Newsday<\/em> feature on Alice that spring found her hard at work mixing and engineering a recording made at Dix Hills. The reporter noted the plush blue carpet and the burning incense in the room, as well as a high stack of boxed tapes behind the studio door of unreleased John Coltrane sessions. \u201cI just had to find out where the fuses were instead of calling my neighbor or an electrician every time the lights went out,\u201d she said:<\/p>\n\n\tBut other than that, I have tried to carry on my life as if John were still here. I learned to edit and work the control board by watching the engineers that recorded me. Now I have about 17 privately recorded albums my husband did, in addition to having two albums of my own to do so I have to put the children to bed and come down late at night to practice and work.<\/p>\n
\n\tSometime in May, a young reporter named Angela Dews went out to visit the home and spend the day with Alice as the kids ran around. \u201cShe was very open with me,\u201d Dews recalled. \u201cI was at her house, she was barefoot, the kids were running around. They played, they\u2019d run up and down the stairs, and she did, too. I felt a real, real connection with her.\u201d Dews spent most of the day out on Long Island with her:<\/p>\n
\n\tShe\u2019d walk around, she\u2019d see something, she\u2019d sit down and play, or she\u2019d do something, you know. She was very much a person who made music all the time. It was very natural, moving from their instruments to her kids, to a conversation with an interviewer. They had a meditation space . . . off to the side of the music room. I do remember that the feeling of it was everywhere, there were these images that showed that they were meditating and they had a spiritual life . . . When she talked about John, she would look away, you know, she was still connected in some way.<\/p>\n
\n\tAbout a week after their interview, Coltrane mailed Dews a typewritten letter, laying out her worldview: \u201cMy music and life are both based upon a simple, integral principle; i.e. spirituality and truth. I believe that spiritual growth is just as important as the physical and mental development of an individual.\u201d In the last paragraph, she discussed her life with John:<\/p>\n
\n\tBeing married to John was an out of sight experience. It was really together. There was such a similarity between us in thought and aspirations. We almost always agreed upon the same things\u2026I was very fortunate to be married to a genius. A woman may be the sustaining power in the home, but the man, I feel, is the energy and soul force behind the whole structure.<\/p>\n
\n\tLater that month, Alice took her group down to Philadelphia to take part in a festival presented by the Philadelphia Jazz Society with the St. Joseph\u2019s College Black Awareness Society on Friday celebrating John Coltrane, with Archie Shepp now performing with her group. Sometime that summer, Alice performed on the new PBS show called Soul! <\/em>Hosted by Ellis Haizlip, a pioneering Black television producer, the episode also featured singers Kim Weston and Bobby Hebb. TV listings of the time blurbed: \u201cMrs. Coltrane chatted with host Ellis Haizlip and performed harp with her quintet for \u2018Blue Nile\u2019 and \u2018Leo\u2019 with Archie Shepp.\u201d (Shepp\u2019s memory failed when the show was mentioned. Worse still, the early years of Soul!<\/em> were not deemed worth preserving or archiving and this performance is now considered lost.)<\/p>\n\n\tOn an 88-degree Fourth of July day, Alice Coltrane performed at the Village Gate. Wood had performed with the group since earlier in the year and he brought his oud with him and switched between instruments during the concert. \u201cRashied Ali was on drums, Pharoah or Archie played horn sometimes, Jimmy Garrison made some gigs on bass,\u201d he recalled. \u201cSometimes I would play the oud, but I was also playing an Indian instrument called the dilruba, tamboura, and all that. She had a pretty large ensemble when she played.\u201d For that particular performance, former Ornette Coleman bassist Charlie Haden was in the group and they performed a long, unmetered improvisation titled \u201cIsis and Osiris.\u201d Alice\u2019s audacious blending of oud (an instrument that wasn\u2019t played in ancient Egypt), harp, bass, drums, and soprano sax created a fusion that transcended its willfully eclectic \u201cworld music\u201d trappings to invoke these ancient Egyptian deities to sublime effect. When Ptah, the el Daoud<\/em> was released that autumn, critics mostly remained indifferent or hostile to the music.<\/p>\n\n\tSri Swami Satchidananda and his Integral Yoga Institute family were quickly outgrowing their housing at West End Avenue and went in search of a larger, more settled space. Hari Zupan, one of IYI\u2019s administrators, found a six-story building on West 13th Street in Greenwich Village and quickly moved to negotiate a deal for the building. But as it came time to make a down payment to take the building off the market, Zupan learned that they were just short of funds. He called uptown to Satchidananda \u2014 then in conversation with Coltrane \u2014 who seemed unbothered by the predicament, offering no real solution and hanging up quickly. Time was running out and Zupan\u2019s next call again yielded no decision from the guru. As recounted in his biography, Alice then asked unprompted:<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI have been coming here and benefiting so much from your teachings. Is there anything I could do to help the center? Is there anything you need?\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tHe simply said, \u201cWhatever you feel moved to do, you can do.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cWell, do you need anything urgently?\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cIn my life there is no urgency.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cOkay, fine, Swamiji. Thank you. I don\u2019t want to take up any more of your time; I should go now.\u201d <\/p>\n
\n\tAs Alice walked away from West End, she realized she had left her purse behind and doubled back, and again sensed that there was something the center needed:<\/p>\n
\n\tYou know, I\u2019m really embarrassed about this. I came with the idea of giving some contribution. Then when you said that there was no urgency, I thought I would wait and give something later. But it seems that God wanted me to make a donation immediately. That must be why I forgot my purse and had to come back for it. I\u2019m going to write a check right away.<\/p>\n
\n\tSwamiji extended an invitation to her to accompany him when he returned to India that winter to attend the World Scientific Yoga Conference. Alice was now part of Satchidananda\u2019s inner sanctum of devotees, contributing not just financially but musically as well. \u201c[Sally] Satya Kirkland put on a program on the life of Buddha and I had a chamber orchestra at the time so I played the music,\u201d Alice recalled. \u201cGurudev liked it very much and so my proximity to him developed from the programs and the music which was what I felt I could offer to Him.\u201d Tulsi Reynolds was also part of this program, playing tamboura in this intimate ensemble at the center. \u201cAnd I guess she was impressed with the way I was playing it,\u201d Reynolds said:<\/p>\n
\n\tI became a really good tamboura player, mostly because Panditji scared me into it. So Alice invited me to join her and we would just play together there. She played piano and I played tamboura and there were people playing flutes. It was really free-form. And then one day she said, \u201cI\u2019m going to be recording and I\u2019d like you to play some tamboura.\u201d So I said, sure, you know. And we started working on the album. We had very little rehearsal.<\/p>\n
\n\tAs Reynolds recalled, she came out to Dix Hills in the middle of the day. The kids weren\u2019t around, but the rest of the group was. \u201cThe studio was sort of like a wing of the house and then you came in and there was a door and these steps and the studio was a whole wing by itself,\u201d she said. \u201cSo we were in the studio and I remember it was daylight. And, like, there was not music to prepare.\u201d The group included Pharoah Sanders, Rashied Ali, and Cecil McBee, who Reynolds had gigged with a few times at Caf\u00e9 Au Go Go in the West Village:<\/p>\n
\n\tCecil and I had become very good friends, but Pharoah had no idea who I was. When Pharoah walked in and he saw a white lady playing tamboura, I thought he was going to faint. Alice just looked at him and said, \u201cPharoah<\/em>.\u201d And he calmed down. Cecil was laughing hysterically because he knew me. I didn\u2019t say anything. I just picked up the tamboura. And of course, once we started and he saw that I could really play, then he was fine.<\/p>\n\n\tThere may not have been much prepared in the way of written music, but Alice knew what she wanted and imparted that to the group. The music would be an expression of gratitude at her newfound relationship with Satchidananda and the hope that it kindled in her heart as well as an expression of her two and a half years of ascetic mortification and self-effacement, which \u2014 as she wrote in a Sept. 30 entry in Divine Revelations <\/em>\u2014 finally drew to an end. The music would contain all the grief and suffering of that journey, as well as the hope and healing that now emerged on the other side of her trials.<\/p>\n\n\tShe also began to envision what her trip to India might be like. It had long been a goal of John\u2019s to one day visit the country, to experience its music and spiritualism firsthand. Now, through God\u2019s divine grace, it was coming to pass. As McBee recalled of the session:<\/p>\n
\n\tIt was very, very spiritual. The lights were low and she had incense and there was not much conversation, dictation, or verbalization about what was to be. Her desire of your essence was all very, very tangible. The spiritual, emotional, physical statement of the environment, it was just there. You felt it and you just played it. It was very subtle but powerful. I can remember it to this day. It was all novel to me, but I knew that it was something very spiritual and very special. No doubt about it.<\/p>\n
\n\tPharoah had been Alice\u2019s closest musical collaborator for close to five years, but even he felt a bit of apprehension when approaching this ineffable music. \u201cYou know, her playing was amazing. I loved what she was doing. But I always felt like what I was doing wasn\u2019t good enough,\u201d he said. \u201cAt one point, I had told her, \u2018I don\u2019t know if you like the way I\u2019m playing or not. I don\u2019t know whether this fits, or what.\u2019 She said, \u2018You\u2019re doing O.K. Just keep on playing. Keep on blowing.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tTraveling toward Rishikesh, India, December 1970.<\/span><\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of Integral Yoga Institute<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\tFoundational to the music recorded that day in Dix Hills was Reynolds\u2019s unhurried thrum of the tamboura. Her teacher Pandit Pran Nath is crucial to understanding the rise of American minimalism in the 1970s, thanks to his famous students: La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Terry Riley, Jon Hassell, Rhys Chatham, Catherine Christer Hennix, and Charlemagne Palestine. Yet his lesser-known pupil\u2019s presence at Alice\u2019s home meant that Pran Nath also informed a shift in spiritual jazz as well. \u201cWhat the tamboura does is it sets down a sonic field in which all the other instruments can float,\u201d Reynolds said:<\/p>\n
\n\tIf the tamboura is tuned correctly, you hear all the other little intervals that are resounding within that. So you can play almost any note and it will work, if<\/em> you touch it exactly right. It sets out a field that everything else floats in and the trick is to sustain it. That can never break, because you cannot miss a note. Any break in that sound field and the whole thing falls apart.<\/p>\n\n\tThat moment of magic is evident from the first buzz of Tulsi\u2019s tamboura on \u201cJourney in Satchidananda,\u201d which radiates outward from the speakers and seems to widen as it makes its way across an infinite ocean. McBee\u2019s methodical ostinato is both rooted in Reynolds\u2019s drone and spiring far above it. And when Alice\u2019s harp comes in, it\u2019s like the gates of Eden swinging wide, beckoning you into paradise. Sanders takes a rare turn on soprano saxophone, and in his solo he conveys both a deep gorge of grief and a yearning for transcendence. Alice soars to the uppermost register of her harp, punctuating her phrases with steep descents into the lower octaves and back. No matter how high each musician\u2019s searching solo takes them, Tulsi\u2019s tamboura offers a soft landing.<\/p>\n
\n\tThis new composition announced Alice Coltrane as an artist in her own right, actualizing that \u201cuniversal sound\u201d that her husband strove toward with his later music. And \u201cJourney\u201d truly exemplifies cosmic music, a vessel that transports you to the highest stratospheres of inner space. While it was not the first instance of Western jazz engaging with Eastern instrumentation, there was still little like it in jazz music up to that point in time. It\u2019s an audacious fusion of tamboura with harp, two instruments whose histories on two separate continents reach back to 2500 BCE yet rarely if ever meet. As Alice explained:<\/p>\n
\n\tThe harp sound is flowing, oceanic, and ethereal. It has a celestial sound that people often associate with heaven. For me, the older instruments have more of a mystical sound, and tambouras, hand cymbals, and mridanga drums were made for worship. In fact, if played devotionally, all instruments could be used to honor the Lord.<\/p>\n
\n\tBoth remain rarities in modern jazz. But Journey <\/em>is also a profound reimagining of what spiritual jazz could be. The peers and label mates of Alice \u2014 artists like Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler \u2014 constituted the masculine faces of the form. Yet the number of women who participated in this music was lamentably low. The negatives that critics saddled Alice\u2019s music with \u2014 \u201cdelicate,\u201d \u201clacking muscle,\u201d \u201cwispy,\u201d \u201csubdued,\u201d \u201ccontent,\u201d \u201cpretty,\u201d \u201cgoing nowhere\u201d \u2014 all became strengths in this new environment she created. \u201cJourney in Satchidananda\u201d inverted all of that.<\/p>\n\n\tLao Tzu once wrote: \u201cShape clay into a vessel\/It is the space within that makes it useful.\u201d So did Alice amplify \u201cthe space within\u201d of this music. King Kong might scale the side of the Empire State Building, but could such power climb up a trellis of flowers or dance on a spiderweb?<\/p>\n
\n\tWhat male critics bemoaned as \u201cfeminine\u201d traits (using every coded word imaginable to not say it out loud), Alice elevated into a receptive, nurturing music. At the height of the Vietnam War\u2019s daily violence and that entire cataclysmic era of the late 1960s and early 1970s, such gentleness and empathy was radical.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe Impulse sales team knew they had something very different on their hands, and a promotional sleeve was designed to look like a doctor\u2019s pharmaceutical script pad. Instead of taking a red or blue pill to relax\u2014 Tonight take ALICE COLTRANE and JOURNEY TO SATCHIDANANDA. It\u2019s smooth but contains recommended amounts of pure energy<\/em>, it read, signed by a Dr. I.M. Peaceful.<\/p>\n\n\tIt\u2019s silly \u2014 especially for an artist who never medicated herself in such a manner \u2014 but even if they couldn\u2019t quite pinpoint what \u201cJourney in Satchidananda\u201d was, they knew it was something unheard before, a hybrid of contrasts. It was avant-garde free jazz, but calm and centered. It drew on classical Indian music, but you would never mistake it for Ravi Shankar. There was fire flaring up from Sanders\u2019s horn, but it was tempered and soothing. It sounded profound loss and longing \u2014 of a widow pining for her soulmate, of a soul seeking to be united with the Supreme Lord once more \u2014 yet imparted a distinct sensation of uplift and affirmation.<\/p>\n
\n\tIn the preceding copy, there also appears to be an error: instead of reading \u201cJourney in<\/em> Satchidananda,\u201d it instead used the prepositional to<\/em>. Which does make more sense, in that you travel to<\/em> a destination. Michel\u2019s session notes reveal that the tracks originally had slightly longer titles. \u201cShiva-Loka\u201d was instead \u201cAlmighty Shiva-Loka\u201d and the original title of \u201cJourney in Satchidananda\u201d was \u201cJourney on the Ship of Satchidananda,\u201d her guru like a great, benevolent vessel. But at some point in the album process, Alice realized that for all her imminent intercontinental travel, this particular journey was more intimate and immediate than that. She wasn\u2019t going \u201cto\u201d a place, nor was she \u201con\u201d something either. She shifted to the prepositional \u201cin\u201d to signify a more profound truth: Satchidananda was not an external destination to be journeyed to, but rather something (or someone) to be discovered within your own self.<\/p>\n\n\tStudying with Satchidananda, Alice embraced Hinduism and the tenets of Advaita Vedanta (nonduality), in which the Self (the Atman) is a reflection of and identical to the Absolute (the Brahman). God wasn\u2019t someone far off in the heavens. It was as Jesus said in Luke 17:21, \u201cThe Kingdom of God is within you.\u201d The title of the piece makes that truth evident. \u201cTo get Self-realization, fulfillment, that\u2019s the point,\u201d Alice said. \u201cAnd it isn\u2019t selfish \u2014 that term \u2014 it just means that you go to your fullest and highest potential, and not be limited by some tenets of some doctrine that says that we come here, here\u2019s the minister, and that we pay our tithes and go home and go back to your job or business or whatever and do everything you want.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cSomething About John Coltrane\u201d uses the complementary low frequencies of Tulsi and McBee again to meditative effect, accentuated by overdubbed sleigh bells from Majid Shabazz. The piece is evocative of John\u2019s great modal explorations, and the solos from Alice and Pharoah are especially poignant, redolent of the Classic Quartet era, rather than the more challenging explorations of the late quintet. But both were aspects of the titular man himself, all part of his spectrum, his quest, whether it was articulated as a scream or serenade.<\/p>\n
\n\tWhile there was a serenity about it, Alice\u2019s music remained every bit as political and radical as the more vociferous shrieks to be heard elsewhere in \u201cfree jazz.\u201d Much like her husband did with \u201cAlabama,\u201d Alice\u2019s sympathy is present in every note. As McBee explained:<\/p>\n
\n\tWe were critical of the limits that were being placed on us. And we felt that our musical words could penetrate steel walls, so long as we said them with honesty, and perseverance, and creativity from the deepest [part] of ourselves. So we were political in that way. But things were rather novel, as far as civil rights were concerned. There were those who were much more eloquent than we were with words, like the Malcolm Xs and the Martin Luther Kings, the Angela Davises. We let them have that verbally, but we said it in music. And we were able to say it in music. We got across equally as well as they did with what we expressed. So Alice Coltrane, when she arrived, was more subtle in her statements, from a very spiritual point of view. She was very quiet, expressing the various sounds and waves of spirits and essences of the gods and the earth. Where we were trying to come from, with the loudness and bombast of our music, she made these statements in a more delicate, graceful, articulate, and uniform way than we did.<\/p>\n
\n\tEvery bit as radical as the unspoken politics in the music, Alice decidedly broke from the Baptist faith. At this point in her life, Alice Coltrane could no longer accept the restrictions of her upbringing, especially when the question came to death and reincarnation. It\u2019s a shift reflective of what was happening across the young culture, as more and more kids of the new generation began to interrogate Christianity and find it lacking. As she put it: \u201cThe Western Church has failed, especially with young people. It was set up to serve needs it\u2019s not meeting. Ask a Swami Hindu monk or someone else from the East about life after death and you\u2019ll get answers that are real about direct experience, about looking to God. It has helped me to go on.\u201d<\/p>\n
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