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Jazz And Harmony: From Bebop to Chants, Music Has Been in Alice Coltrane’s Soul (Teresa Wiltz - The Washington Post )
October 22, 2006 8:40 PM
Copyright The Washington Post
Saturday, October 21, 2006; C01
AGOURA, Calif.
Aluxury station wagon rolls up to the temple here at the Sai Anantam Ashram and everyone stands at the ready, even the little ones, hands clasped in prayer. The door opens, and from it, Swamini Turiyasangitananda, nee Alice McLeod Coltrane — yes, that Coltrane — steps out.
She is tall, mahogany of skin, swathed in a saffron sari, ebony hair pressed smooth, rippling past her shoulders, a long layer of dreadlocks snaking out from underneath. She smiles shyly. A devotee rushes to her side, drops to her knees, and, in the tradition of Vedantic followers everywhere, bows at the feet of her guru.
Inside this temple, located about 35 miles west of Los Angeles, worshipers practice a sort of ecumenical Hinduism: The men sit on one side of the royal blue carpet, the women on the other; Alice presides from a fuchsia velvet armchair. During a Sunday service, she kisses a baby and christens him with a Sanskrit name. Someone announces there will be no services next week, thanks to a rare concert that Alice is giving “back East” — a reference to her show tomorrow at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. She gives a short sermon, quoting from the Bhagavad-Gita: “You don’t need any religion to get devoted to God,” she tells them. Some of the 30-plus present wipe tears from their eyes.
Then she sits at the electric organ. Places fingers to keys. Chants “Ommmmmm.”
And begins to play.
Heads nod; bodies sway. They’re singing in Sanskrit — Bolo Bolo Asrita Bolo Om Namah Sivaya — but something else is going on. The deep bass humming from the organ … the funk emanating from tambourines and hand drums … the soulful singing and fervent yeah yeahs … the sister crying out, hands raised, caught up in the rapture …
Hindu gospel?
Indeed, watching Alice on organ, beaming till her dimples pop, it’s not hard to catch a glimpse of the child prodigy from Detroit playing in the Baptist church. To see the young bebop player, the one with whom John Coltrane fell in love, back at Birdland so many years ago.
Another lifetime ago.
* * *
Hers is a life reinvented, in the classic American way of taking sorrow and spinning it into something that gleams brighter than gold. She’s got a last name attached to one of jazz’s all-time greats, and yet few know her for the highly gifted musician and composer she is: an artist admired for her righteously rumbling arpeggios, for the deep vibrancy of her tone, for her dynamism as an improviser. She joined John Coltrane’s quintet in 1965, and together they explored the limits of avant-garde jazz, marinating in the mysticism of Eastern music, improvising their way into a deeply transcendent experience.
Theirs was a brief but intense union — just five years — but one that brought three children and altered her life’s trajectory. John Coltrane, 11 years older, introduced Alice to Eastern religion, meditation and philosophy. He pushed her to take up the harp, at the time a rare addition to the jazz canon. That instrument, along with her ecclesiastical explorations and noodling with North African and Indian instrumentation, formed the musical basis of her solo albums in the late ’60s and early ’70s: “Journey in Satchidananda,” the staple of many a yoga class; “Ptah the El Daoud”; “World Galaxy”; and “Universal Consciousness.”
Her latest, critically acclaimed album, “Translinear Light,” released in 2004 after a 26-year absence from the mainstream jazz scene, looks both backward and forward, traveling between John’s compositions to the gospel hymns of her Christian childhood to the Hindu hymns of her own Vedantic-based beliefs. She’s now at work on “Sacred Language of Ascension,” scheduled for release early next year, an album that incorporates Hebrew devotional chants, Vedic culture, Coltrane jazz, along with orchestral and congregational church music.
“She’s got an incredible strength and direction,” says bassist Charlie Haden, who played with John Coltrane, worked with Alice on “Journey in Satchidananda” and “Translinear Light,” and will be performing with her tomorrow. “She’s always exploring and discovering… . She’s an incredible musician.”
When her one great love died in 1967 of liver cancer after years of alcohol and drug abuse — Alice manages the jazz legend’s estate — she kept on playing, jamming on the piano, harp and Wurlitzer organ in studio sessions with the likes of Jimmy Garrison and Pharoah Sanders, with Rashied Ali and Archie Shepp, and collaborating with Carlos Santana, Laura Nyro, McCoy Tyner and Jack DeJohnette. Music swirled all around her until 1978, when Alice decided that she’d rather pursue all things spiritual. She spent weeks at a time in India, studying with spiritual masters such as her guru, Sri Swami Satchidananda, and the Indian sage Sri Satya Sai Baba, he of the beatific grin and the splendiferous ‘fro.
Ask her about this change in life direction, and she carefully measures her words, her voice a lyrical murmur punctuated by abrupt, staccato bursts:
“This is what we did, [my children’s] father and I, this is what we did when we were young,” Alice, 69, says of her jazz career, sitting by a burbling stream at the ashram. “We concertized, we were busy and we played in various places and we recorded a lot. I felt that he completed his mission. And I felt that my time had passed on.
“You see where I am today,” she continues, gesturing at the Santa Monica Mountains, the lush trees. “I wanted to spend time in spiritual search.”
So she stopped making music for secular consumption and began recording spiritual music with members of the ashram’s choir. But her second-eldest son, Ravi Coltrane, 41, a talented saxophonist, coaxed her out of retirement, bit by bit, for occasional concerts. Ravi produced and performs on “Translinear Light,” five years in the making, and this year cajoled her to perform in four concerts across the country in the 80th year since John’s birth. Tomorrow’s concert will be her only East Coast appearance.
“The performances for me are really commemorating that Alice wants to get onstage and play a little bit,” Ravi says from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y. “All my ideas — ‘C’mon, Ma, we should make a record, let’s go in the studio’ — it was me begging her.”
* * *
Growing up in Detroit in the aftermath of the Depression, the second-youngest of six children, money was always tight. Her father drove a delivery truck; her mother, a homemaker, didn’t truck with childish nonsense. Alice learned about music from her older half brother, Ernie Farrow, a bassist. When Alice was 7, she went knocking on a neighbor’s door. The neighbor had a piano; Alice didn’t.
“I decided one day that I was going to ask her to teach me,” Alice says. She learned the rudiments and moved on to Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky. Classical music grounded her in technique. She composed her first song at 10 and played in church choirs, and then music halls, weddings, funerals, didn’t matter. “Music,” Alice says, “was just in my heart, somehow.”
Farrow, who died in 1969, turned her on to the intricacies of bebop, to the genius of Charlie Parker and Bud Powell. “He loved music,” Alice says of Farrow, “and umph , he could play .” She fell in love with bebop’s muscular braininess, with its off-kilter chord changes and speeded-up tempos. By high school, she was gigging all over town, chasing bebop’s jagged rhythms. If Cannonball Adderley or Sonny Stitt landed in town without a pianist, she was on their shortlist to call.
After graduating from Northeastern High School in the mid-’50s, Alice passed up a scholarship at the Detroit Institute of Technology and headed straight to New York, with a temporary detour in Paris to study with Powell, legendary even then. Jazz — instrumental jazz — was a macho world, and with the exception of a few, such as Mary Lou Williams, Carla Bley, Hazel Scott and Marian McPartland, women weren’t exactly welcome. Alice ignored the macho machinations.
“There was no way I was going to be mannish and do the things men did,” she says. She just played, mindful of her Baptist upbringing. She carried herself like a lady, just like her mother taught her, and that, she says, is exactly how she was treated.
“She was a sweetheart, a lady lady , that’s how I would put it,” says vibraphonist Terry Gibbs, with whom Alice played Jewish melodies as part of her New York experimentation. “A good-hearted person.”
And what made her a good musician?
“What makes anybody good? They’re good. She played all the right notes, all the right chord changes. Her timing was perfect. What makes Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, good? That cliche ‘good for a girl’ was not true.”
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