In “Cosmic Music: The Life, Art, and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane,” out March 3 through Da Capo Books, veteran music journalist Andy Beta tells the full life story of this highly influential jazz artist for the first time. Drawing on dozens of new interviews and extensive archival research, Beta shows how Coltrane developed her unique sound and spiritual practice, both before and after the 1967 death of her husband John. By the end of the 1960s, she was spending a lot of time at the Integral Yoga Institute on New York’s Upper West Side. Its leader, Swami Satchidananda, “an Indian yoga master with voluminous locks and beard who was becoming known for his wisdom and spiritual teachings,” most famously delivered the opening benediction at Woodstock, and he played an increasingly major role in Alice’s life. In this exclusive excerpt, we learn about the creation of two of Coltrane’s most lasting albums, “Ptah, the El Daoud” (1970) and “Journey in Satchidananda” (1971), the latter of which was named one of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
In the first wintry weeks of 1970, an Indian musician in his fifties named Pandit Pran Nath landed in New York City. Born in Lahore in 1918 (then still part of British India before becoming Pakistan), Pran Nath was an avid music enthusiast who studied the Kirana Gharana, a Hindustani vocal tradition. Pran Nath was especially taken with its austere, slow-moving singing style. If you lived in India, you could have heard Pran Nath’s singing, as it was broadcast regularly on All India Radio. At some point in the 1960s, a few tapes drifted over to listeners in the United States and producer Alan Douglas released some of this music on a 1968 album titled Earth Groove.
An Indian therapist, teacher, and musician named Shyam Bhatnagar began to play these tapes for New York friends like Fluxus artists La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela as well as Terry Riley, and soon Pran Nath was brought over to teach this idiosyncratic vocal raga style in the United States. Native New Yorker Tulsi Reynolds recalled going to author/editor Barbara Stacy’s apartment down on 14th Street on Monday nights, where sometimes Bhatnagar also taught meditation classes. She began studying with Pandit Pran Nath and recalled some crossover between the crowds for Satchidananda and Pran Nath, seeing Young, Zazeela, pianist Pat Rebbilot, and others at the Universalist Church.
“The way that you learn to sing is you lock eyes with your teacher and you play the tamboura,” Reynolds later recalled:
At first, Panditji would tune it, because he didn’t trust me to tune it. And he was very rough. So he would, like, throw me the tamboura, and I would take the tamboura. He would sing and he would look at me, and I would look at him, and we would sing. And you have to do what he’s doing. But in that school, every note has three degrees of sharp and three degrees of flat and the tambura also has three degrees of sharp and three degrees of flat, so the tuning and the singing is so difficult. So I remember we were doing one phrase and I could never get it right. Finally, I got so frustrated, and I said, “Panditji, I don’t know what you want. I don’t know what you want me to do.” So he said, “In Western music, somebody sings, somebody listens. In this music, nobody sings, nobody listens.”
Reynolds began to apply her downtown studies of raga uptown at the Integral Yoga Institute. “I remember getting ready for some celebration we were having and rehearsing there,” she said. “It was Alice, me, Raul Julia, Felix from the Rascals. It developed very quickly.”
Outside of jamming at IYI, Alice started work on a new album with help from a new producer at Impulse. Ed Michel got his start producing jazz and blues albums at World Pacific and Riverside Records before moving over to Impulse in 1969. Up until that time, he had only conducted business over the phone with Alice, but on Jan. 26, Michel rented a station wagon in Manhattan, picked up saxophonists Pharoah Sanders and Joe Henderson and bassist Ron Carter, before driving everyone out to the Coltrane home in Dix Hills, out on Long Island. “That was the oddest part of the day, waiting in the station wagon . . . for everybody to get their stuff together, get down to the car, and drive out there,” he said. After two hushed trio albums, it would mark the first time Alice had recorded with horns since her time with John.
Upon arriving at 247 Candlewood Path, Ed Michel finally met Alice Coltrane face-to-face. “It was a normal home filled with instruments,” he recalled:
From the garage, you walked downstairs to the basement to get into the studio. It was a professionally built home studio. There was an isolated control room with capability of talk between the recording side and the musicians-in-studio side. It was set up for four-track recording. There were two Ampex half-inch four-track machines and at least one Ampex two-track, and a nice selection of professional microphones. I’m sorry to say that I don’t have a sense of my impressions or her presence — the usual hustle and bustle of setting up a recording in a new studio took precedence.
While the Coltrane kids were in school that Monday, Alice convened Sanders, Henderson, Carter, and her neighbor Ben Riley for the date, while another neighbor, Wally Barneke, helped to engineer the recording. Michel recalled the way it played out that day:
It wasn’t all that unusual to do a quintet album in a single-day session, especially one without involved arrangements. I don’t remember how much music was written out; Certainly it was not a lot. I can’t recall a lot of rehearsal — perhaps running down the head of a tune and discussion of the form. What I principally remember is the ongoing conversation between Pharoah and Joe, which was about extended-range saxophone technique, since both of them were masters. I recall thinking it went down like a “blowing date” and I was surprised that it was less “out” than I had anticipated. I actually believed that there were a couple of cuts that would get airplay on “free form” and college radio.
Four pieces were laid down that winter’s day, more focused yet more ambitious than what Alice Coltrane had previously attempted. The epic title track “Ptah, the El Daoud” remains unlike anything in her discography, a sprawling 14-minute march that goes through a vast topography of emotional peaks and valleys. It’s also one of the rare times Alice Coltrane drew on her nascent study of Egyptology and books like The Teachings Of Ptahhotep, referencing Ptah, the ancient Egyptian god of creation, with the epithet in the title translating as “the beloved.” In the liner notes, she explained:
My meaning here was to express and bring out a feeling of purification. Sometimes on earth we don’t have to wait for death to go through a sort of purging, or purification. That march you hear is a march on to purgatory, rather than a series of changes a person might go through.
After all she had endured over the last year, her words cast the piece in a more autobiographical light, reflective of her own period of spiritual purification and something likened to death. (Or, if you’re on a march to purgatory, one can read that as a progression away from hell.) The two saxophonists here offer a thrilling study in contrasts, a frisson that Alice had already tapped into with her Cosmic Music concert. “Joe Henderson is more on the intellectual side, while Pharoah is more abstract, more transcendental,” she said.
“Between [Pharoah and Joe], they knew more about the mechanics of the saxophone than anybody I’d ever met,” Michel remembered. “It was astonishing. I was curious before the date about how they would play together and it was as though they’d been rehearsing for months. They had very different approaches to things but could blend beautifully and deal with it.”
Both tenor players had been on a tear by that point, operating near the peak of their powers. Sanders — fresh from the commercial success of his 1969 album Karma — was pushing further afield with Jewels of Thought and avant dates with Gary Bartz and Don Cherry. After leaving Blue Note, Henderson cut the early fusion Black Power statement Power to the People with Herbie Hancock, Carter, and Jack DeJohnette. (The day after cutting Ptah, he and Carter would head out west over to Van Gelder’s studios and cut Freddie Hubbard’s soul-fusion landmark Red Clay.) All of that profundity and earthly power comes to bear on this session. Alice’s daughter Michelle Coltrane remembered: “I got to be on the other side of the glass a few times. As the only daughter, the oldest, I was of service for her, mother’s helper. I just liked the sound. I never recovered from hearing that music in the studio. The sound was sooo good.”
“Blue Nile” highlighted the gains made thanks to Alice’s diligent practice on harp. Both Sanders and Henderson switch to alto flute, giving the subdued piece a decidedly Eastern feel. It also anticipates the ambient, unhurried breath of her next phase of composition with its emphasis on mood and vibe, “more a feeling than a melody.” That subliminal pulse beacons ahead to future generations. “Mantra” stands as the most through-composed and avant-garde of the pieces, Alice’s piano prominent in its support of the two dynamic saxes. “She was very clear about what she wanted and how she wanted it done,” Michel said. “She was very clear in letting everyone know what she expected. This was also true about mixing and editing.” For Michel, the hardest part about the session was properly recording the harp. “The harp has a wider tonal range than the piano, and those damn noisy pedals! She was very clear and specific about corrections in the mix and where she wanted edits.”
The most evocative, heart-quaking performance occurs on “Turiya & Ramakrishna.” Alice had come upon the Sanskrit word Turiya — used to describe the fourth state of consciousness (after waking, dreaming, and deep sleep) — in her readings and had used it for the title of an elegant harp piece on her 1969 album Huntington Ashram Monastery. Again, she evokes that word and the hushed, contemplative ballad finds her return to her piano trio roots. She explained that the name Ramakrishna also referenced a monastic order in India that was dedicated to spiritual cultivation and philanthropic work, two ideas that would come to light in the years ahead for her. Carter’s empathetic bass work supports her while retaining all the delicacy of her gossamer melodic line. Alice said it was built around three notes:
[It’s] more a feeling than a melody. You’ll notice near the end where I modulate from D Flat up to D and back to the D Flat before going out, there’s a suggestion of “Parker’s Mood,” the part to which the words went “Come with me . . . ” It’s like God asking us if we want to go home — that kind of feeling.
In early February, Alice loaded up the kids and the Lyon & Healy harp in the Chrysler station wagon and drove out to Van Gelder’s. There she met up with her late husband’s former bandmates Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner for the latter’s Extensions recording session. Approximating the absence left by John Coltrane, Gary Bartz and Wayne Shorter shine in the frontline, making for a formidable sextet. In a certain light, it might have been a glimpse at what the John Coltrane Quartet would have sounded like had Alice joined the group (though on harp instead of vibes as originally bandied about). Alice’s connection with Carter, so soon after the Ptah date, is immediate, her harp-like blossoms on the bough of his bass. Her harp solo some eight minutes in positively shimmers in iridescence. And as Tyner’s piano establishes the modal theme and the two horns burst forth, it’s a remarkable spiritual jazz session, recorded at the cusp of fusion taking over the sound of jazz. Unfortunately, it sat unreleased by Blue Note for over two years.
Later that month, Cal Massey staged a benefit concert for the Black Panthers to help fund their legal defense in court. As was Massey’s wont, he assembled a 15-person group to perform an ambitious eight-part suite, titled “The Black Liberation Movement Suite,” with Alice prominently featured on harp. As to how the finished suite sounded, we may never know. Of the eight movements performed, only three were ever recorded, two by Archie Shepp, one by John Coltrane dating back to 1961, but left unissued from the Africa/Brass sessions. One can only wonder what “Reminiscing About Dear John (for John Coltrane)” with his widow on harp might have sounded like that day in downtown Brooklyn. Later that summer, Alice would also participate in another Massey concert, this one held on a boat in New York Harbor.
In April, she headlined Saturday night at the Black Arts Festival at Stony Brook on Long Island. Michelle Coltrane remembered the drive out:
Before seatbelts, we’d pile into the station wagon and the harp would be in the car with us. We’d be going to Stony Brook for a spiritual retreat, and we’d be playing a tent or fort game under the harp. The car would stop and me and my brothers would slide everywhere. On the car radio, she would shush us and make a reference to something in a classical piece, or point out John Coltrane licks on a jazz tune.
A glimpse of this performance was captured on 16mm color film, with Sanders on sax, Rashied Ali on drums, and Vishnu Wood on bass and oud alongside bassist Reggie Workman and Alice on upright piano. A smile breaks across Alice’s face as a version of “Africa” kindles and takes flight. You can just glimpse the kids goofing in the wings, their Afros bobbing behind their mother at the piano bench. The dynamic performance ends with a standing ovation for her.
One week after that show, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on an anti-war demonstration at Kent State University. Four students were killed and nine others wounded or paralyzed from the bullets. Eleven days after that, another confrontation between highway patrolmen and student protesters happened at Jackson State College in Mississippi, with police firing over four hundred times into a gathered crowd, killing two students and wounding a dozen more. The search for peace continued amid such needless violence.
On a sweltering afternoon day in spring, Alice sat at 500 West End Avenue and received mantra initiation from Satchidananda. Another initiate recalled:
We waited there for about three hours to get our mantra initiation. I think Gurudev (Swami Satchidananda) was late on purpose — to really test our sincerity — because about half the people left before he arrived. [Alice] and I were seated opposite each other and even though she was a big celebrity, she sat cross-legged on the floor with the rest of us. She never asked for special treatment and delicately wiped the sweat from above her lips.
Alice became more involved with events happening at the institute. She played on fellow devotee Laura Nyro’s album Christmas and the Beads of Sweat, adding sweeping harp glissades as Nyro’s piano runs build toward a sexual climax within the song. It’s perhaps the lone instance of hearing Alice in a carnal setting. Otherwise, her musical intention was always oriented toward something higher.
Coltrane and Satchidananda, January 1971.
Courtesy of Integral Yoga Institute
A Newsday feature on Alice that spring found her hard at work mixing and engineering a recording made at Dix Hills. The reporter noted the plush blue carpet and the burning incense in the room, as well as a high stack of boxed tapes behind the studio door of unreleased John Coltrane sessions. “I just had to find out where the fuses were instead of calling my neighbor or an electrician every time the lights went out,” she said:
But other than that, I have tried to carry on my life as if John were still here. I learned to edit and work the control board by watching the engineers that recorded me. Now I have about 17 privately recorded albums my husband did, in addition to having two albums of my own to do so I have to put the children to bed and come down late at night to practice and work.
Sometime in May, a young reporter named Angela Dews went out to visit the home and spend the day with Alice as the kids ran around. “She was very open with me,” Dews recalled. “I was at her house, she was barefoot, the kids were running around. They played, they’d run up and down the stairs, and she did, too. I felt a real, real connection with her.” Dews spent most of the day out on Long Island with her:
She’d walk around, she’d see something, she’d sit down and play, or she’d do something, you know. She was very much a person who made music all the time. It was very natural, moving from their instruments to her kids, to a conversation with an interviewer. They had a meditation space . . . off to the side of the music room. I do remember that the feeling of it was everywhere, there were these images that showed that they were meditating and they had a spiritual life . . . When she talked about John, she would look away, you know, she was still connected in some way.
About a week after their interview, Coltrane mailed Dews a typewritten letter, laying out her worldview: “My music and life are both based upon a simple, integral principle; i.e. spirituality and truth. I believe that spiritual growth is just as important as the physical and mental development of an individual.” In the last paragraph, she discussed her life with John:
Being married to John was an out of sight experience. It was really together. There was such a similarity between us in thought and aspirations. We almost always agreed upon the same things…I was very fortunate to be married to a genius. A woman may be the sustaining power in the home, but the man, I feel, is the energy and soul force behind the whole structure.
Later that month, Alice took her group down to Philadelphia to take part in a festival presented by the Philadelphia Jazz Society with the St. Joseph’s College Black Awareness Society on Friday celebrating John Coltrane, with Archie Shepp now performing with her group. Sometime that summer, Alice performed on the new PBS show called Soul! Hosted by Ellis Haizlip, a pioneering Black television producer, the episode also featured singers Kim Weston and Bobby Hebb. TV listings of the time blurbed: “Mrs. Coltrane chatted with host Ellis Haizlip and performed harp with her quintet for ‘Blue Nile’ and ‘Leo’ with Archie Shepp.” (Shepp’s memory failed when the show was mentioned. Worse still, the early years of Soul! were not deemed worth preserving or archiving and this performance is now considered lost.)
On an 88-degree Fourth of July day, Alice Coltrane performed at the Village Gate. Wood had performed with the group since earlier in the year and he brought his oud with him and switched between instruments during the concert. “Rashied Ali was on drums, Pharoah or Archie played horn sometimes, Jimmy Garrison made some gigs on bass,” he recalled. “Sometimes I would play the oud, but I was also playing an Indian instrument called the dilruba, tamboura, and all that. She had a pretty large ensemble when she played.” For that particular performance, former Ornette Coleman bassist Charlie Haden was in the group and they performed a long, unmetered improvisation titled “Isis and Osiris.” Alice’s audacious blending of oud (an instrument that wasn’t played in ancient Egypt), harp, bass, drums, and soprano sax created a fusion that transcended its willfully eclectic “world music” trappings to invoke these ancient Egyptian deities to sublime effect. When Ptah, the el Daoud was released that autumn, critics mostly remained indifferent or hostile to the music.
Sri Swami Satchidananda and his Integral Yoga Institute family were quickly outgrowing their housing at West End Avenue and went in search of a larger, more settled space. Hari Zupan, one of IYI’s administrators, found a six-story building on West 13th Street in Greenwich Village and quickly moved to negotiate a deal for the building. But as it came time to make a down payment to take the building off the market, Zupan learned that they were just short of funds. He called uptown to Satchidananda — then in conversation with Coltrane — who seemed unbothered by the predicament, offering no real solution and hanging up quickly. Time was running out and Zupan’s next call again yielded no decision from the guru. As recounted in his biography, Alice then asked unprompted:
“I have been coming here and benefiting so much from your teachings. Is there anything I could do to help the center? Is there anything you need?”
He simply said, “Whatever you feel moved to do, you can do.”
“Well, do you need anything urgently?”
“In my life there is no urgency.”
“Okay, fine, Swamiji. Thank you. I don’t want to take up any more of your time; I should go now.”
As Alice walked away from West End, she realized she had left her purse behind and doubled back, and again sensed that there was something the center needed:
You know, I’m really embarrassed about this. I came with the idea of giving some contribution. Then when you said that there was no urgency, I thought I would wait and give something later. But it seems that God wanted me to make a donation immediately. That must be why I forgot my purse and had to come back for it. I’m going to write a check right away.
Swamiji extended an invitation to her to accompany him when he returned to India that winter to attend the World Scientific Yoga Conference. Alice was now part of Satchidananda’s inner sanctum of devotees, contributing not just financially but musically as well. “[Sally] Satya Kirkland put on a program on the life of Buddha and I had a chamber orchestra at the time so I played the music,” Alice recalled. “Gurudev liked it very much and so my proximity to him developed from the programs and the music which was what I felt I could offer to Him.” Tulsi Reynolds was also part of this program, playing tamboura in this intimate ensemble at the center. “And I guess she was impressed with the way I was playing it,” Reynolds said:
I became a really good tamboura player, mostly because Panditji scared me into it. So Alice invited me to join her and we would just play together there. She played piano and I played tamboura and there were people playing flutes. It was really free-form. And then one day she said, “I’m going to be recording and I’d like you to play some tamboura.” So I said, sure, you know. And we started working on the album. We had very little rehearsal.
As Reynolds recalled, she came out to Dix Hills in the middle of the day. The kids weren’t around, but the rest of the group was. “The studio was sort of like a wing of the house and then you came in and there was a door and these steps and the studio was a whole wing by itself,” she said. “So we were in the studio and I remember it was daylight. And, like, there was not music to prepare.” The group included Pharoah Sanders, Rashied Ali, and Cecil McBee, who Reynolds had gigged with a few times at Café Au Go Go in the West Village:
Cecil and I had become very good friends, but Pharoah had no idea who I was. When Pharoah walked in and he saw a white lady playing tamboura, I thought he was going to faint. Alice just looked at him and said, “Pharoah.” And he calmed down. Cecil was laughing hysterically because he knew me. I didn’t say anything. I just picked up the tamboura. And of course, once we started and he saw that I could really play, then he was fine.
There may not have been much prepared in the way of written music, but Alice knew what she wanted and imparted that to the group. The music would be an expression of gratitude at her newfound relationship with Satchidananda and the hope that it kindled in her heart as well as an expression of her two and a half years of ascetic mortification and self-effacement, which — as she wrote in a Sept. 30 entry in Divine Revelations — finally drew to an end. The music would contain all the grief and suffering of that journey, as well as the hope and healing that now emerged on the other side of her trials.
She also began to envision what her trip to India might be like. It had long been a goal of John’s to one day visit the country, to experience its music and spiritualism firsthand. Now, through God’s divine grace, it was coming to pass. As McBee recalled of the session:
It was very, very spiritual. The lights were low and she had incense and there was not much conversation, dictation, or verbalization about what was to be. Her desire of your essence was all very, very tangible. The spiritual, emotional, physical statement of the environment, it was just there. You felt it and you just played it. It was very subtle but powerful. I can remember it to this day. It was all novel to me, but I knew that it was something very spiritual and very special. No doubt about it.
Pharoah had been Alice’s closest musical collaborator for close to five years, but even he felt a bit of apprehension when approaching this ineffable music. “You know, her playing was amazing. I loved what she was doing. But I always felt like what I was doing wasn’t good enough,” he said. “At one point, I had told her, ‘I don’t know if you like the way I’m playing or not. I don’t know whether this fits, or what.’ She said, ‘You’re doing O.K. Just keep on playing. Keep on blowing.’”
Traveling toward Rishikesh, India, December 1970.
Courtesy of Integral Yoga Institute
Foundational to the music recorded that day in Dix Hills was Reynolds’s unhurried thrum of the tamboura. Her teacher Pandit Pran Nath is crucial to understanding the rise of American minimalism in the 1970s, thanks to his famous students: La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Terry Riley, Jon Hassell, Rhys Chatham, Catherine Christer Hennix, and Charlemagne Palestine. Yet his lesser-known pupil’s presence at Alice’s home meant that Pran Nath also informed a shift in spiritual jazz as well. “What the tamboura does is it sets down a sonic field in which all the other instruments can float,” Reynolds said:
If the tamboura is tuned correctly, you hear all the other little intervals that are resounding within that. So you can play almost any note and it will work, if you touch it exactly right. It sets out a field that everything else floats in and the trick is to sustain it. That can never break, because you cannot miss a note. Any break in that sound field and the whole thing falls apart.
That moment of magic is evident from the first buzz of Tulsi’s tamboura on “Journey in Satchidananda,” which radiates outward from the speakers and seems to widen as it makes its way across an infinite ocean. McBee’s methodical ostinato is both rooted in Reynolds’s drone and spiring far above it. And when Alice’s harp comes in, it’s like the gates of Eden swinging wide, beckoning you into paradise. Sanders takes a rare turn on soprano saxophone, and in his solo he conveys both a deep gorge of grief and a yearning for transcendence. Alice soars to the uppermost register of her harp, punctuating her phrases with steep descents into the lower octaves and back. No matter how high each musician’s searching solo takes them, Tulsi’s tamboura offers a soft landing.
This new composition announced Alice Coltrane as an artist in her own right, actualizing that “universal sound” that her husband strove toward with his later music. And “Journey” truly exemplifies cosmic music, a vessel that transports you to the highest stratospheres of inner space. While it was not the first instance of Western jazz engaging with Eastern instrumentation, there was still little like it in jazz music up to that point in time. It’s an audacious fusion of tamboura with harp, two instruments whose histories on two separate continents reach back to 2500 BCE yet rarely if ever meet. As Alice explained:
The harp sound is flowing, oceanic, and ethereal. It has a celestial sound that people often associate with heaven. For me, the older instruments have more of a mystical sound, and tambouras, hand cymbals, and mridanga drums were made for worship. In fact, if played devotionally, all instruments could be used to honor the Lord.
Both remain rarities in modern jazz. But Journey is also a profound reimagining of what spiritual jazz could be. The peers and label mates of Alice — artists like Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler — constituted the masculine faces of the form. Yet the number of women who participated in this music was lamentably low. The negatives that critics saddled Alice’s music with — “delicate,” “lacking muscle,” “wispy,” “subdued,” “content,” “pretty,” “going nowhere” — all became strengths in this new environment she created. “Journey in Satchidananda” inverted all of that.
Lao Tzu once wrote: “Shape clay into a vessel/It is the space within that makes it useful.” So did Alice amplify “the space within” of this music. King Kong might scale the side of the Empire State Building, but could such power climb up a trellis of flowers or dance on a spiderweb?
What male critics bemoaned as “feminine” traits (using every coded word imaginable to not say it out loud), Alice elevated into a receptive, nurturing music. At the height of the Vietnam War’s daily violence and that entire cataclysmic era of the late 1960s and early 1970s, such gentleness and empathy was radical.
The Impulse sales team knew they had something very different on their hands, and a promotional sleeve was designed to look like a doctor’s pharmaceutical script pad. Instead of taking a red or blue pill to relax— Tonight take ALICE COLTRANE and JOURNEY TO SATCHIDANANDA. It’s smooth but contains recommended amounts of pure energy, it read, signed by a Dr. I.M. Peaceful.
It’s silly — especially for an artist who never medicated herself in such a manner — but even if they couldn’t quite pinpoint what “Journey in Satchidananda” was, they knew it was something unheard before, a hybrid of contrasts. It was avant-garde free jazz, but calm and centered. It drew on classical Indian music, but you would never mistake it for Ravi Shankar. There was fire flaring up from Sanders’s horn, but it was tempered and soothing. It sounded profound loss and longing — of a widow pining for her soulmate, of a soul seeking to be united with the Supreme Lord once more — yet imparted a distinct sensation of uplift and affirmation.
In the preceding copy, there also appears to be an error: instead of reading “Journey in Satchidananda,” it instead used the prepositional to. Which does make more sense, in that you travel to a destination. Michel’s session notes reveal that the tracks originally had slightly longer titles. “Shiva-Loka” was instead “Almighty Shiva-Loka” and the original title of “Journey in Satchidananda” was “Journey on the Ship of Satchidananda,” her guru like a great, benevolent vessel. But at some point in the album process, Alice realized that for all her imminent intercontinental travel, this particular journey was more intimate and immediate than that. She wasn’t going “to” a place, nor was she “on” something either. She shifted to the prepositional “in” to signify a more profound truth: Satchidananda was not an external destination to be journeyed to, but rather something (or someone) to be discovered within your own self.
Studying with Satchidananda, Alice embraced Hinduism and the tenets of Advaita Vedanta (nonduality), in which the Self (the Atman) is a reflection of and identical to the Absolute (the Brahman). God wasn’t someone far off in the heavens. It was as Jesus said in Luke 17:21, “The Kingdom of God is within you.” The title of the piece makes that truth evident. “To get Self-realization, fulfillment, that’s the point,” Alice said. “And it isn’t selfish — that term — it just means that you go to your fullest and highest potential, and not be limited by some tenets of some doctrine that says that we come here, here’s the minister, and that we pay our tithes and go home and go back to your job or business or whatever and do everything you want.”
“Something About John Coltrane” uses the complementary low frequencies of Tulsi and McBee again to meditative effect, accentuated by overdubbed sleigh bells from Majid Shabazz. The piece is evocative of John’s great modal explorations, and the solos from Alice and Pharoah are especially poignant, redolent of the Classic Quartet era, rather than the more challenging explorations of the late quintet. But both were aspects of the titular man himself, all part of his spectrum, his quest, whether it was articulated as a scream or serenade.
While there was a serenity about it, Alice’s music remained every bit as political and radical as the more vociferous shrieks to be heard elsewhere in “free jazz.” Much like her husband did with “Alabama,” Alice’s sympathy is present in every note. As McBee explained:
We were critical of the limits that were being placed on us. And we felt that our musical words could penetrate steel walls, so long as we said them with honesty, and perseverance, and creativity from the deepest [part] of ourselves. So we were political in that way. But things were rather novel, as far as civil rights were concerned. There were those who were much more eloquent than we were with words, like the Malcolm Xs and the Martin Luther Kings, the Angela Davises. We let them have that verbally, but we said it in music. And we were able to say it in music. We got across equally as well as they did with what we expressed. So Alice Coltrane, when she arrived, was more subtle in her statements, from a very spiritual point of view. She was very quiet, expressing the various sounds and waves of spirits and essences of the gods and the earth. Where we were trying to come from, with the loudness and bombast of our music, she made these statements in a more delicate, graceful, articulate, and uniform way than we did.
Every bit as radical as the unspoken politics in the music, Alice decidedly broke from the Baptist faith. At this point in her life, Alice Coltrane could no longer accept the restrictions of her upbringing, especially when the question came to death and reincarnation. It’s a shift reflective of what was happening across the young culture, as more and more kids of the new generation began to interrogate Christianity and find it lacking. As she put it: “The Western Church has failed, especially with young people. It was set up to serve needs it’s not meeting. Ask a Swami Hindu monk or someone else from the East about life after death and you’ll get answers that are real about direct experience, about looking to God. It has helped me to go on.”
With these new pieces recorded, Alice fully intended to go on. But not everyone did. Such bleak times fomented despair. The day before Thanksgiving, Albert Ayler — less than three years after he performed at John’s funeral — was dredged out of the Congress Street Pier on the Brooklyn side of the East River. He was only 34 years old.
Excerpted from “Cosmic Music: The Life, Art, and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane” by Andy Beta. Copyright © 2026 by Andy Beta. Available from Da Capo, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
