Alice McLeod / Alice Coltrane / Swamini Turiyasangitananda (1937 - 2007)
I/ Through Space and Time
There was a time before Swamini Turiyasangitananda, a time before Alice Coltrane, and a time before Alice McLeod, the first name that took the soon-to-be musical genius. First we'll go back in time, to the very original roots of the people and places that shaped her music through three words: spirituality, community and innovation.
Alice's Earth and times
1. Mesopotamia
Queen Shub-ad
We begin this tale in 1922, when British archaeologists Leonard and Katharine Woodley discovers a royal tomb in Ur (nowadays Irak). Identified as Queen Shub-ad tomb (also known as Pu-abi, which means “Word of my father”), the queen and priestess lived during the Third Dynasty of Ur, probably between 2600 and 2500 BCE. Alongside her body was found the skeletons of 5 soldiers and 23 female servants who were poisoned to serve Shub-ad in her next life. Also, whereas in early Mesopotamia, women were described in relation to their husband, it seems that Shub-ad was ruling on her own, without a single male figure to mention. Also, what interests us the most in relation to Alice Coltrane is a small object that was found in this very tomb, a harp. Harps are the oldest stringed instrument and were used during burial ceremonies. This discovery made clear that harps and lyres were originated from Mesopotamia, and not Egypt like many historians used to think. However, this harp with eleven strings probably was among the influences for future harps and lyres found later in Egypt, especially in the region of Giza. Way before Shub-ad, researchers have found the representation of a harp on a cylinder seal dating to the late 4th millenium BCE, making the instrument even older that the one found in Sub-ad’s tomb.
2. West Africa
Because of the lack of written sources, the ancient History of West Africa is hard to date. We know for sure how important this region of the world was to jazz, gospel and spirituals, even though it’s still hard to trace clear influences. What we know, however, is the importance of possession ceremonies in groups like Songhai in Niger (with ceremonies called holle hori), Fulbe of the Niamey area (still in Niger), Lebou from Senegal and Bulongic (groups along the coast of Guinea-Conakry). The way those ceremonies took place is of course different from group to group, but most of them had social functions. Those ceremonies where genius had to be expelled from men and (mostly) women bodies were meant to reintroduce the individual within the collective and also to heal traumas. The spiritual aspect of those ceremonies remained intact when Islam established in the region, perfectly meshing together with traditional beliefs. Next to those rituals, West African traditions also include polyphonic and choral singing, which makes this part of the world the real cradle of work songs, spirituals, gospel and jazz.
3. India
Surdas
India’s probably the most important country inside of Alice Coltrane’s personal path, and the most important word to remember when looking at India’s History is the word bhajan. This very old word is derived from the word bhakti which means “loving devotion”. It’s a generic name (bhajans can be chants (kirtan), a given mantra, etc) for a specific spiritual movement originated from South India. Those bhajans were written to sing the praise of gods like Krishna, Ganesh and Shiva, most of the time in temples, sung by a group, with one or more lead singers, with percussions like tambourines and tabla. Another goal of bhajans was to challenged the authority of a rigorous clergy who had a complete monopoly over the interpretation of Hindu scriptures. The oldest written sources for bhajans are the Vedas (which means “knowledge” in Sanskrit), a collection of four books written between 1200 and 900 BCE with more than 20 000 mantras, notes on chants, melodies and worship rituals. Also, if there is a name to remember, it‘s probably Surdas, a legendary blind poet and singer born during the 16th century, living near Delhi, one of the most revered poet of India’s history.
4. Russia
Igor Stravinsky
Now we travel a long way in time, til the end of the 19th century, with the composition of the symphonic suite Scheherazade in 1888 by Nikolaï Rimsky-Korsakov, inspired by the famous collection of Middle Eastern folk tales in Arabic (Egyptian, Indian, Persian, Arabic and Mesopotamian folklore) called One Thousand and One Nights. The colourful compositions focused on harmonies (and inspired by composers like Glinka and Berlioz), as well as the use of harp and the interest in the East (even though this was in a more orientalist perspective than the renewed interest in Eastern cultures that spread in the US during the sixties) makes this music piece a cornerstone in classical history. And even more important than Rimsky-Korsakov was a man born in 1882, who grew up in Saint Petersburg and met him during his twenties, a man called Igor Stravinsky. Highly inspired by the work of his master, Stravinsky first met success with the composition of The Firebird in 1910 when he was just 27. Three years later, another composition for a ballet, The Rite of Spring blew the mind of every listeners, drawing harsh criticism because of how unconventional it was. The continuous experimentations on harmonies and rhythm, his use of space within the music, are two elements that will turn this piece into something as controversial as innovative. And today, both composers are listed among Alice Coltrane’s greatest influences.
5. Detroit
Willa Ann Townsend
Born in 1880 in Nashville, Willa Ann Towsend found her way of life in the study of religious beliefs. She received a degree at the National Baptist Missionary Training School and served as organist and music director. In 1921, Willa Townsend compiled and edited a book called Gospel Pearls, “the result of meritorious ability of the members of the committee who had broad experience in the musical field” as we can read in the pages of the book. As we now know, this “musical field” includes folksongs as well as work songs, blues and African traditions (such as possession ceremonies and singing gatherings). Willa Townsend died in 1947, and left behind her a book that was meant to find his place in every Baptist churches, including Mount Olive Baptist Church, Detroit, at a time when postwar gospel was blooming. It also happens that this very church and this very book were the first pratictal approach of gospel music for the young Alice McLeod. She immediately fell in love with those songs sung by the Pastor’s chorus, and this love story put her on the path of spirituality as a collective experience. This was exactly the purpose of Willa Townsend, who wrote that this book is “cheerfully recommend[ed] to all who are in need of a soul-stirring, message-bearing song-book.”
6. Paris
Bud Powell
Another decade, another country, with the legendary Blue Note Jazz Club of Paris, in France. The American jazz pianist and composer Bud Powell was one of the lead figures of modern jazz and bebop, alongside Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker. He was a virtuoso who took jazz forward thanks to his work on harmonies and rhythm. In 1959, Powell moved to Paris where he lived during four years in the Hotel Medicine. These were the last years before Powell was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and many of his last shows happened at the Blue Note Jazz Club. This small period of time happened to be the same as Alice McLeod’s travel to Paris with her then husband Kenny Hagood. She spent several months in the city and became friend with Bud Powell who enlarged her conception of bebop, a genre way different from spiritual jazz, but that immediately strikes the listeners when listening to Alice’s organ improvisations. Bebop also paved the way for modal jazz with Charlie Parker’s work. So it’s not surprising to hear Alice Coltrane mentionning his piece Parker’s Mood as an inspiration for her magnificent Turiya and Ramakrishna.
7. New York
John Coltrane
The final step of our journey is New York, the city of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, the place where modal jazz took its most famous form and changed the face of jazz forever. If bebop is structured around a fast tempo, rapid chord changes and key changes, modal jazz in the way Miles Davis saw it was the kingdom of minimalism. Released in 1958 and 1959, Milestones and Kind of Blue are two of the most important albums in music. From Johann Sebastian Bach to Claude Debussy to Miles Davis, modal music helped musicians find a new frame to improvise and create, freeing their instruments from the chordal scales that restricted their creativity. When John Coltrane joined Miles Davis in his band, the recording and live sessions helped him understand music in another way. This lengendary meeting might be the most important one in John Coltrane’s life, releasing Giant Steps, My Favourite Things and Africa/Brass, three albums before he met Alice McLeod, two legends who will instantly become friends and lovers, creating side by side and pushing the boundaries of music. Because if John died in 1967, Alice continued with her life, constantly reinventing her music, thanks to all those influences I mentionned, for one of the most groundbreaking career in the history of music.
II/ From Church to Space
1. In the Church
Sometimes, family is a decisive factor. Born on August 27, 1937 in Alabama, Alice McLeod grows up in Detroit (the town of John Lee Hooker and Yusef Lateef) inside of a family who is fond of music. Her mother, Annie McLeod, is a member of a church choir and plays piano. Her half-brother, Ernie Farrow, is among the finest bassist of Detroit bebop scene. At the age of 7, Alice starts early classical studies where she encounters some of the greatest composers of music. Two years later, she enters the local Mount Olive Baptist Church and falls in love with gospel, especially thanks to this little book called Gospel Pearls and edited by Willa Townsend. But her biggest discovery happens at the age of 16, when she is promoted to play with the Lemon Gospel Singers at Church God in Christ, deepening her connection to gospel. In the biography Monument Eternal: The Music of Alice Coltrane, Franya J. Berkman writes that this experience “gave her a profound understanding of “down home” religion and the spiritual power for African Americans, as well as the experience of unmediated worship at the collective level.” Every word in this quote counts, this is the foundation of Alice’s relationship to music and it will follow her during her entire life.
2. Terry, Terry and John
At the end of the fifties, Alice McLeoad travels to Paris with her husband Kenny Hagood, a jazz singer. She meets the pianist Bud Powell and plays piano at the Blue Not Jazz Club in 1960. However, because of Hagood’s drug habit, she decides to go back home with their young daughter Michelle (later known as singer Miki Coltrane). In Detroit, she starts working in a duo with Terry Pollard, a fellow female artist also struggling in the male dominated area. Terry buys Alice her first piano, and after some local jobs she starts touring with vibraphonist Terry Gibbs, with whom she records the album Jewish Melodies in Jazz Time in 1963. The same year, she opens with Gibbs for John Coltrane’s quartet at Birdland, a year after discovering his album Africa/Brass. Very quickly, Alice and John starts a relationship and get married in 1965 in Juarez. John adopts Alice’s daughter Michelle and together they have three sons, John Jr., Ravi and Oran, living in Dix Hills, in the suburbs of Long Island. The spiritual connection between John and Alice happens at the time when Afrocentrism begin to rise, with the creation of Kwanzaa, a celebration of African-American culture, Egyptology, etc. Alice replaces McCoy Tyner in John’s quartet at the time where his bandmembers want to work on their own, and they record the album Cosmic Music together.
3. Bandleader
Both tried to expand music beyond knowledge and towards spirituality. Alice learns a lot from John, John learns a lot from Alice. In 1967, John buys a harp, thinking the instrument will help him rethink harmonies and textures. But on July 17, John Coltrane dies of liver cancer. Alice is only 30 years old and has to raise her four children alone while, two years later, her half-brother Ernie Farrow also dies. Alice doesn’t sleep, doesn’t eat. She focuses on the harp that arrived after John’s death and master the instrument quickly, noticing its Egyptian origins and saying « I have a past or history there somewhere ». Alice releases her debut album as a bandleader in 1968 on Impulse! with Pharoah Sanders on bass clarinet, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Rashied Ali and Ben Riley on drums. A Monastic Trio is divided into two parts, one where Alice plays piano and one where she plays harp. The album is criticize as derivative as John’s, but Alice stays focused on her work and releases in 1969 Huntington Ashram Monastery, deepening her relationship with Hindustani spirituality, an ashram being a hermitage or monastery where followers practice yoga and spirituality. In 1970, she releases Ptah the El Daoud (after the name of the Egyptian god of craftsmen), meshing together eastern and western traditions.
4. A New Era
“In 1969, Coltrane reconnected with bassist Vishnu Wood, a musician she'd met in Detroit, her hometown. Wood suggested she meet his guru, Swami Satchidananda, who had given the opening speech at Woodstock and founded The Integral Yoga Institute in New York.” Satchidananda was teaching the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, promoting the concept of self-realization. “It just mean you go to your fullest and highest potential and not be limited by some tenets” says Alice in an interview. Franya Berkam also says in her autobiography that “Vedanta is similar to the spiritual and creative philosophy that John Coltrane developed”. This new perspective helps Alice recording her most famous album, Journey in Satchidananda, recorded between July 4 and November 8, 1970. This album is one of the most influential album for early New Age music, and brings together modal jazz with Middle Eastern music, as well as African Indian blues and Indian claissical. Then, in December 1970, she travels for the first time to India with her guru on a five-week pilgrimage, exploring Bombay, New Delhi, Sri Lanka (spiritual retreat), Rishikesh (to visit Swami Sivananda’s Divine Life Society) and Madras (attending lectures, visiting temples). Alice brings her harp with her and learns Hindu devotional hymns along the way.
5. After India
Back from her pilgrimage, Alice records Universal Consciousness, considered by many as her masterpiece, although less accessible than her previous albums. Coltrane makes all the arrangements for the string quartet with the help of Ornette Coleman, she also records renditions of traditional Indian sacred chants (Hare Krishna and Sita Ram). This album is her first string album, but it’s also the first time we hear her playing the Wurlitzer organ, an instrument that was revelead to her in a vision. “When I began to play the organ, there came the freedom and understanding that I would never have to depend on anyone else musically.” She continues her experiments with strings, drones and organ with Lord of Lords (featuring an excerpt from Stravinsky’s Firebird) and World Galaxy in 1972. The same year, her family moves to Southern California and Alice began practicing Indian religious rituals. Around this time, Alice becomes Swamini (teacher) Turiyasangitananda, which means in Sanskrit “the transcendental Lord’s highest song of bliss.” She opens an ashram in 1972, the Vedantic Center, and relocates it in Woodland Hills in 1975 because of the increasing number of followers. This sanctuary welcomes seekers from all faiths to experience the teachings of spiritual life.
6. Sai Anantam Ashram
Back from her pilgrimage, Alice records Universal Consciousness, considered by many as her masterpiece, although less accessible than her previous albums. Coltrane makes all the arrangements for the string quartet with the help of Ornette Coleman, she also records renditions of traditional Indian sacred chants (Hare Krishna and Sita Ram). This album is her first string album, but it’s also the first time we hear her playing the Wurlitzer organ, an instrument that was revelead to her in a vision. “When I began to play the organ, there came the freedom and understanding that I would never have to depend on anyone else musically.” She continues her experiments with strings, drones and organ with Lord of Lords (featuring an excerpt from Stravinsky’s Firebird) and World Galaxy in 1972. The same year, her family moves to Southern California and Alice began practicing Indian religious rituals. Around this time, Alice becomes Swamini (teacher) Turiyasangitananda, which means in Sanskrit “the transcendental Lord’s highest song of bliss.” She opens an ashram in 1972, the Vedantic Center, and relocates it in Woodland Hills in 1975 because of the increasing number of followers. This sanctuary welcomes seekers from all faiths to experience the teachings of spiritual life.
7. The Shape of Music
To say Alice’s career stopped in 1978 is a misconception of her relationship to music. Between 1982 and 1995, she released four cassettes through her company Avatar Books housed inside the ashram. Her children encouraged her to visit a local music shop to see the new modular synthesizers and she became fascinated by them, buying the OB-8 snthesizer. Those cassettes were recorded for the worshippers to accompany their meditation and were never meant to be published publicly (although you can find some of them on YouTube now). The first cassette is Turiya Sings in 1982 where Alice goes deeper into the form of singing bhajans. It’s the first time we hear Alice’s beautiful dark voice. Her music becomes devotional singing over ambient soundscapes with a brilliant use of synths. The second cassette, Divine Songs, put Alice’s voice on top while we can hear her on harp again on the beautiful Er Ra. Finally, she releases Infinite Chants and Glorious Chants both in 1990 and 1995, with a full-throated choir, a flute on the last cassette, turning those recording into some of the most intense music ever recorded. Longtime student Shankari Adams had some words about her recording process. “The most common process I witnessed was her taking the chanting we did during weekly worship service. That would be the base line and then she would go into the studio an add layers on tracks to that base line for the devotional music.”
8. Out of This World
Those four cassettes are just samples of what happened inside the ashram. We can only consider ourselves lucky enough to have access now to these recordings, since they were part of an oral tradition that ended up being recorded by Alice for meditation practice. However, in 2004, Alice Coltrane releases a new studio album called Translinear Light, under the impetus of her son, saxophonist Ravi Coltrane. This very surprising album gather everything Alice did during her life. However, on January 12, 2007, aged 69, Alice dies of respiratory failure. She leaves behind her the ashram that keeps welcoming worshippers until Californian forest fires destroy it in 2018. One of the big question Alice Coltrane worked on during her lifetime was: how do you experience music? The clear answer is that we can enjoy those bhajans even taken out of their context because the main purpose of the ashram is to bring people together, no matter what they believe in. Spirituality is first and foremost a deep dive within your own self that doesn’t have to do with religion. Bhajans are spirituality in a religious context, but this religious context isn’t mandatory to experience the spiritual awakening. It’s all about deep meditation and connecting with yourself, nature, and the world around you. John Coltrane once said “I was looking for a universal sound.” Alice Coltrane found it.
III/ The Music
1. The First Album - A Monastic Trio (1968)
A Monastic Trio was the first Alice Coltrane studio album recorded, and in my opinion, it is one of the best debut albums not only in jazz, but in the music industry as a whole. The first part of the album features Alice Coltrane playing piano with songs like "Ohnedaruth" and "Gospel Trane" being some of the highlights of the album. In the 1998 reissue of the album, 3 new tracks were added, including an outstanding performance of Pharoah Sanders´s saxophone solos on "Lord help me to be", and even John Coltrane did a vocal performance on the song "The Sun" while Alice plays the piano in such a spectacular way that I can´t put into words. And a divine ending track "Altruvista", also featuring Pharoah Sanders. Alice played piano since she was 7, and just with a few tracks she demonstrated the fluency she had on it. The other half of the album, with songs like "Lovely Skyboat" and "Atomic Peace" features Alice Coltrane playing harp, and it showed many people (me included) that Harp can be extremely beautiful when played in a Jazz record. This album was revolutionary for jazz music, in my opinion, with some of the most graceful and heavenly performances ever recorded in an album. Alice blesses our ears from start to finish, creating one of the most impressive albums to date.
(written by a collaborator)
2. The Last Album - Translinear Light (2004)
If we only consider the albums Alice recorded in a classic studio, there is a huge gap between her last album for Warner Brothers, Transcendence in 1977 and her last album Translinear Light released in 2004. Alice Coltrane is credited as the main artist in this album, but her son Ravi Coltrane, at the origin of the project, could have been mentioned too. You can hear his sax on several tracks like Jagadishwar or Blue Nile, while her other son Oran Coltrane plays the alto saxophone on The Hymn. More than ever before, this is a familial album, like an immense tribute to everybody she worked with, with Charlie Haden, Jack DeJohnette, the singers of her ashram on the last track, still reminding us of John Coltrane’s importance with her covers of Crescent and Leo, and finally revisiting some of her old recordings with Sita Ram and Jagadishwar. This album is very hard to categorize because of how special it feels, it’s one of those albums that nobody ever thought would exist. But here it is, her final recordings, and it’s simply marvellous to hear all those people reunites one last time, transcending time to let us hear Alice’s genius on piano with the extraordinary Walk With Me, on the organ with Leo and on the synth on Jagadishwar.
3. The Album - Divine Songs (1987)
Among the four cassettes that have been released in limited editions during the time Swamini Turiyasangitananda aka Alice Coltrane was remaining in her Sai Anantam Ashram in the Santa Monica Mountains, three of them can be found on YouTube. They are all very different musically and structurally, but to me Divine Songs is the pinnacle of Alice Coltrane’s career. All the knowledge she gathered during her life, from India to Russia, from France to Egypt, Detroit and West Africa is contained in this very album. Her sombre voice shines at the center of almost every song, delivering her most transcendental performances on Om Shanti and Madhura Manohara Giridhari while this album remains more diverse than Turiya Sings, for instance with the beautiful track Er Ra, where Alice reunites with her harp, an instrument that has been more rare those last years after her discovery of the Wurlitzer organ and then the OB-8 synthesizer. There is not a single album that sounds like this one on Earth, because these are not traditonal Indian chants, they are a chance for us to enter Alice’s ashram and experience the highest level of spirituality she was connecting with.
IV. The Playlist