Alice Coltrane - Divine Songs

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.