ALICE COLTRANE PASSES

[brownie]

An obituary from the Minneapolis Star Tribune today.

Alice Coltrane, 69, the jazz performer and composer who was inextricably linked with the musical improvisations of her husband, the legendary saxophonist John Coltrane, died Friday of respiratory failure in Los Angeles.

Alice Coltrane, 69, the jazz performer and composer who was inextricably linked with the musical improvisations of her husband, the legendary saxophonist John Coltrane, died Friday of respiratory failure in Los Angeles.

A pianist and organist, Alice Coltrane was noted for her astral compositions and for bringing the harp onto the jazz bandstand. She was also a noted Hindu guru in California.

[Chalupa]

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/c...s-pe-california

OBITUARIES

Alice Coltrane, 69; performer, composer of jazz and New Age music; spiritual leader

By Jon Thurber

Times Staff Writer

January 14, 2007

Alice Coltrane, the jazz performer and composer who was inextricably linked with the adventurous musical improvisations of her late husband, legendary saxophonist John Coltrane, has died. She was 69.

Coltrane died Friday at West Hills Hospital and Medical Center in West Hills, according to an announcement from the family's publicist. She had been in frail health for some time and died of respiratory failure.

Though known to many for her contributions to jazz and early New Age music, Coltrane, a convert to Hinduism, was also a significant spiritual leader and founded the Vedantic Center, a spiritual commune now located in Agoura Hills. A guru of growing repute, she also served as the swami of the San Fernando Valley's first Hindu temple, in Chatsworth.

For much of the last nearly 40 years, she was also the keeper of her husband's musical legacy, managing his archive and estate. Her husband, one of the pivotal figures in the history of jazz, died of liver disease July 17, 1967, at the age of 40.

A pianist and organist, Alice Coltrane was noted for her astral compositions and for bringing the harp onto the jazz bandstand. Her last performances came in the fall, when she participated in an abbreviated tour that included stops in New York and San Francisco, playing with her saxophonist son, Ravi.

She was born Alice McLeod in Detroit on Aug. 27, 1937, into a family with deep musical roots. Anna, her mother, sang and played piano in the Baptist church choir. Alice's half brother Ernie Farrow was a bassist who played professionally with groups led by saxophonist Yusef Lateef and vibes player Terry Gibbs.

Alice began her musical education at age 7, learning classical piano. Her early musical career included performances in church groups as well as in top-flight jazz ensembles led by Lateef, guitarist Kenny Burrell and saxophonist Lucky Thompson.

After studying jazz piano briefly in Paris, she moved to New York and joined Gibbs' quartet.

"As fascinating — and influential — as her later music was, it tended to obscure the fact that she had started out as a solid, bebop-oriented pianist," critic Don Heckman told The Times on Saturday. "I remember hearing, and jamming with, her in the early '60s at photographer W. Eugene Smith's loft in Manhattan. At that time she played with a brisk, rhythmic style immediately reminiscent of Bud Powell.

"Like a few other people who'd heard her either at the loft or during her early '60s gigs with Terry Gibbs, I kept hoping she'd take at least one more foray into the bebop style she played so well," he said.

She met her future husband in 1963 while playing an engagement with Gibbs' group at Birdland in New York City.

"He saw something in her that was beautiful," Gibbs, who has often taken credit for introducing the two, told The Times on Saturday. "They were both very shy in a way. It was beautiful to see them fall in love."

Gibbs called her "the nicest person I ever worked with. She was a real lady."

She left Gibbs' band to marry Coltrane and began performing with his band in the mid-1960s, replacing pianist McCoy Tyner. She developed a style noted for its power and freedom and played tour dates with Coltrane's group in San Francisco, New York and Tokyo.

She would say her husband's musical impact was enormous.

"John showed me how to play fully," she told interviewer Pauline Rivelli and Robert Levin in comments published in "The Black Giants."

"In other words, he'd teach me not to stay in one spot and play in one chord pattern. 'Branch out, open up … play your instrument entirely.' … John not only taught me how to explore, but to play thoroughly and completely."

After his death, she devoted herself to raising their children. Musically, she continued to play within his creative vision, surrounding herself with such like-minded performers as saxophonists Pharoah Sanders and Joe Henderson.

Early albums under her name, including "A Monastic Trio," and "Ptah the El Daoud," were greeted with critical praise for her compositions and playing. "Ptah the El Daoud" featured her sweeping harp flourishes, a sound not commonly heard in jazz recordings. Her last recording, "Translinear Light," came in 2004. It was her first jazz album in 26 years.

Through the 1970s, she continued to explore Eastern religions, traveling to India to study with Swami Satchidananda, the founder of the Integral Yoga Institute.

Upon her return she started a store-front ashram in San Francisco but soon moved it to Woodland Hills in 1975. Located in the Santa Monica Mountains since the early 1980s, the ashram is a 48-acre compound where devotees concentrate on prayer and meditation.

Known within her religious community by her Sanskrit name, Turiyasangitananda, Coltrane focused for much of the last 25 years on composing and recording devotional music such as Hindu chants, hymns and melodies for meditation. She also wrote books, including "Monumental Ethernal," a kind of spiritual biography, and "Endless Wisdom," which she once told a Times reporter contained hundreds of scriptures divinely revealed to her.

In 2001 she helped found the John Coltrane Foundation to encourage jazz performances and award scholarships to young musicians.

In addition to Ravi, she is survived by another son, Oren, who plays guitar and alto sax; a daughter, Michelle, who is a singer; and five grandchildren. Her son John Coltrane Jr. died in an automobile accident in 1982.

[Soul Stream]

Reunited with John. A happy day for Alice I'm sure.

[jazzbo]

Thanks for all the wonderful music Alice!

[alocispepraluger102]

her duo recording turiyana on the charlie haden duets album is one of the of the most beautiful pieces of music i have ever heard.

my favorite picture of her is the cover of 'cohn coltrane at the village vanguard again'

[alocispepraluger102]

her duo recording turiyana on the charlie haden duets album is one of the of the most beautiful pieces of music i have ever heard.

my favorite picture of her is the cover of 'cohn coltrane at the village vanguard again'

i hope this is appropriate:

bony, March, 1989 by Darlene Donloe

Living With The Spirit And Legacy Of JOHN COLTRANE

THE white brick ranch-styled house is tucked inconspicuously behind black wrought-iron gates in Woodland Hills, Calif. Inside, Alice Coltrane, an accomplished jazz musician, sits quietly at the piano, glancing at the photograph of her late husband, the legendary saxophonist, John Coltrane.

It's been more than 20 years since Coltrane's death, and yet the memories are vivid and strong as thoughts of him still consume her.

"I can't miss him," she says. "He's here. I feel him here."

John Coltrane, long considered ahead of his time musically, was one of the jazz world's most innovative musicians. He worked with such jazz greats as Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk early in his career. Known as "Trane" to his friends, he went on to form his own band in the 1950s, playing radical harmonic and melodic changes that some music critics called "sheets of sound."

For four years, John and Alice Coltrane lived as husband and wife, creating "avant garde" jazz until Coltrane's untimely death in 1967. He died from liver cancer at the age of 41. Coltrane's influence over Alice, much like the musical idolatry from his fans, is remarkably strong.

Alice Coltrane claims to have spoken to her dead husband. "I see him physically in my room while I'm in a transcendental state," she says.

The first time she saw Coltrane, she says, was about a month after he died. "I was sitting in my bedroom meditating when the door opened and Coltrane walked in. He had an instrument that looked like the soprano sax he used to play," she recalls. "He was playing it. Sometimes he looked better than when he was alive."

She saw her husband on occasion over a 12-year period, Mrs. Coltrane says. It's been nine years now since she last spoke to John, and she believes it's because he's been reincarnated and is living in his next life.

She admits that many people may find her accounts to be unlikely. "I know people don't understand or believe what I'm saying," she says. "All I can say to them is to mediate and find out for themselves."

Alice McLeod Coltrane was born in Detroit in 1937, growing up in a musical family. She became an accomplished pianist, studying under the jazz pianist Bud Powell and later playing with major musicians.

In 1963, she met John coltrane in a jazz club in Europe, and what began as professional adoration soon gave way to romance. The two were married a year later, and Alice joined her husband's band in 1966 replacing pianist McCoy Tyner. Both Coltrane and his wife became deeply religious and began studying the music and religions of the East--especially India.

It seems ironic that the woman, once intensely devoted to her music, has cast it aside for what she calls "the path of devotion and understanding." She stopped touring extensively 12 years ago and cut herself off from most of her friends. "Some of it was due to location and distance," she offers. "With some, I just didn't call or correspond."

Now, Mrs. Coltrane keeps herself busy with the Vedantic Center, a spiritual center she founded 14 years ago in Agoura, Calif. As the center's director, she holds the title of swami. She also produces a spiritual half-hour television program, which is shown in the spring on Los Angeles' Channel 18.

Although she no longer performs regularly, Mrs. Coltrane carries on her late husband's music through the "John Coltrane Festival." The festival, which is funded through Coltrane's estate, highlights the work and talents of young musicians.

The Coltrane children have followed in their parents' musical footsteps. Michelle, 28; Ravi, 23, and Oran, 21, live in the Los Angeles area, spending their time studying and developing music and frequently attending their mother's spiritual services at the center. (The couple's first born son, John Jr., died in 1982).

She doesn't spend too much time in the "music room," which seems more like a shrine to her fallen hero. The room is the exact replica of the music room in the couple's former home in New York. Everything is in place, the grand piano, the Persian rugs, the many African instruments and Coltrane's numerous awards. Ironically, there is not a single saxophone in the room. One of his saxophones is stored in a back room of the house. The others are used by his sons and a nephew.

For Mrs. Coltrane there are many pleasant memories of her late husband, and for those reasons, she never remarried. "I don't know that I'd want to live in the proximity with less a man," she says... "I could never marry again."

There is talk of recording and performing again. Alice hasn't done so in 12 years. But more than anything else, she longs for others to appreciate Coltrane's musical accomplishments as much as she does. "John needed to take music to a new level," she says. "That's why when you listen to John Coltrane, you hear everything. Everything was in his music. That's why it's important for people to never forget the contributions he made."

COPYRIGHT 1989 Johnson Publishing Co.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

[mikeweil]

I'm totally shocked - this hit me unexpectedly ....

R.I.P., and many thanks for the beautiful music.

Will spin some of her harp playing later when I'm back home.

[clifford_thornton]

Reunited with John. A happy day for Alice I'm sure.

How true, indeed.

[sal]

What a sad day this has turned out to be. RIP.

[chris olivarez]

She was one of my early favorites.RIP to the great lady!!!!!

[John L]

RIP

[Randy Twizzle]

Alice Coltrane, Jazz Artist and Spiritual Leader, Dies at 69

By BEN RATLIFF

Published: January 15, 2007

Alice Coltrane, widow of the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane and the pianist in his later bands, who extended her musical searches into a vocation as a spiritual leader, died on Friday in Los Angeles. She was 69.

The cause was respiratory failure, said Marilyn McLeod, her sister and assistant.

Ms. Coltrane lived in the Woodland Hills section of Los Angeles near the Sai Anantam ashram in Agoura Hills, which she had founded in 1983. Known as Swami Turiyasangitananda, Sanskrit for “the highest song of God,” she was the guiding presence of the 48-acre ashram, set among the Santa Monica mountains, where 25 to 30 full-time residents study the Vedic scriptures of ancient India, as well as Buddhist and Islamic texts.

She was also the manager of Coltrane’s estate, as well as of his music-publishing company, Jowcol Music, and the John Coltrane Foundation, which has given out scholarships to music students since 2001.

As a pianist, her playing was dense with arpeggios that suggested the harp; the instrument had an important place in her life. One of her childhood heroes was the Detroit-based jazz harpist Dorothy Ashby, and she was later motivated to study that instrument by Coltrane, who loved its sound.

Raised in a musical family in Detroit, Ms. Coltrane played piano and organ for church choirs and Sunday school from age 7. As a young musician in Detroit, she was studying classical music and playing piano in jazz clubs, in a group including her half-brother, the bassist Ernie Farrow, and the trombonist George Bohannon.

In her early 20s she lived briefly in Paris, where she studied informally with the pianist Bud Powell, and was briefly married to the singer Kenny (Pancho) Hagood, with whom she had a daughter, Michelle. She returned to Detroit, playing in a band with her brother, and then moved to New York in 1962. A year later she met John Coltrane.

She was playing vibraphone and Powell-inspired bebop piano in a group led by the drummer [sic] Terry Gibbs at Birdland, on a double-bill with Coltrane’s quartet. Coltrane was well established by the beginning of the 1960s, though she hadn’t known about him for long before moving to New York; the first time she ever heard him, she said, was on the 1961 album “Africa/Brass.”

They connected instantly; she moved in with him and traveled with the Coltrane band. By the summer of 1964 they had relocated from New York City to a house in Dix Hills, on Long Island. They married in 1965 in Juárez, Mexico, coinciding with Coltrane’s divorce from his first wife, Naima Grubbs. By that time she and Coltrane had already had two of their three children together — John Jr., who died in 1982, and Ravi, who by his 30s had become an acclaimed jazz saxophonist.

Ms. Coltrane is survived by her sisters, Marilyn McLeod of Winnetka, Calif., and Margaret Roberts of Detroit; her daughter, Michelle Carbonell-Coltrane of Los Angeles; her sons Oran Coltrane of Los Angeles and Ravi, of Brooklyn; and five grandchildren.

In 1966, as the Coltrane band’s music became wilder and more prolix, she became its pianist. She replaced McCoy Tyner, who quit without rancor, largely because he could no longer hear himself on the bandstand. Though she wasn’t Mr. Tyner’s technical equal and lacked his percussive power, she fit with the group’s new purpose; by the time of the recordings that would become the album “Stellar Regions,” in February 1967, she was fluid and energetic within the group’s freer new language.

She told an interviewer that Coltrane helped her to play “thoroughly and completely.” This meant stretching the definitions of rhythm and harmony, but she also meant something broader; Coltrane was talking about “universalizing” his music, creating a nondenominational religious art that took cues from ancient history and foreign scales. He helped her to sign a contract as a solo artist with his label, Impulse. And he introduced her to Eastern philosophy and religion, which became the main focus of her life.

After Coltrane’s death from liver cancer in 1967, Ms. Coltrane took a vow of celibacy. And at first she made music closely related to his, often reflective, minor and modal; on piano or harp she played flowing, harplike phrases over a deep midtempo swing, and she worked with the bassist Jimmy Garrison and the drummer Rashied Ali from John Coltrane’s band. On records like “A Monastic Trio,” “Ptah, the El Daoud” and “Journey in Satchidananda,” she was able to reconcile blues phrases and jazz rhythm with a kind of ancient, flowing sound.

Ms. Coltrane met her guru, Swami Satchidananda, in 1970, and in more recent years became a devotee of Sathya Sai Baba. By the early 1970s she developed a renewed interest in the organ, because it produced a continuous sound; she wanted to make a meditative music that wouldn’t be interrupted by pauses for breath. Her 1972 record, “Universal Consciousness,” with Ms. Coltrane on Wurlitzer organ and string arrangements by Ornette Coleman, became a far-out classic. In the mid-70s she switched to the Warner Brothers label and made four more records, including orchestras and Hindu chants. Thereafter, until 2004, she made records purely for religious purposes, distributing them privately.

After first establishing the Vedanta Center in San Francisco, she moved her ashram to Agoura Hills, just northwest of Los Angeles, and expanded it. In the past 10 years, she performed the occasional concert with Ravi, and in 2004 she finally returned to recording jazz, making “Translinear Light,” produced by Ravi, who reunited her with some old colleagues like Charlie Haden and Jack DeJohnette, as well as a chorus of singers from her ashram.

[ep1str0phy]

Found out about this Sunday morning, listened to World Galaxy and Universal Consciousness over the drive up from LA to San Francisco. History will write and say all sorts of damn things, but she was a truly beautiful soul.

[gslade]

Her music will live on

R. I. P.

[Guest youmustbe]

I was told she had fluid on the heart, but was trying to cure herself and her heart gave out.

[Soul Stream]

I was looking at iTunes for some Alice Coltrane and was surprised to find a couple of japanese-only impulse CDs...stuff ya can't get here. Wow. Also, Lon Armstrong wrote some nice stuff in review of her strings impulse lp.... nice work lon.

[alocispepraluger102]

anything written about how her asian influences may have influenced the course of john's music, and ours? lt seems even if she never had played, she may have influenced the music significantly.

Edited January 17, 2007 by alocispepraluger102

[mikeweil]

History will write and say all sorts of damn things, but she was a truly beautiful soul.

Very well said!

[alocispepraluger102]

nday, January 14, 2007

Alice Coltrane - a jazz supreme

Alice Coltrane, the jazz performer and composer who was inextricably linked with the music of her late husband, legendary saxophonist John Coltrane, has died in Los Angeles. She was 69. Here, in tribute, is an article I ran in August last year.

It's a Sunday afternoon in the Fillmore section of San Francisco, and at the Church of St John Coltrane the service is in full swing. The church's founder, His Eminence Archbishop Franzo King, a tall, stick-thin 60-year-old dressed in a white cassock with a green scarf and a fuchsia pink skullcap, is dancing in front of an 8ft-high Byzantine-style icon that depicts John Coltrane holding a saxophone with flames emerging from it, a gold halo around his head.

The archbishop's son, Rev Franzo King Jr, on tenor saxophone, is playing a version of Lonnie's Lament, from Coltrane's album Crescent, that eventually merges into Spiritual. A choir led by Archbishop King's wife Marina is singing the Lord's Prayer over the music, while a four-piece band (with his daughter Wanika on bass) accompanies them. Thirty or so congregants are crowded into the tiny room, the air thick with the smell of incense. Some are dancing and clapping and saying Hallelujah! while others are sitting with eyes closed in silent meditation. In a corner, the 11-year-old Franzo King III blows on his own horn.

The centrepiece of the "Coltrane liturgy" is his 1964 album, A Love Supreme, what the church calls his "testimony". As the band goes into Acknowledgement, the first part of A Love Supreme, the choir sings the words to Psalm 23. When they reach the part where, on the album, Coltrane chants the words "A Love Supreme" over and over like a mantra, Archbishop King walks among the congregation with a microphone. "Let's have some love!" he yells. "Don't just take it! Give!"

From Ministry of sound in the Guardian. And now hear A Love Supreme Part 1 complete (7' 43") and watch the video online.

John Coltrane saw his album-length suite A Love Supreme as his gift to God. The album was recorded by John Coltrane's quartet on December 9, 1964 at the Van Gelder studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. The album is a four-part suite, broken up into tracks called "Acknowledgement" (which contains the famous mantra that gave the suite its name), "Resolution," "Pursuance," and "Psalm." It is intended to be a spiritual album, broadly representative of a personal struggle for purity. The final track, "Psalm," uniquely corresponds to the wording of a devotional poem Coltrane included in the liner notes. A Love Supreme is usually listed among the greatest jazz albums of all time. It was ranked eighty-second in a 2005 survey held by British television's Channel 4 to determine the 100 greatest albums of all time. The elements of harmonic freedom heard on this album indicated the changes to come in Coltrane's music.

* For more on the African Orthodox Church of St John Coltrane, 351 Divisadero St. San Francisco, CA follow this link.

Notes on A Love Supreme based on Wikipedia. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

If you enjoyed this post take An Overgrown Path to Love of the blues

Posted by Pliable at Sunday, January 14, 2007

Labels: african orthodox church, alice coltrane, Jazz, john coltrane, san francisco

[7/4]

Tribute and memorial on WKCR.org, today - Feb. 18, 2007 until 9pm EST.

Edited February 18, 2007 by 7/4

[7/4]

with some live music including Gary Lucas!

[7/4]

Ah...I dig it all.

They just had interview with Reggie Workman.

[7/4]

Yikes...electric guitars with fuzz pedals, whammy bars and loops!

[JSngry]

there is NO universial conciousness, baby--

Of course there is. How can there not be?

[7/4]

The universial conciousness will not be televised.