# CD review: Alice Coltrane – Shiva-Loka – 1971 – 2024: Video, CD cover

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2024/02/16/cd-review-alice-coltrane-shiva-loka-1971-2024-video-cd-cover/
- Published: 2024-02-16T00:04:29+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**Alice Coltrane’s 1971 concert at Carnegie Hall will be released in full for the
first time, via Impulse! Out March 22, the live album presents Coltrane’s first 
Carnegie Hall performance as a leader, joined by an all-star band comprising Pharoah
Sanders, Archie Shepp, Jimmy Garrison, Cecil McBee, Ed Blackwell, Clifford Jarvis,
Kumar Kramer, and Tulsi Reynolds. They played four songs: “Journey in Satchidananda”
and “Shiva-Loka” (from Journey in Satchidananda) and versions of John Coltrane’s“
Africa,” and “Leo.” Listen to “Shiva-Loka” below.**

The release launches Impulse! and Verve’s “Year of Alice,” which also includes a
performance from Ravi Coltrane, Michelle Coltrane, Brandee Younger, and more at 
Birdland in New York. In 2021, Impulse! released Kirtan: Turiya Sings, a stripped-
down version of Coltrane’s 1982 album.

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Today, we revisit a marvel of spiritual jazz, an album overflowing with transcendence,
harmony, and grief. Alice Coltrane’s daughter Sita Michelle once recalled a morning
when she was lying in bed before school. She awoke to the sound of a beautiful harp
and thought, “If heaven is like this, then I’ll be certainly ready to welcome it
when I get my chance.” The story goes that John Coltrane had ordered that harp, 
but died before it could arrive. Since Alice’s career as a bandleader took off in
the years after John’s death, and her practice centered around this silvery new 
instrument, it’s tempting to see the harp as the gift that he left her to perpetuate
their shared musical legacy.

But Alice was not Orpheus, and John was not Apollo. To suggest that the harp itself
began her career would be to deny the intensity of her talent and do wrong by every
wife whose legacy has been yoked to her husband’s. Though their influences dovetail,
their oeuvres remain separate, and within the spectacular and emotional Journey 
in Satchidananda, the knot at the heart of Alice Coltrane’s harp story starts to
unfold.

Born Alice McLeod in the Detroit summer of 1937, she was a talent from the start,
playing piano and organ in her local Baptist church. Because the music she would
go on to make is so cosmic, so beatific, it’s easy to mistake Alice Coltrane for
somebody without rigorous musical training. But she performed classical piano at
concerts around Detroit in her teens. In 1960, she moved to Paris and took up jazz
under the mentorship of pianist Bud Powell. By the following year, she was performing
as the intermission pianist at the Blue Note in Paris.

The first man Alice Coltrane married delivered her, in a way, to the second. She
wedded jazz vocalist Kenny “Pancho” Hagood in 1960, but almost as soon as she conceived
their child, their relationship deteriorated due to his heroin abuse and she returned
to America. With their daughter Sita Michelle in tow, Alice arrived in Detroit later
that year and her career as a professional musician began in earnest. She gigged
around Detroit, eventually joining Terry Gibbs’ quartet on the piano. She was a 
sought-after improviser, notable for her commitment to trance-like playing that 
transcended the rhythms her bandleader established. While playing a New York show
with Gibbs’ band in 1962, she met John Coltrane on a shared bill at Metropole. The
following year Alice abruptly quit Gibbs’ band, telling him that she was going to
marry John. John and Alice had three children together.

John died of liver cancer in 1967. He left Alice bereft, or whatever word is stronger
than “bereft.” She couldn’t sleep and she saw visions; she lost weight. In the depths
of her grief, Alice had visited a man named Swami Satchidananda, a guru who had 
spoken to the crowds at Woodstock, and become his disciple. His advice and spiritual
guidance soothed her spirit.

Coltrane was by this stage deeply engaged with matters of the spirit. Her compositions
began to bend psychedelically to musical traditions around the world, but remained
flavored by the bebop environment of her Detroit youth. She recorded Journey in 
Satchidananda, named for her spiritual adviser Swami Satchidananda, in 1970. All
of Coltrane’s early albums bear witness to her exploration of mythology and religion,
particularly from Egypt and India, the latter of which she visited several times
in the 1970s. But it’s Journey in Satchidananda that pays full tribute to the transformation
that she underwent in the late 1960s—as a human being and artist.

As that crystalline harp makes so immediately clear, this is a record as much about
the soul as it is about skilled orchestration. The clue is in the title: it’s a 
journey. Coltrane takes us across uncharted territory in jazz composition, drawing
from multiple cultures and diverse instruments, but she also shows us emotion in
motion. Because she refuses to stay in one key, instead treating the album’s themes
as a set of recurring melodic shapes, the very texture of Journey is defined by 
transition, process, and flow. Its music has no beginning or end. Instead, as the
first bars of the opening track demonstrate, Coltrane is working with the principle
of looping and transcendence.

You should listen to Journey beginning to end while lying on the ground with your
eyes closed, because those are the best conditions for performing the kind of visualization
that Alice Coltrane’s liner notes request: “Anyone listening to this selection should
try to envision himself floating on an ocean of Satchinandaji’s love,” she wrote,“
which is literally carrying countless devotees across the vicissitudes and stormy
blasts of life to the other shore.”

And so I spread myself out over the floor of my apartment until I felt like a conduit
between the earth below and the universe above. The record opens with three droning
tamboura notes, anchoring the title track. The three-note phrase looped around, 
holding me inside it, while a soft and well-assured bassline spread out beneath.
Then Alice enters. Within the theme played on the tamboura—a long-necked string 
drone instrument with an almost reedy timbre—her harp sounds like a sprite, or a
child set free after a long confinement. It dances upwards and downwards unselfconsciously,
as if nobody is watching. With my eyes closed, it sounded like a beam of light on
water.

When the legendary free jazz pioneer Pharoah Sanders joins, his saxophone melody
could go anywhere, since Cecil McBee’s bass is so steady (McBee by this time had
played with Miles Davis, Yusef Lateef, and Freddie Hubbard). On this track as on
the next four, dissonance is a place to visit but not to stay. Every top melody 
is an exploration, but Coltrane’s orchestration always provides a stable and repetitive
place of return. That drone-and-bass texture comes from McBee and the tamboura, 
played by a musician credited only as “Tulsi,” while at the other end of the register
Sanders’ sax and Vishnu Wood’s oud join Coltrane’s harp in a kind of sparkling, 
freeform dance.

The orchestration is broad and deep, unmistakably influenced by Coltrane’s interest
in South Asian tradition. Nothing as boring as chord progressions governs Journey.
Instead, like John, Alice worked in the modal style, discarding functional harmony
in favor of freely-chosen chords around a root note. The album’s harmony references
Indian scales and other non-diatonic series, but mostly it runs off its own themes,
like that opening three-note drone. Melodies wander across the record from instrument
to instrument, and track to track. They recur, alter, and they play.

On track two, “Shiva Loka,” Alice’s harp grows stronger, unfurling into an own entity
with its own character. The track is named for a goddess, the Dissolver of Creation.
The three-note circle from track one is now a sonorous base, its resonance becoming
thicker and more lively. The bells speed up and scatter over the music’s surface.
The pulse is thicker too, taking us off the beat and into a real rhythm. It’s hard
to dance while lying on the ground, but “Shiva Loka” makes that possible.

The groove continues in “Stopover Bombay,” a train rocking on its tracks. It’s only
on “Something about John Coltrane” that things quiet down. Coltrane switches over
to piano and it falls like rain, patterning the space with cool irregularity. When
Sanders’ sax beings to scream, you hardly know whether he is laughing or crying.
It’s a track animated by intense emotion that takes you in every direction there
is. As it drew to a close, I felt as if I had been returned unharmed through a storm,
back to the circle of tamboura that had protected me from the start.

In the final track, the live-recorded “Isis and Osiris,” we finally meet Alice’s
sadness. Over 11 committed minutes, Vishnu Wood gives us an oud melody that sounds
trapped inside the minor scale. The oud’s sound is sharp but resonant. He sobs and
he trills, taking the record’s grief to a conclusive pitch. Then everything goes
quiet, and the journey is over.

In the long moment before I peeled myself off the floor, I felt the spirit of Coltrane
still touched by grief. It’s so hard to describe—to put into the language of words,
rather than of sound—but among the record’s abundant mix of emotion, you can hear
pain. There is no Journey without John; no Satchidananda without the Swami; no Swami
without the grief. Instead of a binary split between music and life, or husband 
and wife, this record reveals that all these elements of Alice Coltrane’s life existed
for her in an all-encompassing divine flow. His name may have cast a shadow over
hers, but Alice Coltrane was not trying to escape it.

When I finally opened my eyes, a beam of sunshine flooded through my apartment. 
Like the cascading harp at the center of the album, the sunbeam seemed to say to
me that art is the only thing that exists beyond death. Shadows don’t exist without
light. Each defines the other. Alice Coltrane made Journey in Satchidananda from
an in-between place, amid the unlocatable flow of different emotions, different 
lives, different traditions. Coltrane’s music is a journey, this record says, and
a destination all of its own.

**The Carnegie Hall Concert (Live):**

01 Journey in Satchidananda (Live)
 02 Shiva-Loka (Live) 03 Africa (Live) 04 Leo(
Live)

![Shiva-Loka (Live) - EP - Album by Alice Coltrane - Apple Music](https://i0.wp.
com/is1-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Music116/v4/ed/1e/e7/ed1ee797-5b97-42b9-f4b0-
593ac6ddc84a/24UMGIM00937.rgb.jpg/1200x1200bf-60.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

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