Alice Coltrane: Journey to the Temple

Rightly or not, the musical legacy that Alice Coltrane has been perpetuating for the last fifty years or so, will probably always remain linked in some way to her late husband. And while John Coltrane blew a nutso/schitzo saxophone, his wife created a body of work that’s not only granted easier access to the uninitiated listener, but also has as much spirituality imbued in it as his own work. That’s not to slag off the dead – how untasteful. But none of those aforementioned points are really debatable. Alice Coltrane works in lean, lilting piano solos and washes of harp that her husband couldn’t have approached in any manner.

Journey in Satchidananda (1970) is generally considered this Coltrane’s master statement. And it well may be. But that doesn’t discount her prior or subsequent work. A Monastic Trio, released three years prior, presented a discombobulated set that cherry picks a few tracks from John’s Cosmic Music, which itself is a compilation. The trio disc, which at some points includes Pharaoh Sanders, making it a quartet, might then be considered something of a warm up for Huntington Ashram Monastery. The 1969 released album has not only a consistent group setting – and an actual trio in the form of Coltrane, Ron Carter and Rashied Ali - but also a more fully recognized vision of what Alice would continue on to do through the next few decades.

Over the album’s six tracks, Coltrane switches between piano and harp. Her approach on each instrument oddly echoes back and forth. The flowing nature of her harp on “Paramahansa Lake” is mirrored by the keys on the following track entitled “Via Sivanandagar.” The one difference between Coltrane’s approach on these instruments is due to the fact that soloing on the harp seems to be pretty much impossible. So while the single note runs that Coltrane gets into when sitting at the piano are endlessly knotted up in her chording, when plying harp strings its all windy notes and airy pronouncements.

Not having a reed player on the disc, as Sanders is absent from this date, allows Coltrane and her rhythm section the entirety of the album to work off of each other. And while it should be well known, Ali was John’s favored drummer at the end of his life performing on the last recordings with the saxophonist. Those efforts found Ali flailing in some pseudo-religious manner that while all ecstatic and appropriate wouldn’t have fit into Huntington Ashram Monastery, which makes his staid approach all the more notable. Of course, the fact that bells just as well accompany Alice’s compositions is part of it, but mention should still be made.

With Ptah the El Daoud just a year off, the steadily more confident group leader had worked out a great deal of what was to come next. And while the albums released in 1970 are more fully orchestrated, Alice Coltrane’s earliest records are just as rewarding and even more important to the ‘60s culture from where each was birthed then her work would be during the following decade.