Something About Alice Coltrane

Ok, so she's John Coltrane's wife. By that, I mean that I think that if you didn't know anything about her and you came across her records (or just her name, for that matter), you might think, "I didn't know Coltrane had a wife!" Or, "who was this woman married to Coltrane?" Which is probably, in some ways, the perfect question to ask. Who was she? Why did he marry her or she him? What does her music have to do with that marriage? What does the marriage of the higher order spiritual soldier of interstitial (I thank my grad school buddy, Fitz Fitzgerald for that word) spatial species (him) to a master mistress player queen of harp, piano, organ, strings, and divine-ated concept mean (her) for the world of music? Is music greater than the world itself? Is music the most divine expression of the greatest world there will ever have been?

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But, you know, she isn't anyone's wife. Her being a "she" doesn't give anyone the authority to "marry" her off to anyone and have this marriage define the "she" that is her. Or maybe she's a wife but we don't get to know anything about what her wifeliness is because no one but one man - which isn't us -- is married to her. Meaning, the wife part isn't ours to assess, isn't ours to imagine, is only ours to project. So what we then get is the music part, the everything that are her endless sound. But it is interesting, too, because Alice seems to have never presented herself without the "wife" part, and not just by using the name "Coltrane". She seems to have always presented this aspect of herself with pride, this wifeliness, this timelessness that links her to the name "Coltrane", because she and he were family, the familar, and their music is each part of a familial and existent world, a world of the beyond of music, a world of the beyond of spirit where the music they made is the music that seeks the spirit beyond the spirit, the light that shines behind the light that shines, the cloud whose unknowing is that by which what the world has become undone and remade in an image of absolute light, a room inside, a passageway to the immediate melody of the highest of all worlds.

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I am already terrified to write about this subject. Mostly because I don't want to go anywhere besides into the heart of the sunrise that is the music of Alice Coltrane. But the heart of the sunrise (Yes lyrics -- "Love comes to you and you follow / Lose one on to the heart of the sunrise") is where the terror lies, not because love hurts, but because fire hurts, and if love is fire, then love is the fire that burns me with the promise of tomorrow. And the promise of tomorrow is the utter inferno of today.

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It isn't easy to find all of Alice Coltrane's records. Her complete discography is listed here, on her website. I have a few "easy-to-gets" -- A Monastic Trio; Ptah, the El Daoud; Journey in Satchidananda. I have a couple "stumbled-upon-can't-believe-I-founds" -- Huntington Ashram Monastery, Universal Consciousness. I have one "I-have-never-seen-this-before-and-won't-again" -- Lord of Lords. I owned Transfiguration for a time, but the organ solo on "Leo, Part One" and "Leo, Part Two" was so intense I thought that just having the record around would burn my house down, if not a sharpshoot a pure bullet hole of love in my heart, so I sold it back and I hide my eyes when I go to the store and see her face staring off to the side as she sits at the organ on the album cover, not because I am ashamed, but because I know she will have never been ashamed of anything, and that she would speak to me with a soft ecstatic compassion and know that if I didn't ever understand, that my not knowing this would harm nothing but the sun, and not even the sun, but the sum total of my inner image of the sun. (One afternoon, as Leo, Part 1 became Leo, Part 2, the organ that filled the stereo and then the bedroom and then the hallway and the closets and the living room and kitchen and doorways and doorframes and windows all around with the flames of fury, the flames of impossible and essential loss -- one afternoon, I think I learned that it might take me 30 years to hear what I was hearing and beat back against the flames with my own mind. That same afternoon I brought the record back to the record store with a promise to remember my development of that single moment, my mind half-melted and half mettled.) There's a record with Carlos Santana, Illuminations (I won't give a link to it because I protest Carlos in the name of Alice, my contribution to what she contributed to everyone) -- I have never trusted dear Carlos when it comes to improvisation, but that's why I'm me and Alice is Alice. World Galaxy can't be found anywhere (I mean, conveniently or within a reasonable price for a record whose reason transcends that of all musical economies). Perhaps it is lost so that we can imagine it, and only misimagine it. First, though, let's go here to lose what we have so as to rebuild our imagining:

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The thing I always immediately think when I put on Journey in Satchidananda is that that is one deep well of feeling, and at the bottom of the well is where every sound begins, and the sky is where every sound arises, and the sun is where each sound separates, and the All Knowing is where listening creates the sound that begins, that has arisen, that will separate, that will return. The first track of the album begins with a bass figure from the bottom of the earth, a simple figure that you can immediately recognize as part of the known world, and then the otherwordly ancestry spiderweb of the tamboura falls across it, a shaft of piercing light through a window, and then Coltrane's harp comes into the thick, begins the pure thinking that is surrounded by a sea of percussion, sailed upon by a saxophonic melody, a deepest feeling that is the blissful consciousness of satchidananda. We are on the journey within this bliss, and every harp note plucked and picked and rattled by Alice is the sound of this bliss explicitly named and framed before our vanished eyes. We see only what we hear, which is what we feel, which is where we go and how we have gotten there.

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I imagine it must have been strange for her, making her own way, after being so close to the giant that Coltrane always was. But I don't think I can imagine it right, because partly what I can't imagine is Alice herself, with everything she thought about music and everything she heard music to be. The music that is hers is music that can only be heard as its own music. It is jazz because the music she made is meant to deepen the well, sweeten the water that is jazz, but it isn't jazz out of the convenience that instrumental, improvisational, African-American music is jazz. I imagine it must have been strange for her in that she seems estranged from everything but the Lord of Lords, the holy night that is the top of a lonely mountain and the lightning flash that composes the terror of the oldest world we have ever known.

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Universal Consciousness -- first off, how can that be an album title? Sure, they are just words, and words can be the title of anything, but the that begins with the meaning, which is tendered heavily, a price to be part of paying as being part of the universe that encompasses our consciousness. Alice Coltrane's concept of the conscience -- the inner knowledge of -- the thing that makes us us and not us in being beyond us -- shines, radiates, remembers, inculcates, calculates....

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The record begins with something that seems like the sound of what would lie on the outskirts of the world, as if these sounds could only be heard in a very specific place, a place that, paradoxically, one could only get to through hearing these sounds. There are a quartet of violins that squeal a punctual and punctuated melody interspersed with panicked and wracked nerve percussion, like jazz and like what jazz would be if the jazz were religious and sun baked in the religion of a sea-swept world, with only the sea to guide us further away from the universe that drags us, stone-henged, back to the mundane earth.

By the time we get to "Oh Allah" (above), the violins hover over us like a cloud of credible proof that there is something about all of this, a spirit that is the body, a soul that is the flesh. Alice uses this intro to set up one of those organ solos that she makes, over bass, drums, and air and wind -- I don't know how to describe one of her organ solos other than it sounds like wind blowing through stiffer wind, like water flowing through stiller waters, and this doubling of form with another form is the forum that allows her to flow through everything. But her playing, too, aggressively pursues the highest calling, its as if it can only always ascend in a way so as to open the sky and burst through it with the flames that are the meaning of the deepest cracks in the deepest earth.

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Alice Coltrane was as heavy as a bright sky that fills itself with the possibility that you are part of its delicate fabric, the clouds that remember the sea.

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The heaviest of her records is Lord of Lords, a heavy set of heavy-set tracks. "Going Home" (listed here --

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is almost just like "Oh Allah" in that the main content of the 10 minute piece is a wonderfully distended and swelling organ solo, like waves that rise and crash against a set of cragged rocks hundreds of feet tall. Each note that Coltrane plays seems itself hundreds of feet tall, and when there is no organ, there are choruses of strings and voices stretched across the window of the sky, taut and tight and open and emptying everything out of sound but ringing notes notation the triumph of faith over the will. It's hard to describe about this music partly because the form of it is the form of the prayer it seeks to invoke, which is a heavy prayer, a prayer to the heaviness of the One that is All.

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But I think it makes sense to honor the mystery of time and sequence end with something earlier from Alice, from Huntington Ashram Monastery.

This track shares elements with Journey In Satchidananda -- simple, immediate bass floor rumble non-jazz jazz riff, handclap church percussion, and the flurry of harp spider ice dance all atop everything. Huntington was Alice's 2nd solo record, from 1969, and the opening track, which is just her harping her way through every corner of the universe over the simplified rhythm section, is her happiness and hope for all of us, for mankind, even. It's this piece that shows me that the world through her eyes was the world of the Coltrane that he didn't know how to have, that he knew he couldn't have unless he married this world and it became the past of his family, the essence of that something he needed to have, that something about everything that is the piano, the harp, the organ, the strings, the sound of everything shaking the sky and tearing the night into ecstatic harmony.