“To the Other Shore”: Alice Coltrane’s Musical Epiphanies in the decade after John’s Death
Alice Coltrane had an itch for transcendence. Inside the squalls of her shrieking electric organ and the intense flurries of sound that she conjured with her sidemen is the fundamentally human desire for communion with a higher spiritual wisdom. Sometimes her music is lush, rousing, and overwhelmingly gorgeous; at other times, her tunes can sound cramped, dissonant, and harsh. When creating, Alice is reaching toward universal consciousness, transmuting the glorious peaks and hellish valleys of human experience into startlingly profound musical experiences. This engagement with spiritual experiences was evident from the day she first played a note. From her early days playing keys in Black Baptist churches to her later years soaring amongst the stars with her cosmic jazz, Alice always used music to grasp at the ecstatic and the spiritual. Her free-jazz explorations in the 1970s not only display Alice, the musician, rejoicing in the transcendent power of sonic vibrations, but also Alice, the human being, seeking wisdom through the marriage of Black and South Asian cultural traditions. In these tunes, organs distort, drums clash, and rhythms dissolve – all in the service of spiritual transcendence. I can speak for myself and other Alice listeners when I say that her music possesses a peculiar power. It halts time, disorients the listener’s mind, and reorients it toward something higher, something ineffable.
After John Coltrane’s death in 1967, Alice plunged into a period of deep spiritual transformation that manifested in her subsequent musical adventures. This intense period of her life – impacted by frequent bouts of insomnia, hallucinations, and physical ailments -- resulted in music that is imbued with profound sorrow. The 1970 composition “Turiya and Ramakrishna” is a manifestation of this sadness. Alice spends the beginning of the track playing variations on a bluesy riff, equipped with her trademark trills and expressive command of rhythm. Drums and bass swing in the background while she floats above, dragging and rushing, seemingly using the emotional content of the moment to dictate where her playing falls on the beat. This sonic environment continues until the rhythm shifts into a rubato pattern signaled by the steady ringing of percussive bells. Her piano trills and stays on one chord until shifting upward into a higher chord, giving the impression that she is searching for some higher level of consciousness, some higher power amid deep sorrow. New Yorker writer Hua Hsu remarks on this emotional heaviness, describing Alice’s “stormy passages” as “a struggling kind of transcendence.”
Alice’s solo brings the listener back into the swing backbeat, although she rejects this rhythmic constraint completely. Her playing seems to express her emotions through free-flowing glissandi and trills. The give and take between swing and rubato continues throughout the rest of the track, further implying the exploratory nature of this period and her entire discography. Franya Berkman and other scholars contend that this early period of Alice’s solo career consists of variations on John’s creative ethos, with Alice herself stating that she “was not concerned with artistic individuality.” While this may be an apt description of this music, “Turiya and Ramakrishna” and other compositions of this period are seeped in Alice’s individual ear for using rhythm, harmony, and timbre as emotive vehicles for exploration and self-expression. These trends continue to reappear in Alice’s subsequent compositions and forays into new instrumental worlds.
The musical product of Alice’s spiritual tribulations is undeniably evident in her experimentations with the harp, Wurlitzer organ, and Indian classical instruments. Stemming from Alice’s long interest in South Asian philosophy, 1970’s “Journey in Satchidananda” was a new sonic and philosophical step for Alice that would reverberate throughout the rest of her career. Inspired by her new spiritual relationship with famed guru Swami Satchidananda, this tune and much of her music in this era showcases Alice actively working through her grief and discovering new sonic and spiritual modalities in the process. Alice’s engagement with non-Western belief systems fosters sociocultural significance, representing her method of reimagining her relationship with American spiritual traditions, particularly the Black church. The opening tamboura drone and bass vamp quickly contextualize the tune as a modal jazz and Indian classical fusion piece. Alice’s harp glissandi soon cascade into the mix, a barrage of texture and harmony that conveys a sense of contemplation. Berkman quotes an interview with Alice in which she claims this tune and the others on the album should inspire the listener “to envision himself floating on an ocean of Satchidanandaji’s love, which is literally carrying countless devotees across the vicissitudes and stormy blasts of life to the other shore.” Her harp playing, with its flowing and cascading presence, could be likened to this ocean of divine love, as it both serves as the foundation and the driving force for this track’s progression. Her experiences with Satchidananda and larger Indian philosophical traditions represent the next transformation in Alice’s lifelong spiritual search that began in Mt. Olive Baptist Church.
Alice went into great detail about her experiences with meditation and spiritual seeking in a 1970 Black Journal documentary. She recalled spending weeks in deep meditative states, discovering deeper parts of herself and others around her, and coming “face to face with God.” These profound experiences imbued Alice with a sense of complete freedom: “I’m free. The world cannot claim me anymore.” What does a musician do after discovering this level of freedom? Alice followed her spiritual liberation by creating a string of albums that present radically experimental sonic worlds packed with squealing Wurlitzer organs, rattling percussion, and abrasive dissonance. On “Battle at Armageddon,” from 1971’s Universal Consciousness, Alice transmutes the concepts of rhythm, form, and tonality through her own kaleidoscopic vision. The tune opens with dissonant rumbles of organ bass, punctuated by high-pitched organ trills and cluttering drumbeats. Alice’s sound here is erratic, textural, and liberated. The tune seems to lack a set meter and instead sources its rhythmic pulse from Alice’s bass notes. Her melodies are repetitive variations on a single motif that transitions through different tonal centers. Alice’s organ travels up and down scales in a fluid, unbroken pattern, using reverb and echoes to amplify the frenetic dissonance of the tune. Here, Alice’s wielding of the electric Wurlitzer organ allows her to channel her new experiences of consciousness expansion and project infectious emotional energy and intensity. Having incorporated the teachings of the Indian philosophical tradition Advaita Vedanta – characterized by a link between knowledge of the self to knowledge of the fundamental reality of the universe -- into her life, Alice used her music to transcend genre boundaries and convey this spiritual realization. Berkman described Alice’s musical ambition to express “extraordinary transonic and atmospherical power” and send her newfound worlds of sound “into the ethers of this universe.” This sort of cosmic destination characterized Alice’s music in the 1970s – “Battle at Armageddon” is but one example of her using dissonance and free improvisation to tap into the sonic essence of the universe.
Alice’s interpretation of her husband’s famous tune “A Love Supreme” illustrates her command of the electric organ as a tool for realizing transcendent musicality. Beginning with a serene string arrangement, a passage of spiritual spoken word, and harp glissandi, the tune initially conjures the calmer aspects of spiritual experiences. However, Alice’s distorted organ sound soon juts into the mix, accompanied by an almost funk-rock style drumbeat. She begins playing the well-known theme of “A Love Supreme” before plunging into a rhythmic conversation with the drummer. Her improvisation incorporates sharp, abrasive clusters of dissonance that roar through the mix. Moreover, her organ’s gritty distortion and danceable rhythms are reminiscent of the jazz-rock fusion experiments of her contemporaries. Tremolo effects on the organ and the ringing of percussive bells slow the track down into its ecstatic finale. Soaring string melodies form the sonic foundation while Alice’s organ improvisation flutters up and down the length of the piano. This sort of free meter improvisation seems to make her music float, perhaps on the ocean of Satchidanandaji’s love, or perhaps into new dimensions of musical discovery.
When listening to music like Alice’s, I am often struck with simple gratitude for the existence of music itself. A universal method of communication, music allows artists to give us a peek into their inner world, sharing in their pain, joy, sorrow, and bliss. Listening to tunes like “Journey in Satchidananda” and “Turiya and Ramakrishna” feels like just a peek into her inner universe of transcendent sounds and realizations. My journey to loving her music was long, as I felt initially startled by her penchant for dissonance and chaos. However, as I continued to lean into her expression over the years, I have grown to love this artist so emboldened by the liberating power of authentic self-expression. Similar to how her methods of musical expression transformed over her spiritual path, my method of listening to music has transformed after sitting with her catalog. Honing into the artist’s personal intentions and observing the music’s texture and timbre truly help visualize the inner world many artists so intensely want to share. I am grateful for Alice’s life, mission, and musical adventures. Not only has she opened my mind to new forms of experience, but she has also taken my preconceived notions of musical possibilities and guided them into a world of infinite possibilities.
