2004 - USA
Spiritual Jazz
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.