1/31/2024 0 Comments Alice coltrane jalbum coverJazz was primarily a man’s game back then in many ways, it still can be. That Alice Coltrane accomplished this while nurturing a profound spiritual sensibility that led her to dedicate herself to Vedic worship and practices, and eventually found an ashram in California, makes her story all the more impressive – especially when one factors in the fact that she began her own career in 1967 as a 30-year old African American woman. That musical alchemy remains a category unto itself, a distinct fusing of African American idioms with Indian and Vedic song forms distinct from other cross-cultural experiments employing similar elements. Her recorded legacy – approximately a dozen albums – defines a creative arc unlike any other musician. Her compositional style – which generated songs and blues and modal workouts with exotoc, mystical titles like ‘Journey in Satchidananda’, ‘Blue Nile’, and ‘Lovely Sky Boat’ – is all her own. Her later approach to chordal instruments – piano, organ, and harp – had few precedents, and even fewer followers. Alice Coltrane may have grown up in the post-bop, jazz world of the late 1950s, but by the end of the 1960s, when she recorded the first recordings bearing her name, she had already begun to create her own sonic signature. In fact, relative to her more famous husband, it can be argued that her music was more original, more ground-breaking. More than a dozen years since her passing, Alice Coltrane continues to serve as the embodiment of what it means to be truly, musically unique – distinct from John Coltrane, and the entire jazz world as well. ![]() ![]() I habitually compartmentalize, until an artist so singular and unrooted reminds me to reboot my thinking. And Trane begat so many generations that followed. I catch myself placing musical heroes along lines of influence and succession, a Levitical approach – so-and-so begat so-and-so. Duke Ellington excoriates the practice in his memoir from a number of angles. To catalogue and create systems may merely be a human response to help process the multitude of music that’s out there. Forgive me father, for I have categorized.
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