As it was in the beginning, let your music forevermore be an expression of My Divinity in a sound incarnation of Myself as nadabrahma. For, eternally, divine music shall always be the sound of peace, the sound of love, the sound of life, and the sound of bliss.
To reach Sai Anantam Ashram, home of Alice Coltrane’s Vedantic Center, you must travel on Triunfo Canyon Road, which goes through a lovely mountain pass in Agoura Hills, California, and winds leisurely between horse farms and exclusive homes in the Santa Monica Mountains. When you reach the ashram’s entrance—a humble gate that is easily overlooked—music of Alice Coltrane and her devotees emanates from speakers set beside the dirt driveway. Entering the grounds, you find yourself in a small, protected valley, originally the sacred land of the Chumash Native Americans.
The ashram’s stunning mandir, or temple, rises white as a cloud against the hills. In winter and spring, a brook in front of the temple splashes along, joining a tireless chorus of insects and birds. Several modest homes are set back into the hillside. Ashram inhabitants and visitors—mostly African American men, women, and children—are dressed in South-Asian attire: the women wear saris, the men kurtas. Speaking quietly among each other and greeting Sunday guests, they make their way with visitors to the steps of the mandir, remove their shoes, and enter the sanctum, men turning to the left and women to the right. The interior of the temple is simple and unadorned: there is a guest book and basket of hymnals by the entrance, a stretch of blue carpet and yellow cushions on the floor, and a small organ at the far end. Behind the organ stand two life-size posters of Sathya Sai Baba. On the right, out of sight, is a raised altar bearing an oil lamp, flowers, fruit, and images of Hindu deities. Once inside, the members of the small congregation silently sit down on the floor.
If you had the good fortune of attending Sunday services when the ashram’s guru, Alice Coltrane—known in this context as Swamini Turiyasangitananda—was still alive, you would have seen her arrive dressed in orange robes, and flanked by attendants. She would make offerings at the altar, take her seat behind the Hammond B3 organ, and begin to play. First would be a bhajan to Ganesha, the elephant deity to whom Hindus traditionally pray before starting any religious and worldly endeavor. Alice would depress the pedals, and the bass vibrations would pass through the walls and floorboards. Playing syncopated chords with her left hand and a soaring, pentatonic melody with her right, she would signal the song leader in the men’s section to start the men singing. The women would respond, and blues-inflected devotional music would fill the room. The hymn would have several tempo increases, propelled by Alice’s dramatic modulations and the driving bass lines she would play with her feet. The congregation would create harmonies and counterpoint, and cry and shout in response to members’ musical and emotional outpourings. They would clap ecstatically, and join in with tambourines and other hand-held percussion instruments. Their guru would smile and nod in rhythm, acknowledging the moment.
The bhajans that followed would be livelier, praising other deities of the Hindu pantheon: Rama, Krishna, Siva. Each hymn would have an extended and improvisational refrain section—similar to the Watts hymns one might hear sung by a Southern black congregation—in which individuals “inject the spirit of their being,” as one member described it to me (Botafasina 2001). After the collective improvisation of the refrain, the hymn melody would return, and the bhajan conclude. Immediately, another would begin—with no announcements or conversations in between—and the organ would start again. To end the musical portion of the service, which lasted roughly an hour, the final hymn in praise of Sathya Sai Baba, “O Bhagavan,” would be sung, following by closing prayers.
What kind of music is this? Bhajans at Sai Anantam Ashram are clearly sui generis. While it is common today to hear white Americans singing Indian devotional hymns at yoga centers and at concerts—American artists such as Krishna Das and Jai Utal have major record deals these days, and tickets to hear them sing cost twenty dollars or more—Alice Coltrane’s bhajans are noncommercial, free to the public, and performed in a predominantly African American, gospel style. Furthermore, for nearly three decades they were played by Alice herself, who infused her arrangements with the diverse genres she explored over the course of her life as a church accompanist, bebop pianist, composer, and avant-garde improviser.
What’s more, the ritual that one finds at Alice’s ashram reflects her own iconoclastic musical and spiritual journey. In the mandir, she reproduced the aesthetics of black sacred music characteristic of her formative years in Detroit. She also maintained an approach to musical worship that reflects the theory of her late husband, John Coltrane, that music has a universal, transcendent nature—a theory she synthesized with elements of Hindu practice learned from her gurus and in her travels to India. And remarkably, although this musical worship at Sai Anantam Ashram clearly recapitulates her own evolution, it has become a ritual separate from any notion of her as an artist. Ashram members do not experience bhajans as if they are performing the compositions of Alice Coltrane. They believe, as their beloved swamini did, that “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 December 2007).
How do we make sense of these songs? They are at once African American and South Asian. Their histories can be traced to religious revivals spanning India’s medieval period, as well to cultural formations that coalesced in the New World among the descendants of African slaves. They form a genre attributable to an individual composer, yet they are also a ritual that belongs to the whole community. Appreciating and understanding Alice Coltrane’s sacred music at the ashram—and, for that matter, the other music that she recorded and performed over the course of her prolific career—requires that we move beyond reified categories of musical style and religious practice and honor the open-ended quality of cultural production and the ways we pass on the life of cultures. Most importantly, it draws our attention to the formidable role of Alice Coltrane—a woman often relegated to the footnotes of works about her late husband—as both musician and guru.
It may seem odd to begin a book about Alice Coltrane, a jazz icon, by describing her role at Sai Anantam Ashram. The reader probably expects this first part of the book to detail her early musical experiences in a chronological manner, consistent with most jazz biographies. But this is not a jazz biography; rather, it is an exploration of the music of a woman and devotional musician whose contributions transcend such genre-specific constraints. Understanding Alice Coltrane’s superior artistry and her religious music expands the definition of jazz and challenges the process of canonization. It also provides an opportunity to discuss experimental music created by black composers and the phenomena of musical and spiritual hybridity in the late twentieth century on a broader scale. For lack of a single, concise term, this study of Alice Coltrane is best described as an ethnomusicological life history that prioritizes the role of spirituality in her musical aesthetics and in the cultural spaces she inhabited.
Few people in the music business are aware of Alice Coltrane’s role as guru or of her musical ministry. She is known primarily as a jazz pianist and harpist, or simply as the widow of the legendary saxophonist and composer John Coltrane. Among jazz aficionados, her importance tends to rest on the controversial role she assumed when she replaced McCoy Tyner as the pianist in her husband’s last rhythm section. Accordingly, her important works are seldom considered to exceed the small body of recordings she made with John Coltrane during the last year of his life. Few people are aware, then, of the Hindu-influenced devotional music she composed and arranged with her devotees, despite the current popularity of music for yoga and meditation. Fewer still know that by the mid-1970s, her works included more than twenty albums of original compositions and virtuoso improvisations, which she recorded for the Impulse and Warner Brothers labels with some of the giants of modal and free jazz—Pharoah Sanders, Leroy Jenkins, Rashied Ali, Roy Haynes, Cecil McBee, Reggie Workman, and Ron Carter—as her sidemen. Even more obscure are her formative, pre-Coltrane years in Detroit when, as Alice Mcleod, bebop virtuoso, she performed in the company of the Motor City’s extraordinary postwar pianists: Barry Harris, Terry Pollard, Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan, and Sir Roland Hanna, to name only a few.
Alice’s musicianship, like that of many of John Coltrane’s sidemen, has been overshadowed by the contributions of the man many consider to be the last great innovator of modern jazz.1 One also wonders whether her avant-garde experiments would have received any attention at all had she lacked the Coltrane name, particularly given that her continually expanding musical conception, which coalesced in the hybrid ritual music of the ashram, fell outside conventional definitions of jazz or any other identifiable single genre. After her teen years as a church pianist during the late 1940s and early 1950s, she played and composed in a variety of musical styles: gospel, bebop, rhythm and blues, Western classical, free jazz, and Indian devotional. Her albums feature original compositions for standard jazz instrumentation—bass, drums, piano—as well as works for harp, Wurlitzer organ, strings, and choir. She adapted the works of Stravinsky, Dvorak, and her late husband. She also recorded herself singing and playing her own version of ancient Indian chants and hymns. Yet for marketing reasons, or by association with her husband, Alice Coltrane is classified as a jazz musician, although she herself did not call her music jazz—she believed she played “spiritual music” (interview with author, 2001).
For better or worse, Alice experienced the fate of many exceptionally talented women married to men recognized for their brilliance: while her own contributions received attention, she never really got a fair shake. During the late 1960s, many of John Coltrane’s fans viewed her as an accomplice to the so-called anti-jazz experiments of his final years. Her notoriety was further exacerbated by the tremendous power she assumed when she took control of Jowcol Music, her husband’s publishing company, and decided the fate of his unreleased materials after his death. In particular, her choice to overdub her own playing on his signature recording of “My Favorite Things” angered many in the jazz establishment.
While Alice’s eccentricities and her role as the wife of a legendary musician surely contributed to the marginal, if not contested, status of her own music, other discursive forces also played a significant part. As subjects of study, black female musicians have been quintessential others, either overlooked because of—or overdetermined by—the categories of gender, race, and class. To a great extent, social constructions of difference burden black male musicians as well: their lives are routinely viewed in light of the pervasive challenges of racial discrimination they encounter, and whether they represent their group as “race men.” However, compared to black male musicians, black female musicians rarely transcend difference and obtain the status of artist. Even in the noblest attempts to explore the music and lives of black female musicians, scholars have tended to focus on personal hardships and identity politics. Few have challenged “the current romanticization of the black subject and the refusal of complexity in the representation of the lives of black women,” and even fewer have focused adequately on their music (Carby 1992, 178).
When women instrumentalists have garnered attention for their talents in the male-dominated jazz world, their success has usually hinged on the supposedly male qualities of their playing: they are praised for their strong rhythm, big sound, and aggressive improvisations. Conversely, when a woman plays sensitively or with quiet dynamics, her musicianship tends to be dismissed for lacking sufficient masculine characteristics. This gendered mediation is evident everywhere in the assessment of Alice’s solo career. Critics who expected to find the aggressive intensity that characterized her work with John Coltrane’s ensemble were frequently disappointed. For instance, in his Down Beat review of her 1970 release, Ptah the El Daoud, Ed Cole wrote: “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). In his review of A Monastic Trio (1968), John Litweiler commented: “the harp side of this LP presents waves of sound, a wispy impressionist feeling without urgent substance” (1969, 22). Ekkehard Jost asserted that “Alice Coltrane is not a ‘hard’ pianist who drives the music with rhythmic accentuations” (1974, 98).
Listeners also tend to equate musical characteristics such as loud dynamics and jarring timbral effects with the counterculture and political resistance, especially during the 1960s, when such explorations were still novel. As a result, Alice’s more intimate albums from the late 1960s did not have the palpable political innuendo that one could feel in the music of her avant-garde colleagues. She may indeed have lost some of her avant-garde audience by 1970, at least those louder-is-better “free-jazz” fans who were unaware of her aggressive approach in albums such as Universal Consciousness (1971) and Transfiguration (1978). Alice’s seemingly apolitical choices have also placed her at odds with the models of resistance and radicalism that black women of historical importance typically embody.2 Although during the height of the civil rights movement she was playing dissonant, freely improvised jazz—a style that tends to be associated with cultural nationalism and black militancy—she opted not to engage in a direct or public manner with “the struggle.” She was not a song leader or educator such as Bernice Johnson Reagon,3 who used black spirituals to effect social change. Nor was she politically outspoken like Abbey Lincoln or Nina Simone. Gentle in demeanor, a devoted wife and mother of four, Alice’s persona was, in many respects, consistent with the patriarchal helpmate image that the revolution espoused, an image that has since been scrutinized by black feminist theorists.4
While Alice conformed in her domesticity to this conservative aspect of black liberation ideology in the 1960s, her universalist views ultimately challenged many of the Afrocentric tenets of black liberation popular at the time. In her writing and interviews, she consistently expressed the importance of transcending category and limitation. Beginning in the late 1960s, she expressed belief in a transcendent oneness, a “universal consciousness” that subsumes all creativity and religious faith. Despite the ostensible forms of ethnicity one finds in her devotional music and religious practices, cultural specificity and racial identity did not figure in her religious or creative philosophy. Her universalist views, therefore, were—and still are—at variance with those of musicians and scholars who make blackness or an African worldview central to African American cultural production.
A religious sensibility steadily guided Alice Coltrane’s artistry—a feeling that music “had to come from the composer’s heart and spirit and soul, not just his mind” (quoted in Lerner 1982, 23). This attitude, combined with her uncanny musical skills and an experimental temperament, led her along a path that was not only musically but spiritually daring. Compared to the conservative Christianity of her childhood in Detroit, Alice Coltrane was a religious maverick. During the late 1960s, she and her husband began to explore meditation and a universalist approach to religion. Their spiritual pursuits as a couple extended to the bandstand, where they played a personalized version of spiritual music in the form of dissonant, free-meter improvisation. After her husband’s death in 1967, Alice experienced what she called a “reawakening.” From that point on, her music either attempted to express her experience of the divine or was written and performed as an offering to God.
In 1969, she befriended the Indian guru Swami Satchidananda and discovered the philosophical and spiritual teachings of the Vedas. She was still raising her four children when she recorded the majority of her albums, which, like John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme (1965), included extensive liner notes that testified to her personal transformation. The albums feature devotional compositions and improvisations that increasingly drew on both free-jazz idioms and the bhajans that she discovered on her pilgrimages to India, as well as semi-orchestrated works and harp pieces reflecting her deepening mysticism.
In 1976, she had a revelation in which she was instructed to become a Hindu swami. She had founded the Vedantic Center in 1972, and in 1983, after she had joined the monastic order, she established Shanti Anantam Ashram, later renamed Sai Anantam Ashram. She served as spiritual director for the ashram and regularly played for services and delivered sermons until her passing on January 12, 2007. After a long hiatus from public performance, interrupted only periodically by benefit concerts in honor of her late husband, she returned to touring in the last years of her life, playing with a jazz quartet featuring her son, the tenor saxophone player Ravi Coltrane, and her former bassists, Reggie Workman and Charlie Haden.
During her monastic period, she wrote four little-known spiritual treatises—Monument Eternal (1977), Endless Wisdom I (1981), Divine Revelations (1995), and Endless Wisdom II (1999)—all of which were published by her own Avatar Book Institute. Monument Eternal documents her spiritual rebirth from 1968 to 1970. As she described the work in its preface, it is “a book based upon the soul’s realizations in Absolute Consciousness and its spiritual relationships with the Supreme One.” The two volumes of Endless Wisdom make up a comprehensive treatise that explores the nature of the divine and the proper relationship between humanity and God. Here Alice claims no authorship; in the preface to the first volume, she explains that she was “divinely sanctioned” to “inscribe” the words of the Lord based on “sacred communications” (9). Divine Revelations is written in the form of a diary, with entries that document revelations between 1968 and 1995. Each entry recounts conversations that she had with avatars in the form of Rama and Krishna, or with the living guru Satya Sai Baba, whose followers consider him to be an embodiment of God.
As a self-proclaimed mystic and composer of devotional music, Alice might be compared to numerous Western art-music, jazz, and gospel musicians who have written sacred works. Several figures immediately come to mind: the medieval saint Hildegard of Bingen, the twentieth-century French composer Olivier Messiaen, Duke Ellington and Mary Lou Williams with their jazz masses, and Thomas Dorsey, who was “called” to compose his famous gospel song “Precious Lord.” However, Alice’s commitment to universal spirituality as a guiding principle and her use of wide-ranging religious and musical sources distinguish her from these other composers. In her liner notes and spiritual treatises, she employed mythic imagery from a host of religious traditions, including Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, and the religion of ancient Egypt. In a parallel fashion, her music brought together diverse musical styles and cultural traditions in an attempt to portray her experience of spiritual transformation and exaltation.
One might praise her for anticipating what is now the rather common postmodern trend of mixing and juxtaposing genres from vastly different historical periods and cultural traditions. However, her devotional compositions lack the oppositional irony typically associated with postmodern aesthetics. Rather, I suggest that it was her extraordinary religious experiences and her universal spiritual philosophy—infused by the Vedic notion that the paths are many, yet the destination one—that inspired her to draw from so many diverse sources in her musical composition and her written testimony.
As a devotional musician, Alice appropriated and synthesized numerous genres according to divine inspiration, using them as vehicles for meditation, ecstasy, praise, and worship. Her spiritual fervor granted her enormous artistic license, which has been a source of contention among critics and colleagues. This, coupled with her mystical claims, has made her rather suspect in the eyes of the neoconservative jazz establishment, and not without warrant.5 Many devotional musicians emerged during the 1960s and 1970s. Some emulated John Coltrane, while others were swept up in the popularity of Eastern mysticism; still others profited from the market potential of the cosmic, exotic, and occult. Alice Coltrane, however, belongs in a category by herself. Her religious transfiguration during the era resulted in music of great emotional and artistic depth, as well as a lasting commitment to spiritual duties that ultimately took precedence over musical composition and performance altogether.
In assessing Alice’s “spiritual music,” one should also keep in mind that its hybrid nature is not uncommon in religious musical genres. Although they have not been studied comparatively, ecstatic musical traditions tend to appropriate an unusually wide array of source materials. For instance, the melodies of Hasidic nigunim (wordless devotional tunes) are frequently popular songs deemed sacred by a rabbi; some are even military marches.6 Similarly, bhajan melodies in India have been lifted from famous film scores and then matched with religious texts; their widespread familiarity has made them ideal for communal song. This mode of secular cross-fertilization is also common in black Protestant music. Scholars have documented a process of constant exchange: though the texts and lyrics might change, the musical components of genres such as spirituals, gospel music, and the blues often sound indistinguishable.
The breadth of Alice Coltrane’s music also results from the diversity of musical styles available to contemporary musicians and composers. In Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West, Mark Slobin calls attention to the intricacy of musical exchange that occurs in late capitalist societies. For Slobin, “micromusics” result from a complex “web of affiliations” that individuals and groups encounter at the intersections of three types of cultural experience: the “supercultural,” “subcultural,” and “intercultural.” “Super-cultural” refers to coercive aspects of culture produced by large-scale social and political structures such as government and industry.7 “Subcultural” refers not only to groups united by common factors such as ethnicity, class, and gender but also to more subtle, frequently flexible categories determined by individual choice and belonging. “Intercultural” refers to the complex exchange that occurs across the boundaries of a nation-state through “the commodified music system” or “the diasporic linkages that subcultures set up across national boundaries.” Given this view of culture, Slobin argues, “we need to see music as coming from many places and moving along many levels of today’s society, just as we have learned to think of groups and nations as volatile, mutable social substances rather than as fixed units for instant analysis. Yet at any moment, we can see music at work in rather specific ways, creating temporary force fields of desire, belonging, and, at times, transcendence” (1993, xiv).
Even while her nonsectarian religious philosophy led her down extremely unconventional roads for an African American woman from her generation and fostered her avant-garde and hybrid musical aesthetics, Alice Coltrane always remained deeply connected to the African American spiritual and musical locus of her family’s origins. If one looks beyond her surface eclecticism, it quickly becomes apparent that Alice’s creative impulse was firmly rooted in time-honored forms of African American religious expression. Specifically, her collective works can be seen as a form of religious testimonial, or “testifyin’,” a ritual act situated in the religious traditions of her youth.8 As James Cone writes,
Testifying is an integral part of black religious tradition. It is the occasion when the believer stands before the community of faith in order to give account of the hope that is in him or her. Although testimony is unquestionably personal and thus primarily an individual story, it is also a story accessible to those in the community of faith. Indeed the purpose of testimony is not only to strengthen an individual’s faith but also to build a faith community. (Cone 1982, 14)
As a poetic and evocative frame for this study, I propose that Alice Coltrane’s various forms of testifying—in both text and music—constitute a multidimensional, African American spiritual autobiography. I draw this broad parallel for a number of reasons, first and foremost because the confessional and autobiographical nature of her oeuvre invites this manner of interpretation. With a heartfelt message to her listeners in the liner notes of A Monastic Trio (1968), the first album she made after her husband’s death, she began a lifelong and increasingly extensive narrative about her relationship with God and her own spiritual evolution: “unable to answer all of the wonderful cards and telegrams sent me during the summer of 1967, I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you, sincerely, on behalf of my family and myself, for your kindness.” By 1971, she was prefacing each tune with an edifying message, a teaching, or an evocative description of the process of spiritual transformation. In her liner notes, she discussed how particular pieces were motivated by conversations she had during her meditations with the Lord and his emissaries, and how various compositions were written as offerings to God.
Valuable historical, sociopolitical, and literary connections can also be drawn between her own confessional statements and those found in African American spiritual autobiographies, past and present. Historically, spiritual autobiographies, particularly Protestant versions, have been written to “help initiate others into the experience” and to “teach, edify, persuade and exhort” (Brereton 1991, 3). In the hands of African American writers, the spiritual autobiography has also had a radical purpose. According to William L. Andrews, the African American spiritual autobiography has provided “a way of declaring oneself free, of redefining freedom and then assigning it to oneself in defiance of one’s bonds to the past or to the social, political, and sometimes even moral exigencies of the present” (1986a, xi). It is characterized by “the reconstructing of one’s past in a meaningful and instructive form, the appropriating of empowering myths and models of the self from any available resource, and the redefining of one’s place in the scheme of things by redefining the language used to locate one in that scheme” (7). Andrews also asserts that the history of black autobiography has been one of “increasingly free story telling.” That is, “the journey of black autobiography toward free telling first had to pass through intervening consciousness of amanuenses and editors, then had to challenge generic conventions and discursive properties of writing itself, before finally undertaking the greatest task of all, the appropriation of language for purposes of signification outside that which was privileged by the dominant culture” (290). Alice’s adventuresome and genre-defying qualities as a writer and musician function within this economy of “free telling” that Andrews describes.9
In many respects, Alice’s example as a religious seeker and iconoclast is also similar to that of black female preachers from earlier eras—women such as Rebecca Jackson, who founded a small Shaker community of black women in the late nineteenth century; and the black matriarchs Sojourner Truth, Amanda Berry Smith, and Jerena Lee, who, as Alice Walker writes, were directed by “an inner-spirit” and “abandoned the early black churches to find a religious audience of their own” (Walker 1982, 79). And Alice’s texts, like those of these black evangelical women writers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were inspired and sanctioned by what she believed were mystical experiences. Robert Ellwood—whose definition seems to best approach Alice’s encounters and those of her evangelical sisters—describes a mystical experience as one that “in a religious context is immediately interpreted by the experiencer as direct, unmediated encounter with ultimate divine reality. This experience engenders a deep sense of unity and suggests that during the experience the experiencer was living on a level of being other than the ordinary” (Ellwood 1999, 39). Like Alice, Jarena Lee, Rebecca Jackson, and Julia Foote, among others, felt compelled by God to document their spiritual lives. Acting as amanuenses in their respective works—The Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee (1849), Gifts of Power (1871), A Brand Plucked from the Fire: An Autobiographical Sketch (1886)—they dictated their direct communications with the Lord and wrote about receiving divine gifts and powers.
To be even more precise, Alice’s work embodies a unique form of mystically inspired text that Chanta M. Haywood has called “autometography,” which is an autobiographical narrative that “reveals a subject’s understanding of themselves that transcends earthly constructions of their lives and identities” (Haywood 2003, 116). Haywood uses this term to describe the writings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of black female preachers who were similarly called to serve. She draws attention to the way in which the women’s texts and personal examples not only offered hope of salvation, but also set forth a “god-inspired social critique” that challenged the social expectations of the day (17).10 Describing autometography and the narrators’ subject position, Haywood writes: “every aspect of their being was interpreted from a metaphysical vantage point that allowed them to see themselves as prophesying daughters, a perception that would in many ways require them to challenge nineteenth century notions of who they should be” (111). She states: “On the level of sociopolitical strategy, this religious conviction became a cultural passport, allowing the women access to physical and ideological spaces otherwise denied them . . . They presented a powerful challenge to dominant 19th century ideas about woman’s proper space” (20).
While twentieth-century black women writers have not been required to stand behind God’s authority in order to claim agency or their literary voices, the identification of a sacred self or soul and the unmediated relationship with God have nonetheless remained salient themes in the writings of contemporary African American women novelists, in both their autobiographies and their fiction. Scholars have explored how this trope has been recapitulated in the works of such literary figures as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, among others.11 Alice Coltrane, like these “womanist” writers12 who emerged with her during the 1970s, appropriated this holy mantle of self-realization in order to address contemporary concerns.13
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, what were the social expectations for an African American jazz musician from Detroit, a Baptist woman from a conservative middle-class family, a mother of four? Surely Alice was not expected to become an avant-garde improviser, let alone a swamini. And whatever these expectations may have been, they must have been complicated by her position as a black public figure during a period of heightened racial tension and African American cultural nationalism—not to mention by the responsibility of being the widow of John Coltrane. Alice’s personal and mystical relationship with the divine appears to have provided the direction and strength that she needed to transcend social expectations, skepticism, and criticism, and chart her own creative path. That relationship also ultimately paved the way for new possibilities of African American spiritual and musical identity. In a journal entry dated July 3, 1975, for instance, she wrote:
On this day, Lord Sri Rama said, “Several persons in this country (USA) are inquiring amongst themselves as to ‘how does an American, black, Christian lady become an East Indian Swamini’?”
In this regard, Baba said, “it matters not whether public inquiry and opinion are favorable or unfavorable; one’s country and nationality are of no underlying criterion. If one has dedicated his life in devotion to God, he can be selected to become a candidate for initiation into the renounced order of sanyas.” (A. Coltrane 1995, 87)
Situating Alice boldly alongside these female preachers and womanist writers allows for a feminist reading of her life, in which the “interior spiritual resources” of black women in America are given the same attention as the stories of male-centered genius that typically dominate jazz biographies (Walker 1982, 79).
Alice’s oeuvre also shares an inclusive aesthetic with the work of her evangelical predecessors; one can thus extend the hybridity arguments already made into the realm of African American spiritual narratives. As William Andrews and others argue, the African American spiritual autobiography has never had a standard form, poetics, or rhetorical style. During different periods in its evolution, black women writers drew from “whatever sources were available,” calling upon a variety of “empowering myths” from multiple religious and folk traditions (Andrews 1986, 290). The very language they employed was multitextual: it borrowed from Protestant conversion narratives, the King James Bible, the sentimental novel, political petitions, and the vernacular. Writers also wrote poems and parables to describe their experiences, especially in their accounts of dreams and visions. While Alice’s incorporation of terms and concepts from Hinduism are a radical departure from the writings of previous evangelical women, the breadth of religious references and the eclectic nature of her texts still unite her work with these earlier spiritual narratives.
On the one hand, the hybridity historically found in African American spiritual autobiographies results from the individual cultural experiences of the narrator, such as the educational opportunities she had, her exposure to other texts, prior religious background, and regional style. On the other hand, it also stems from the complex, often embattled subject position of the black woman narrator. Literary critics have theorized black female subjectivity along these lines and have posited that it implicitly produces texts of a hybrid nature. Mae Gwendolyn Henderson argues that “black women must speak in a plurality of voices as well as in a multiplicity of discourses. Through the multiple voices that enunciate her complex subjectivity, she not only speaks familiarly in the discourse of the other(s) but as Other she is in contestorial dialogue with the hegemonic dominant and subdominant or ambiguously (non)hegemonic discourses . . . these writers enter simultaneously into familial or testimonial and public, or competitive discourses—discourses that both affirm and challenge the values and expectations of the reader” (Henderson 1994, 264). Henderson borrows the term “speaking in tongues” to describe this phenomenon. She further distinguishes between glossolalia, which can be seen as a metaphor for the “private language” of the church community, and the Bakhtinian notion of heteroglossia, which pertains to “the multiple languages of public discourse” (118).
These hybridity arguments are relevant to Alice’s works in a variety of ways. First, she clearly drew from “whatever sources were available.” In her prose, she moved between disparate styles: poetry, first-person diary confessions, and the mystical direct writing of God’s word. She borrowed liberally from the King James Bible, from translations of the Bhagavad Gita, and from her own colloquial speech. In a parallel fashion, her music synthesized gospel progressions, Western art music, and dissonant, free-meter improvisations. Alice produced a hybrid artistry that spoke in tongues. She uttered the insider, ritual tongue of glossolalia, drawing on the sacred and secular vernaculars of Detroit’s African American subculture. She also spoke in the multiple public discourses of art music and jazz modernism. Her work achieved a complex synthesis that does, in Henderson’s words, ultimately “both affirm and challenge the values and expectations of the reader” (118).
That said, her oeuvre moves completely beyond these binaries: her self-proclaimed mysticism disrupts these relational modes. In fact, I believe that Alice was trying to transcend the “complex subjectivity” that Henderson speaks of, and to do so required moving beyond the realm of the material world and its limits and conditions. This is why I find the word “autometography” relevant here. Alice’s collective works and her personal example as a swami are best described as a spiritual narrative that reveals an understanding of herself that, as Haywood put it, “transcends earthly constructions.”
Exploring Alice’s spiritual music and her religious pursuits presents a substantial scholarly challenge. In the secular academy, spirituality has taken a back seat to the so-called important stories of political history. This is particularly evident in jazz studies. Even though many famous jazz musicians have acknowledged the role of religion in their creative processes, jazz scholars tend to focus on issues of black political oppression and have not yet productively engaged with religion. Both the irrationality associated with religion and the ecstatic and supposedly earthy qualities of black church music also conflict with the modernist intellectual agenda of “jazz uplift.”14 Furthermore, within the black community, the role of the church in African American culture has been contested territory and has inspired heated polemics; the church has been viewed both as a wellspring of authentic black culture and political empowerment and as a corrupt, backward institution representing the hegemonic forces of white society.
Nevertheless, this study is predicated on an exploration of the crucial role of spirituality in avant-garde jazz improvisation. Scholars who write about black music, particularly avant-garde jazz during the mid-to late 1960s, must contend, at least in some manner, with the social reality of black revolution. Two dominant and opposed methodologies have emerged in 1960s jazz scholarship. Unfortunately, neither has produced a vocabulary sufficient to describe the relationship among the creative process, spirituality, and politics. One method of scholarship separates the aesthetic from the political: its works customarily begin with a brief nod to the civil rights movement, followed by a hasty retreat into the musician’s work.15 The advantage of this method is that the black jazz musician, who has been over-determined as a racial and political figure through decades of criticism, acquires the status of individual and genius. The disadvantage, of course, is the disavowal of revolutionary cultural shifts that shaped artistic production. The second scholarly method encodes the music with radical meaning. Writers in this camp tend to relate musical characteristics such as free rhythm, collective improvisation, and timbral intensity to cultural nationalism and black militancy.16
However, situating the explorations of 1960s jazz within a purely political framework is insufficient, particularly with respect to an artist like Alice Coltrane. Her music and commentary from the mid-1960s onward stressed the personal and the spiritual, not the political. I do not mean to suggest that the religious and political facets of culture ought to stand at oppositional poles. Rather, they should be viewed, in the words of Robert Ellwood, “as bands in a single spectrum” (Ellwood 1994, 9). Alice Coltrane’s spiritual pursuits should not be posed against the political activism of the era and therefore overlooked. Her spiritual explorations should be seen as a creative, energizing, and productive alternative to more explicit forms of political protest—an alternative that may, indeed, have deeply radical implications.17
To shed light on the political nature of Alice’s eclectic and Eastern-influenced spiritual music, I have contextualized her work within 1960s religious culture and the search for “a new spirituality” among members of the Black Arts movement (Neal 1989, 77). The cultural historian Melani McAlister has written persuasively on the political dimensions of African-Americans’ interest in non-Western religions during the 1960s. She sees such spiritual explorations among black Americans as a way of forming “an alternative sacred geography” that provides “alternatives to official policy, framing transnational affiliations and claims to racial or religious authority that challenged the cultural logic of American power.” In her view, these spiritual pursuits are part of a larger project that encompasses “a re-visioning of history and geography in order to construct a moral and spiritual basis for contemporary affiliations and identities” (McAlister 1999, 638).
It should be clear by now that this is an interdisciplinary and culture-based musical study. To some extent, the cultural emphasis of this project has been a necessity due to Alice Coltrane’s reclusive nature. The personal data that musical biographers gather for extensive narratives have not been available. Alice cherished her privacy. Thus, poring over letters, scrapbooks, diaries, and musical sketches, an activity enjoyed by most biographers, has not been possible. I did have the good fortune of meeting Alice Coltrane on several occasions and interviewing her. I also visited Sai Anantam Ashram and participated in services. To gather additional information, I spoke with her devotees, friends, colleagues, and producers and have examined statements she made to journalists and John Coltrane scholars, as well as an extensive, unedited interview she made for a radio documentary in the early 1980s about her musical career. I have also listened closely to her recorded music and to her public performances in recent years.
In chapter 1, I situate Alice Coltrane’s formative musical experiences within the tight-knit musical networks of the African American community in Detroit. I place particular emphasis on her early training in the Baptist church and other black denominations, the historical presence of important African American musical families, and the unique jazz fraternity that fostered a thriving local bebop subculture. With this elucidating context in place, I conclude with an analysis of her little-known bebop recordings with the vibraphonist Terry Gibbs.
In chapter 2, I explore her musical development during her time as John Coltrane’s musical, spiritual, and marital partner. I describe the process by which she came to absorb his unique aesthetic and spiritual philosophy. In addition to analyzing her playing in John Coltrane’s late quintet, I discuss the changing nature of American religion during the 1960s, giving special emphasis to the new forms of spirituality that emerged among black Americans in the context of Black Power.
In chapter 3, I examine Alice’s spiritual transformation after her husband’s death, and its effects on her musical aesthetics during her solo career. Her oeuvre—eleven albums on the Impulse! and Warner Brothers labels—is viewed as the legacy of her early years in Detroit and the influence of her husband, and as a completely unique contribution to avant-garde jazz and world-music fusions of the late 1960s and 1970s. I ground her innovative musical approaches and the increasingly hybrid nature of her compositions in her experiences traveling with her guru, Swami Satchidananda, throughout India; her theory of musical transcendence; her commitment to a universal concept of spirituality; and her belief in the Vedantic notion of self-realization. Finally, in chapter 4, I explore her bhajans—the devotional music that currently serves as ritual music at Sai Anantam Ashram—in the context of a community that has followed her teachings for nearly thirty years.
My ethnomusicological and interdisciplinary approach as a scholar widens the boundaries and concerns that typify jazz biographies. Musicians participate in interpenetrating musical subcultures: those of family, church, ethnic group, school, neighborhood, city, region, musicians’ collective, nightlife, and so forth. Mapping the life and music of Alice Coltrane in an ethnographic manner allows us to observe the musical continuities and discontinuities between these communities; it affords a means of elucidating the multiple cultural spaces she occupied. For instance, the story of Alice Coltrane’s early years reveals postwar Detroit to have been a vibrant and extremely influential center in the development and continuation of bebop well into the 1950s. Additionally, her training in the church and her immersion in a family-centered system of musical mentorship provide both insight into the processes of musical transmission in black urban communities and an alternative to the stories of individual male genius that dominate jazz criticism.
In a similar fashion, Alice Coltrane’s rapid development from a bebop pianist to an avant-garde player during the mid-1960s is best seen within a frame of interpenetrating spheres of influence. Alice’s musical metamorphosis cannot be separated from her marriage to John Coltrane, from his mentorship, and from their spiritual explorations. Likewise, these explorations cannot be dissociated from the larger transformation of black cultural politics during the civil rights era. Moreover, viewing the couple’s search for universal spirituality and their commitment to avant-garde jazz as a vehicle of transcendence directs attention away from the political rebellion of the period and toward its equally important counterpart, spiritual revolution. Exploring Alice’s musical development, then, requires us to consider how countercultural spiritual explorations among black musicians influenced the aesthetics of avant-garde musical expression. Furthermore, while the study of ritual practices has figured prominently in both ethnomusicological studies of non-Western music and in musicological works devoted to Western art music from past centuries, it has been noticeably absent in studies of post-1960s jazz and contemporary experimental music.
Finally, Alice Coltrane’s transformation from musician to guru offers an insight into her evolving compositional aesthetics and, in turn, reveals the exceptional fluidity of ritual practices in late modern Western society. Her impulse and ability to create a new musical and spiritual tradition speaks not only to her own vision and means, but also to a historical moment ripe for invention, reinvention, and new modes of self-realization. As Eric Hobsbawm has argued, “there is probably no time and place with which historians are not concerned which has not seen the invention of tradition . . . However, we should expect it to occur more frequently when a rapid transformation of society weakens or destroys the social patterns for which ‘old’ traditions had been designated, producing new ones to which they were not applicable, or when such old traditions and their institutional carriers and promulgators no longer prove sufficiently adaptable and flexible” (Hobsbawm 1983, 5).
Alice Coltrane provides a valuable example of African American women’s consistent participation and presence in jazz and American music. Her life and music challenge time-honored aesthetic binaries: those of composer/improviser, the art/jazz world, black/white, East/West, and secular/sacred. But as much as this life history may offer new insights into jazz history; African American musical and social history; notions of tradition, ritual, and identity; and feminism, it also restores and celebrates the contributions of an original and influential American composer, an improviser, and, above all, a devotional musician.
Ultimately, Alice’s mystical orientation as an artist produced extraordinarily original music. Yet it was also her compulsion to testify, a ritual rooted in the traditions of her childhood, that produced such a unique body of work. As James Cone writes, testifying, though at the center of communal experience, is also “unquestionably . . . and primarily an individual story” (Cone 1982, 1). As we will see, the musical testimonials that appear throughout her prolific recording career, in her life as a performer, and in her role as a musical swami reveal a rich earthly life full of opportunities for artistic and spiritual growth.