Alice​ Coltrane

“…In July of 1967, just four years after he met Alice at Birdland, John Coltrane died of liver cancer. He had been complaining of pain for months, but held off seeing a doctor and they diagnosed it too late. Six weeks before her 30th birthday, Alice was a widower with four children, bereft of her soulmate, family breadwinner and chief outlet for her own musical career. Meanwhile, the counterculture was seizing the popular imagination on a number of fronts, be it the Summer of Love, the heyday of the Black Power Movement, or the vogue of alternative religions and forms of consciousness. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were just over the horizon. Alice Coltrane was breaking down…

Unable to sleep or eat properly, her weight fell from 118 to 95 pounds. She had hallucinations in which trees spoke, various beings existed on astral planes, and the sounds of “a planetary ether” could spin through her brain and knock her unconscious. Her family was concerned for her health, and more than once she was sent to the hospital due to self-inflicted wounds, including a third-degree burn so awful that her blackened flesh fell off her hand…

Alice fell into the nadir of her existence, she experienced tapas, a vital period of trial, tribulation and transition, designed to cleanse and enhance her spirit. The relentless and yet serene path she followed in the many decades after her prolonged ordeal validates this outlandish interpretation of events.

The music under her own name from this period seems intended to further the musical and spiritual direction of her late husband… The songs are mostly hers, modal tunes with somber moods. But there is strength and sustenance too. Her playing is more prominent, and often she is performing on the harp John bought her shortly before he died. As with the piano, she is playing the entire instrument, set free on glissando arpeggios that Kahn describes as “very loose, almost like water flowing back and forth, very spiritual and meditative.”

The tapas of austerity helped prepare Alice for a spiritual ally, Swami Satchidanada, an Indian guru introduced to her by another transplanted New York musician from Detroit, Vishnu Wood. Although he was somewhat of a celebrity guru — he came to the United States as a guest of the visual artist Peter Max, and even opened the Woodstock Festival — Satchidanada taught the Hindu philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, which promoted the concept of self-realization, the notion that their soul is not different than god…

Alice explained, “It just means you go to your fullest and highest potential and not be limited by some tenets of some doctrine that says we come here, here’s the minister, and we pay our tithes and go back to our home or our job or business or whatever and do everything you want.” Franya Berkman makes two incisive observations about Alice’s embrace of Advaita Vedanta. “[A]s an extraordinarily self-disciplined, independent, and inner-directed artist with a strong predilection for religious expression, Alice was uniquely suited to pursue the yogic and devotional lifestyle that the swami advocated… In its inclusiveness and emphasis on personal potential, Vedanta is similar to the spiritual and creative philosophy that John Coltrane developed.”

After she returned home from India, Alice unfurled what is arguably the masterpiece of her commercial recording career with Universal Consciousness, recorded less than six months after Journey in Satchidananda. Voracious in her desire to communicate and receive love and wisdom — and unearth it within herself — Alice added Turiya to her name, the Sanskrit word for “pure consciousness.” Following a divine vision, she also plays the Wurlitzer organ for the first time on record, an instrument that would dominate her religious music in the future. Her extensive liner notes conjoin myths and texts from various religions and read like a gothic melodrama. She composed string arrangements for four violinists and got the great avant garde jazz iconoclast Ornette Coleman to transcribe them. At least two of her original compositions, “Hare Krishna” and “Sita Rama,” are based on traditional chants, another component of her later, privately released work.

Universal Consciousness anticipates the “world music” movement by more than a decade. It is a bountiful blend of a symbolically omnificent organ that absorbs the traditions of the Black church and Indian chanting rituals…

But the crowning glory of Lord of Lords is her reclamation of Dvorak’s “Largo,” from the composer’s New World Symphony. That it was taken by the composer from Negro spirituals he or his assistants heard was made plain when one of his former students transformed it back to a spiritual, entitled “Going Home,” that further evolved into a popular hymn and part of the jazz repertoire… On Lord of Lords, Alice leads off “Going Home” with harp but switches to organ and executes a driving gospel-blues solo on the instrument accompanied by Haden on bass and [drummer] Ben Riley on drums. The bones of Dvorak’s arrangement are there. The depth, tone and tenor of the piece is restored to its original owners. On her benediction with Impulse, Alice Turiya Coltrane once again didn’t leave anything behind.

In 1972, Alice relocated to the Bay Area of California, where she founded the Vedantic Center in a San Francisco storefront. Miki, the oldest of her four children, was twelve at the time. “When we were packing up the house, we were worried about missing our friends, but she said that when she was in meditation [it was revealed to her that] we were supposed to move there,” Miki says. Four years later, when Alice had another revelation, instructing her to abandon the secular life and become a spiritual teacher in the Hindu tradition, the children were first informed by a note on the refrigerator, announcing that her name was now Swamini Turiyasangitananda…

“We were required to go to services until we were 18, and to learn all the songs, of course, but she allowed us to be children, giggling and poking each other,” Miki said. “When the students lived next door to us, there were courses given on Wednesdays and Sundays, but the students would also cook and we had get-togethers in the rec room, with chances to play violin or read poetry. Most of them were religious-based, but there was still a family feeling to it. The services were much more amazing at 30 years old than at 15, when you were hurrying to get into the car to go to the beach. But it bloomed into being a uniquely devotional experience.”

Purusha Hickson: “When I heard her music, in my heart I could tell she knew something. I had to meet her,” Hickson said. “People who knew her as Mother Turiya called her up and she said to bring me to see her. She was playing at the 60th birthday of Swami Satchidanada and afterward I got an opportunity to meet her. She was so down-to-earth, with no pretensions, but at the same time there was this spark of light about her… she was still playing concerts, but with us she emphasized chanting. She talked about growing closer to god through the power of sound, with the recitation of mantras. And when she played it was otherworldly. Her organ was intense stuff that reminded me of John Coltrane’s saxophone.”

“She used to tell us to chant from the heart and not worry about mispronouncing names; that if you are calling to god, god will know who you are calling to,” Hickson says. “Even when we were chanting in Hindu, she said you don’t have to sound Indian; just give it that universal feeling. My mother had a totally different emphasis of attack on the devotional songs,” said Miki Coltrane, “Then I went to India and heard all these people chanting and they locked it in in a different place, “It was only then that I realized what she had done — I hadn’t noticed. It was done with respect, but [her chants] had a groove.”

“When Swamini first started teaching, she never sang. But when we moved to Woodland Hills, there were not as many people around, and she wanted to help us until we gathered more voices,” Hickson related. “But when she came out with Turiya Sings, it was kind of amazing.”

“I am a non-musician but she just let us sing from our heart, because what she wanted from the music was the way we were speaking to god, or about god, and the way it touched you,” said another student, Jayalakshmi Moss. “Because of her profound ear, she knew where to place you so were with people who knew music and would be there in front of your face to help you.”

One of the more remarkable things about the Alice Coltrane legacy is how this intensely spiritual music has become something of an underground phenomena. Some of the buzz has been spurred by Flying Lotus, who attended services at the ashram and waxes eloquent about the beauty and power of what Alice was laying down. The availability of this music on Youtube and other sites also exposes more listeners to these unique bhajans… Alice was reinterpreting ancient Vedic texts.

Mark “Frosty” McNeill, co-founder of internet radio station Dublab out of Los Angeles: “There is this really unique blend of someone fully devoted but also extremely talented, making records on her own schedule and her own terms. The actual musical blend continues this idea of universality that both her and John Coltrane had. That means there are not as many boundaries when it comes to the spiritual and the musical. The harp is not a common instrument in jazz. The unique string arrangements with the Eastern tonalities and the electric instrumentation are not typically fused — it is unlike anything I have ever heard before. Yeah it sounds like gospel, but then she is singing a Sanskrit chant on top of a soulful Wurlitzer, with synthesizer swells and cosmic sweeps that evoke a big bang creation of the universe.

“I was born an African American Christian,” said Jayalakshmi Moss, “and I can absolutely hear the church in her music. But it is also absolutely unlike anything I have ever heard. Many of us are well-traveled and we have chanted with many fine masters of spirituality. But we all know that her blend is absolutely unique.” “People used to ask her all the time, ‘Should I call you Alice or Swamini?’ And she would always say, ‘You can call me either one, whatever you like,’” said Hickson. “She taught us that people start out with an external person, a guru or shaman, but that person will only take you so far. In the end, people have to make the journey inward, ourselves. Our only real guru is our divine inner spirit.”

Or, as Miki Coltrane puts it, “Most people don’t have the kind of patience, or the kind of belief, that my mother had. She didn’t toot her own horn. She let the universe handle it.”
~ Britt Robson

Photos ~ Alice and John Coltrane, 1965 ~ Universal Consciousness, Turiya Sings