In wonderland
Alice Coltrane World Spirituality Classics Volume 1 LUAKA BOP. CD/DL/LP
WHEN 26-year-old Alice Lucille McLeod met John Coltrane at Birdland in New York City in 1963, she was already an accomplished jazz pianist, who’d studied with Bud Powell in Paris, played with Yusef Lateef and Kenny Burrell, and fronted her own jazz trio. The pair bonded in bebop and church, but Coltrane also introduced McLeod to his own religious philosophy, assembled from The Bible, the Q’ran, and the Bhagavad Gita, and expressed on the sleevenotes of 1964’s A Love Supreme as “all paths lead to God”. This multi-disciplinary curiosity proved invaluable when, in July 1967, John Coltrane died from liver cancer, leaving the 30-year-old Alice to raise four children alone and continue his musical and spiritual message. Dismissed by contemporary jazz critics, the music she made for Impulse! and Warner Bros in the 10 years after her husband’s death – flowing, arpeggiated works for piano and harp, meditative Wurlitzer organ drones and atonal orchestrations of jazz and Indian instruments – has become a huge influence on contemporary underground scenes, via champions like SunnO)))’s Stephen O’Malley, and Alice’s great-nephew Steven Ellison, AKA Flying Lotus. Another sub-cult also grew around the hard-to-find music Coltrane recorded as Swami Turiyasangitananda (Sanskrit for “the highest song of God”) between 1982 and 1995. Mainly intended as objects of devotional study for residents at Coltrane’s ashram in the Santa Monica mountains, the music on the four limitedrun cassettes – 1982’s Turiya Sings, 1987’s Divine Songs, 1990’s Infinite Chants, and 1995’s Glorious Chants – was based around the traditional Vedic songs of India and Nepal. Alice transformed the simple Sanskrit chants into multi-layered epics of weird psychic energy heard on this collection, subtitled The Ecstatic Music Of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda. This is partly thanks to her schooling in gospel and rhythm and blues. Soulful backbeats are driven handclaps and tambourines while chants mesh with a call-and-response wildness, Coltrane deploying such ringers as mezzo-soprano Radha Botofasina, John Panduranga Henderson (who once sang in Ray Charles’s band), and Tamil-born singer Sairam Iyer, while taking the solos with her own deep, sensual voice, discovered following a meditation in 1982 when the Lord told her to sing, as “neither male or female” but with “the voice of the soul”. When combined with string swells and the air-raiddrone harmonics of the OB-8 synthesizer, the effect is hypnotic and restorative. Remastered from her own mastertapes by the original producer and celebrated jazz engineer Baker Bigsby, these incredible tracks sound better than ever. One tiny complaint: the original tapes were intended as complete listening experiences, immersive acts of prayer with the transportive qualities of a religious or psychedelic experience. For the time being, this is just a taste of the full bewitching trip.
First-ever compilation of Alice Coltrane’s devotional music, only previously available on limitedrun cassettes. By Andrew Male.