Spirituality in Jazz
John Coltrane, Blue Train Session
Alice Coltrane
John & Alice Coltrane by Chuck Stewart, April 1966
“NO MATTER WHAT … IT IS WITH GOD. HE IS GRACIOUS AND MERCIFUL. HIS WAY IS IN LOVE, THROUGH WHICH WE ALL ARE. IT IS TRULY – A LOVE SUPREME “– John Coltrane
It was during my final year of university – more specifically when I found myself spending long, tedious hours writing my dissertation – where I became fully immersed in jazz music like never before.
See, I knew I didn’t possess an adequate attention span to be able to listen to music with lyrics or even a podcast whilst studying/working without it becoming a distraction, but at the same time I knew it was going to be absolute torture to sit in my room or in the library and type up close to 10,000 words in complete silence. I’d start to listen to various bits of my favourite electronic music whilst typing, Robert Hood’s ‘Internal Empire’, Oneohtrix Point Never’s ‘R Plus Seven’ and almost everything by Aphex Twin, but it would make everything feel too intense… I’d end up sitting there thinking that I was in a scene from one of the Matrix movies. Writing an essay should never be that stimulating.
My knowledge of jazz music at this point was still very minimal, but that being said, I already had probably the best entry point to the genre on my phone – Miles Davis’ 1959 album ‘Kind of Blue’. I’d given it a few spins in the past and I remembered the song ‘So What’ in particular as not too long before I had seen the late Virgil Abloh incorporate the song in a live DJ set where he somehow managed to mix it into ‘T-Shirt’ by Migos which was interesting to say the least. From here, I explored more of Miles’ extensive discography, which naturally led me to find out about more prominent jazz musicians from the genre’s golden era: Sun Ra and his Arkestra, Bobby Hutcherson, Ahmad Jamal, Pharoah Sanders, Dorothy Ashby and of course John and Alice Coltrane to name a few, and it was the stories of the latter two, and overall the sub-genre of ‘spiritual jazz’ that they belonged in, that piqued my interest the most.
Alice Coltrane, born Alice McLeod, grew up in Detroit during the 40s and 50s in a musically enthused household. Her mother was a member of the choir at her church; her half-brother, Ernest Farrow, was to soon become a jazz bassist whilst her younger sister, Marilyn, went on to become a songwriter at Motown. Alice would regularly perform as a pianist at various clubs around Detroit before moving to Paris in 1959 to further study jazz and classical music where she would play alongside the likes of Bud Powell whilst also working as the intermission pianist at the once-famous Blue Note Club. By 1963, Alice had returned to Detroit doing gigs around the city when she met John Coltrane who, by this time, was a successful jazz musician and star in his own right.
Coltrane was born in North Carolina but moved to Philadelphia at the age of 17, where he first witnessed Charlie Parker play saxophone, a defining moment in his early career that would solidify his love for the genre. After a year serving in the U.S. Navy, Coltrane arrived back in Philadelphia in 1946, eager to become a part of the flourishing bebop jazz scene. He would practice his craft endlessly and by the end of the 40s, having been in multiple bands, he was playing the saxophone alongside Parker, the man who initially inspired him to take music seriously. A few years on, Coltrane would find himself crossing paths and working with legendary jazz figures such as Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. Fast forward to the early 60s and, after a series of albums with Atlantic Records, we are brought to the period where John and Alice meet. They would go on to get married, start a family of three children, and play together in the same band with John on saxophone and Alice on piano.
In the liner notes of John Coltrane’s 1965 magnum opus, ‘A Love Supreme’, he writes “by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music. I feel this has been granted through His grace. ALL PRAISE TO GOD”. This was written in reference to a spiritual awakening Coltrane supposedly experienced in 1957, amidst a long-term struggle with alcohol and heroin addiction. Famously, as a result of his ongoing vices, he was kicked out of Miles Davis’ band he was playing in at the time for becoming increasingly unreliable and erratic, the last straw for Davis being when Coltrane showed up to a live performance ‘smashed out of his mind and barely able to play’.
This spiritual awakening and reaffirmation of his faith in God would prove to be a defining moment in Coltrane’s life and career, but it wasn’t his entry point into religion or spirituality at all.
Coltrane grew up in a Christian household, with both his maternal and paternal grandfathers (William Blair and William H. Coltrane, respectively) being Reverends at churches within the state of North Carolina. Furthermore, as well as Alice’s latter influence on John, Coltrane’s first wife Naima was a Muslim convert who also aided him in forming an interest in spirituality. It’s also important to keep in mind that this was during a time when there was a large influx of African Americans (especially musicians) being introduced to Islam through the Ahmadiyya movement as it was generally believed that converting to a Muslim faith provided spiritual protection from harmful pitfalls that accompanied the profession, alongside a safeguard from the stigma of white supremacy whilst offering an ‘opportunity to clear musicians from the labyrinth of American oppression and the myths about Black Americans’. Although the Ahmadiyya movement was founded by a South Asian man, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, as well as being based in India, it appealed to Black Americans due to its racially inclusive doctrines, ambitious internationalist scope and notion of continuous prophecy (Hammer and Safi, 2013). It’s argued that although Coltrane did not become a Muslim, he was influenced to a certain extent by the spirit of Islam brought on by the Ahmadis, for example, on ‘A Love Supreme’, Coltrane repeatedly echoes the phrase ‘Bismillah’, the opening phrase of almost every chapter of the Qur’an.
Islam wouldn’t be the only religion that Coltrane would seek knowledge and inspiration from. In this sense, he became something I refer to as a ‘seeker of truth’. Coltrane would go on to explore a variety of spiritual, religious, and philosophical texts which included The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, the Bhagavad Gita, and Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi (these three books all being rooted in Hinduism, with the latter delving into similarities between spirituality in the Eastern and Western hemispheres). In addition to this, Coltrane studied the Qur’an, the Bible, Kabbalah (a highly influential tradition of Jewish Mysticism) and Zen Buddhism. He also focused on non-religious doctrines and New Age thought such as cosmology, the philosophy of Jiddu Krishnamurti, and Plato and Socrates, as well as educating himself on African history, treating everything he learnt with respect and openness. Despite showing interest in a multitude of different religions and philosophies, Coltrane is argued to have spoken of God from more of a Universalist point of view instead of a traditional religious one – this is generally accepted as the case since he is quoted in the liner notes of his album ‘Meditations’ (1965) saying “I believe in all religions, the truth itself doesn’t have any name on it to me, and each man has to find it for himself”.
In October 1965, Coltrane recorded a 29-minute single named ‘Om’, referring to the sacred syllable in Hinduism which symbolises the entirety of the Universe and the essence of the Ultimate Reality (Para Brahman). Coltrane described Om as the "first syllable, the primal word, the word of power" and the song itself contains chants from both the Bhagavad Gita as well as the Bardo Thodol (also known in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead). His study of Indian music led him to believe that certain sounds and scales could "produce specific emotional meanings." After ‘A Love Supreme’, Coltrane’s style of music became more avant-garde and experimental, made by him abandoning traditional musical structures and tonality and spirituality went on to become a stand-out dimension within his music, with the names of follow-up albums having many spiritual connotations behind them such as ‘Ascension’ and ‘Meditations’ (1966).
John and Alice shared a strong interest for spirituality together and this was something that aided in strengthening the powerful and one-of-a-kind bond they had with one another. She would refer to him as her first guru who taught her about Eastern religions and philosophies. As she would recall, “he liked to meditate, and we used to meditate together. I think it started with him, because I was born into a Christian family… and it wasn’t so much a turning away from that, as it was a direction that I was given to follow”.
However, on July 17th 1967, just 5 years after the couple first met, John Coltrane passed away from liver cancer at the tender age of 40. This would end up having a profound effect on Alice for the rest of her life. But where John’s journey ended, hers would continue.
Alice’s period of mourning saw her in complete distress: she was losing weight, refusing to eat or sleep and reportedly suffering from hallucinations. The death of her husband had left her devastated. After what she referred to as her time of ‘tapas’, a Sanskrit term signifying a period of trial and tribulation that is intended to cleanse and enhance a person’s spirit, she would be introduced to the Indian guru Swami Satchidananda Saraswati during his tour of the United States in the late 60s. From here, she would be filled with the same amount of devotion to the Creator as John once was – taking a vow of celibacy and going on a 5-week long pilgrimage to India with the Swami; the only difference in their devotion being the way in which they expressed it. In Alice’s mind, Hindu traditions would be able to accommodate the kind of universalist ethos that she and John had imagined near the end of his life. John espoused a universal, non-denominational approach stating that “no road is an easy one, but all paths lead to God” and although this was also a long-standing belief of Alice - that the divine could be found through any church - it was the Vaishnavism branch of the ancient Vedic religion that she ended up choosing to devote herself to and teach others about. Vaishnavism is essentially a sect within Hinduism where followers devote themselves solely to the deity Vishnu, known as the Preserver within the ‘Trimurti’ of the one Supreme Being alongside Shiva (the Destroyer) and Brahma (the Creator). Generally, followers of Vaishnavism tend not to acknowledge the concept of the Trimurti instead maintaining that both Shiva and Brahma are just forms of Vishnu whilst also believing in the various Avatars of Vishnu such Buddha, Rama and Krishna. This was a major influence on Alice’s music beginning at the start of the 1970s with songs having names such as ‘Turiya and Ramakrishna’, ‘Sita Ram’ and ‘Shiva-Loka’. Furthermore, the devotional Vedic chants that she experienced sung at the ashrams in India would eventually be incorporated into her music during the 70s and 80s.
After returning from India, Alice began to use her adopted Sanskrit name, Turiyasangitananda or Turiya for short - translating to ‘the Lord's highest song of Bliss. She had also taught herself how to play the harp, the instrument her husband had bought her just weeks before he died and she also made a shift to a more avant-garde style of jazz, leaving behind her bebop roots. Her most celebrated offering would be the 1971 album ‘Journey in Satchidananda’, a fusion of modal jazz, African and Indian blues and Middle Eastern music with Alice’s harp and piano playing at the forefront and the saxophone by none other than Pharoah Sanders.
By 1972, she had abandoned her secular life and had relocated to California from the famous family home in Dix Hills, Long Island alongside her 3 children. Within 3 years, she would establish The Vedantic Centre in San Francisco which would later be relocated as a part of an ashram to Agoura Hills, Los Angeles in 1983 after tragedy struck the Coltrane family again when the oldest son John Jr. died in a car crash. The new site was called the Sai Anatam Ashram, where Alice became a Swamini (main spiritual director). This was a place where people of all faiths were welcome to visit, take advantage of the peaceful surroundings and appreciate the contributions of spiritual wisdom and insight from not only Vedic scriptures but also exemplary narratives and scriptural texts from other religions such as Islam and Buddhism to more recent revelations of God. The ashram was in use from its inception in 1983 to 2017 and was unfortunately destroyed in the 2018 California wildfires.
Alice disappeared from the public eye, once moving into the ashram and would carry on making devotional music which included bhajans and kirtans however these would only be made available to the members of her ashram until 2017 when a compilation entitled ‘World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda’ was released. Her final studio album ‘Translinear Light’ was released in 2004, 2 years later she would do her first set of live shows since 1981 and on January 12th 2007, Alice Coltrane would pass away from respiratory failure at the age of 69, her body being buried alongside her soulmate in Pinelawn Memorial Park, New York.
In some ways, Alice completed John’s spiritual journey for him – carrying on his musical and spiritual legacy all while creating one of her own. With John being such an iconic and larger than life figure in the realm of jazz, it’s easy to understand why the work of Alice would often go under the radar and fall into obscurity despite the fact she was able to push forth a uniquely personal and visionary style of spiritual jazz, defined by cascading harp glissandi, highly percussive piano playing and lush symphonic orchestral arrangements. I would 100% recommend anyone struggling with writing their dissertation now to tap in, a little bit of self-realisation while trying to reach 10,000 words never did anyone any wrong.
Written by Dillon Gohil