her students sing in a particular manner. As with her jazz sidemen, she wished her devotees to experience freedom of expression. Nonetheless, most of her students were African American, and their devotional singing evolved in a culturally specific manner. In her adaptations of Hindu hymns, Alice made arrangements that complemented what she termed the Southern singing style of her spiritual community. She described her creative philosophy in a 1988 interview with Dolores Brandon. Referring to Radha Krsna Nama Sankirtana (1977), the first album on which Alice recorded her devotees, Brandon asked: “the other thing I really like about that album is that you brought a black, soul, gospel feeling too—are you aware of that?” Alice replied:
Oh many people say that. And you know why that happens? In music, I don’t think I have real preferences about form. Especially when it comes to a religious faith or a spiritual conviction. Because when you express your heart, it has to come from you. When those chants are sung I don’t tell them, if you don’t sound like India, forget it. I don’t say such a thing. Sing the chants the way you feel about singing them. Sing from your heart and spirit and that’s what you get. A number of people that were members or disciples at the Vedantic Center had that background, like a Southern kind of background and the experiences in the Baptist church. So you begin to hear that. So the music that I play basically complemented that. Because, also, my background in this lifetime, I had extensive experience playing for various churches for all kinds of faiths. The Adventists, the Baptists, the Methodists. I had a great time playing in Detroit in the various churches so I had that experience. If people had preference to hymns, and they, say, were part of our center, and they expressed like that, then the music would have that form. Again, the music would always complement the congregation that was singing, the congregational chanting. So that’s why it comes out that way. And then I find out that when there are more people and they become members, and they come from various backgrounds, like especially today, eleven years later, there are people from all over—Europe, Asia. You get such a mixture. But you’re singing from your heart, your spirit. That’s what I’m concerned about. (A. Coltrane 1988)
In some respects, the bhajans diverge substantially from Alice’s professional and commercial musical projects. Her instrumentation, arrangements, and harmonic foundations are comparatively simple; they consist of keyboard, vocals, and hand percussion, with simple pentatonic melodies set over conventional chord progressions. At a deeper level, however, there are many similarities between the bhajans and Alice’s previous works. Using methods similar to those in her jazz sessions, Alice created flexible, expandable musical structures over which individuals could elaborate or improvise their own lines. She also arranged harmonies and parts for her choir in a spontaneous fashion, particularly during studio recordings. As Reyes-Botafasina explained:
She would give us harmonies right there on the spot. She would sing it, we would be in sections, and she would come over—altos, tenors, sopranos, bari[tone]s, and one person who had a little bit of musical skills would make sure they got those notes right. The whole job of that person, poor thing, was to make sure they transmit those notes to other people and that they all sing them. And for me it was so much fun. It was like avant-garde music, completely in the moment. So, on the technical side, you are using your skills to analyze what she’s giving you, you know, music is in patterns, so you can give it back. But then you listen, and . . . it’s, it’s so ancient, so ancient. (interview with author, 2007)
One can also equate the flexible, spontaneous aspect of these hymns to Alice’s earlier recompositions of symphonic works that interrupt meter and form so that, as a player, she could find her “eternity” (Lerner 1982, 22) even within a Western art-music aesthetic. What makes the bhajans different from her professional work on the bandstand, however, is the devotional intent of all members involved. In this respect, Alice was returning to the congregational aesthetics of her childhood. This devotional, unmediated quality at the core of her bhajan practice is founded on the historical bhajan practice in India. In fact, it is this very ecstatic essence—related to bhakti, or personal devotion to a particular deity—that attracted Alice in the first place, and ultimately provided the grounds for her musical synthesis.
Bhajan is a generic term that refers to Hindu devotional hymns associated with bhakti revival movements throughout India’s medieval period (600–1500). As a result of religious revivalism during that period, the role of the priestly class and the importance of formal religious rituals were de-emphasized and replaced by a belief that the individual should cultivate a personal relationship with the gods and goddesses. Gradually the practice of religion passed out of the control of the Brahmin caste and into the hands of leaders of sects and gurus of any caste. This religious restructuring produced generations of religious philosophers, ecstatic sects, and poet-saints who have advocated many different methods of bhakti worship.4 Bhakti worship is typically characterized by approaching spiritual union through acts of divine love and devotion, ritual offerings, and the repetition of God’s holy names.
One of most widely adopted forms of bhakti worship among Hindus is singing God’s name and praising God’s glories.5 The hymns are based on ancient texts by poet-saints and usually fall in one of five categories: songs for Siva, songs for Krishna, songs for Rama, songs for the Divine Mother, and songs for the particular guru of a community. Since the sixth century, this bhajan tradition has been absorbed into South Asian classical arts. It has influenced Sufi and Sikh traditions of musical worship and has also remained a popular form of Hindu devotional practice. The ultimate goal of bhakti practice and the singing of bhajans, is to lose oneself in the love of God. This musical, emotional, and unmediated approach to worship is similar to that found in African American church services, particularly those of Baptist and Holiness congregations like the ones Alice played for as a young woman. The ecstatic nature of the genre, then, ultimately provided the basis for the unique musical synthesis one finds at Alice’s ashram.
In India, particularly in the north, the practice of bhajans is extremely common during satsang, so that group singing is found at temples as well as informally in homes, where the majority of Hindu practices are daily maintained.6 Individuals also commonly sing by themselves as they perform puja, the making of ritual offerings, at home altars. To facilitate group singing, bhajan melodies tend to be antiphonal in nature and quite simple, falling within forms of raga and tala accessible to most amateur singers.7 Typically, an individual in the community or a professional song leader leads the worship. The usual accompaniment is harmonium and hand percussion, though one might also find other drone instruments such as a tamboura, ektar, or shruti box, and additional melodic instruments such as violin and flute.
Although the instrumentation differs, the musical forms that Alice used in her bhajans are quite similar to what one might encounter in India, or in other Hindu ashrams and temples in the United States. This is largely due to the structural implications suggested by the texts. Bhajan prosody usually conforms to or is influenced by traditional Sanskrit poetic forms. In many bhajans, the text consists only of the name or multiple names of a single deity. The majority of simple bhajans follow an AAB format, which Alice maintained, for the most part, in her adaptations. In longer bhajans, which have more extensive poetry, a strophic form, to which Alice also adhered, guides the musical structures. In her japa adaptations (the devotional genre in which singers chant the name of a single deity unaccompanied), her forms consisted only of an A section. Although these basic aspects of bhajans remained intact in Alice’s adaptations, most of her other musical parameters reflected the aesthetics of African American music. The vocal melodies were predominantly pentatonic, set over functional chord progressions and chromatic walking bass lines. More important, the vocal idiom, group dynamics, and expressive behavior of the congregation were typical of African American ecstatic services.
Alice’s bhajan adaptations do not mark the first use of Indian devotional songs in an American spiritual community. The earliest use of Indian devotional hymns in the United States can be traced to the English adaptations that the guru Paramahansa Yogananda introduced in the 1930s in his organization, the Self-realization Fellowship. Yogananda’s hymns, however, did not follow the ecstatic tradition. They were set to Protestant melodies and sung in a staid European American fashion, similar to what one might find at a white Protestant church. A. C. Baktivedanta Prabhubada, the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness in America, or ISKCON, is largely responsible for having introduced the more passionate elements of Hindu bhakti practice to the United States. The devotional chanting and singing of the ISKCON community—the repetitive Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare mantra—has been part of the American landscape since 1965. However, because of the eccentric and zealous manner in which ISKCON members chant in public, their particular form of musical devotion has not had wide appeal for the majority of Americans who are drawn to Hindu devotional singing.
What has become enormously popular instead, particularly over the last decade with the rise of hatha yoga, are Westernized folk-rock adaptations of Hindu devotional melodies.8 Today, yoga studios and fitness centers play recordings of American bhajan singers during class and sell the music in their bookstores and boutiques. Since the 1990s, the careers of a number of American artists with Sanskrit spiritual names have blossomed: Krishna Das, Ram Das, Jai Utal, and Ma Chetan Jyoti. Today, such musicians give concerts at yoga centers, where guests are charged twenty dollars to enter. Yoga periodicals regularly advertise and review the musicians’ recordings, and one can find bins of such music in CD stores. Like Alice Coltrane, many of these artists traveled to India during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
While the texts and musical forms that Alice used in her bhajan adaptations link her to what has become a relatively familiar devotional practice in the United States, her adaptations are quite distinct from those of American bhajan singers currently performing (I should mention that in America, the genre is largely known as kirtan, a commonly used synonym for bhajan).9 For the most part, the American bhajan artists currently recording are itinerant singer-songwriters who play for largely white audiences. They can be seen to follow in the footsteps of American devotional singers and reform song leaders of the 1960s and 1970s who used American folk-rock idioms to spread their religious messages. By contrast, Alice’s bhajans evolved within a specific spiritual and musical community as daily ritual music, and her arrangements served the unique expressive needs of Sai Anantam Ashram members. Her compositions were far more communally driven than those of the typical American kirtan song leaders, and hers were dominated by a host of African American musical elements. Additionally, Alice was not typically featured as a vocalist or lead musician on her recordings. Instead, she played a subtle, yet extremely powerful behind-the-scenes-role as an accompanist and arranger.
Although Alice began composing and recording bhajans as early as the mid-1970s, American followers of yoga and Hinduism have not, by and large, discovered the music. This was largely due to Alice’s reluctance to perform her sacred music outside Sai Anantam Ashram. But other factors also play a part. They include the noncommercial nature of her Avatar label, which recorded most of her bhajans (the majority of these works are currently available only on cassette); the ecstatic African American musical elements of her devotional music, which may have scared away insular white audiences; racist attitudes about black cultural expression in general; and the fact that her early bhajan settings for Warner Brother were unavailable for so many years. Her adaptations, then, predated the current bhajan craze by at least thirty years, and even though they provide some of the most interesting stylistic fusions and deeply rapturous versions of the American bhajan genre available, they are little known.
While Alice’s bhajans appear to be a rather straightforward musical fusion of African American and South Asian devotional genres, as ritual they are much more complex. They should not be confused with forms of religious syncretism in which preexisting beliefs are grafted onto or camouflaged by hegemonic modes of religious expression, as in the case of Brazilian Candomblé or Cuban Santeria. Rather, what we encounter in Alice’s bhajans is a fusion of culturally specific musical aesthetics with an emergent, sui generis, and subcultural belief system.
Bhajans at Sai Anantam Ashram “act out the insights and understandings,” to use Albanese’s words, of Alice’s universalist spiritual philosophy. On an expressive level, Christian music has come to pervade the Indian ritual. However, the Christian ideology or creed associated with gospel-music worship is no longer in play. At Sai Anantam Ashram, Jesus is not seen as the only savior but as one of many avatars, along with Rama, Krishna, Gandhi, and Sathya Sai Baba, who have descended to earth to enlighten mankind. Surya Botafasina, who is Radha Reyes-Botafasina’s son and a fine young pianist raised at the ashram, explained:
Really, I find the struggle for me is being able to explain what exactly the experience of growing up on the ashram is to other people. And so I found that through inquiries and direction, you say, “I was raised in a spiritual community.” The Vedic texts and the Bhagavad-Gita are studied and heard from on a frequent basis. The devotional songs we sing, bhajans, are mostly in Sanskrit; however, we celebrate Christmas, we love Jesus, we love anything that has to do with God, period. And it’s just a really great experience and a great privilege to be able to be a part of the most high. (interview with author, 2002)
Botafasina and other ashram members are clearly aware of the musical hybridity of these chants; they nonetheless view them as “ancient,” universal, and transcendent. Botafasina explained: “You can break it down and say there are various elements—that sounds like a gospel riff, or that sounds like a jazz change, or that sounds like a really funky bass line, or that sounds like a really Indian thing. But in the end, it’s just music from the real source, number one, God” (ibid.).
For ashram members, bhajan practice achieves a set of spiritual ends that are consistent with Alice’s theology: bhajan practice helps the chanter establish a personal relationship with God, calms and focuses the mind as a form of mantra meditation, and offers the chanter an experience of totality or universal consciousness. Alice stated on the ashram’s website: “Chanting is a universal devotional engagement, one that allows the chanter to soar to higher realms of spiritual consciousness. Chanting is a healing force for good in our world, and also in the astral worlds. Chanting can bring a person closer to God because that person is calling on the Lord” (http://www.saiquest.com, accessed August 2003). She also wrote: “Bhajan chanting extols the magnificence and the holiness of God. It celebrates the divine glories of the Lord. Chanting consists of worshipping God through song and music . . . Chanting removes agitations or vrittis from the mind, and brings peace. It edifies one, uplifts the spirit, purifies the atmosphere, and elevates the consciousness” (1999, 4).
Botafasina wrote about the experience of chanting:
It is a very interesting phenomenon to hear each singer and the personal special connection that he or she has with God through the music. Many a day have I been driven to tears when participating in the bhajans. The passion that one’s soul has for its source overrides all other thoughts or feelings which could even be close to being deemed as secular or materialistic. During these refrains, the Names are being exalted in most heavenly ways. The timeless spirit of the ancient beings can be felt. Many significant, memorable spiritual experiences are often recalled at these times . . . Whether you are at the workplace toiling in a job which tests your patience, at home performing your own personal puja, singing during selfless service to mankind, or keeping the Names of the Lord on your mind as you proceed throughout your day, bhajans enhance the atmosphere. Bhajans can be felt long after the chord has been played. The mind may forget, but the heart always wants to hear more of its heavenly home. (Botafasina 2001)
His mother described her experience of chanting in this fashion:
What’s important—what’s unique—is what’s going on with the consciousness of the person chanting bhajans in the mandir [temple]. What kind of visions you are having? Everything was being answered that you wanted to have answered. It’s all there in this chanting. The ecstasy, the understanding, all at once. It’s an incredible experience. You get chills all over. We would sing until we couldn’t sing anymore. We would chant so much that we couldn’t talk anymore. We could only say, “Om Namah, Sivaya.” And that was the whole purpose—for the bhajans to ultimately become mantra. It’s beyond all the musical elements. (Reyes-Botafasina interview with author, 2007)
Through daily communal repetition, bhajans have become a tradition in their own right. Ashram members do not experience bhajans as if they were performing the compositions of Alice Coltrane. For instance, Botafasina was absorbing a specific musical vocabulary and an approach to making music that many would associate with the gospel and jazz traditions. However, he does not have this personal connection to these traditions. For him, these practices are associated with the bhajans he has grown up with and the spiritual practices of the ashram. Through repetition and their relationship to a sacred space and a devotional community, bhajans have become tradition for him and are felt to be timeless and eternal. Consider his following comment: “I love Herbie Hancock, especially the tune ‘Maiden Voyage,’ but I didn’t know the true meaning of a sus chord [suspended chord] until I heard it in a bhajan. Okay, in bhajans you know you will stay in that one key [laughs], just rest there, and well, twenty minutes will have gone by—we’re still singing” (interview with author, 2002).
For Botafasina, the act of singing bhajans also serves to “bring the community together.” In this communal context, each member testifies to his or her experience through song. The act of singing, then, functions in both an individual and collective sense to validate and encourage the faith of the congregation. Botafasina likened the experience to a family reunion:
The ashram always feels like a family gathering on Sunday afternoons. Various sopranos and rich altos can be heard singing Jai!!!! Hari!!!! Krishna!!!! Rama!!!!! Sathya Sai!!!!! Sathya Sai Ghana Shyama!!!! All of the names reach the trees, mountains, land, stream, and animals in the near proximity. The males with their booming baritones, and textured tenor voices all bellowing Bham Bham Bolo!!!!! Jai Shri Ram!!!! Siva Shankara!!!!!! Oh pity me, words never could accurately describe the joy I am trying to convey on this paper. Even if I were able to play a CD on a state-of-the-art sound system, the feeling could only be replicated not duplicated. It is truly an experience, which is unique to the bhajans of that land. Swaminiji has stated “the bhajans in this mandir are sung like no other place in the Universe.” (Botafasina 2001)
It is now almost two years since Alice’s “ascension” and her students continue their involvement in this ritualized bhajan practice. Their sustained involvement points not only to her success in structuring communal spiritual life at the ashram, but also to her powerful and influential role as guru in their lives. What I have found extraordinary in speaking with Surya Botafasina and his mother about bhajans at the ashram is the way that Alice succeeded in providing them with an experience of music making that drew directly from the experiences of her own life. She reproduced the interrelationship of music, family, community, love of God, and the aesthetics of ecstatic black music characteristic of her formative years in Detroit. She also maintained an approach to musical worship that reflects John Coltrane’s theory of music’s universal, transcendent nature, and she incorporated elements of Hindu practice learned in the company of her gurus and during her travels to India.
Ultimately, Alice succeeded in creating a unique devotional practice based on the wide-ranging and rich experiences of her life. And her bhajans act as ritual still. Functioning as such, they “act out the insights and understandings” that are expressed in the ashram’s spiritual philosophy, they “serve to bring the community together,” and they structure the daily lives of members (Albanese 1999, 10). Bhajans are intertwined with the belief that as a form of bhakti practice, they lead to God-realization. They are also central to the sense of community, with singing bringing the ashram together twice a day and collectively confirming each individual’s spiritual path.
With these bhajans, Alice Coltrane completed a sacred circle and returned to the congregational aesthetics of her youth. In many respects, however, she never really left them. Even when recording projects that were ostensibly secular or commercial in nature, she found a way to make them personal vehicles for worship and transcendence. Additionally, the musical environments she participated in always communally validated individual experience. This was true of her bebop engagements, her avant-garde jazz projects with her husband, and her own compositions. Her music was always, to use her words, “spiritual music.” Central to the gospel services of her childhood, her impulse to testify developed into a highly refined and eclectic philosophy of musical transcendence in the company of figures such as John Coltrane and her Indian spiritual teachers.
As a professional musician, Alice inspired those with whom she played with her sensitivity, virtuosity, and wide-ranging abilities as a multi-instrumentalist. As a composer, she never tired of exploring new sounds, traditions, and technologies. As the musical and spiritual anchor of Sai Anantam Ashram, she brought happiness, well-being, and strength to her disciples and to everyone she met. As a woman, she led an adventurous and fortunate life in which family, community, professional success, and spiritual practice were integrated.
How many people realize their potential to this extent? How many are able to watch their creative imagination unfold so vividly? How many musicians hear their compositions in the hands of master players, and in the hearts and voices of their students as devotional ritual? How many people invent traditions that outlive them? Alice is a rare example. Her boundary-crossing aesthetics and her inspiring spiritual autobiography—documented in sound, text, and ritual—tells a free story, testifying to her faith and extraordinary personal history. Perhaps most of all, it reveals an understanding of herself that transcends earthly constructions.