Deathblog:

ALICE COLTRANE 1937 – 2007

I am very sad to report the death of Alice Coltrane: details here.

I suppose it is inevitable that in the grand narrative of musical history, Alice will be unfairly relegated to the shadow of her husband’s achievements, but, despite the mutterings of certain closed-minded jazz critics, I would argue that she stands on her own merits as one of the most ambitious and unique artists in modern music.

As a female band leader / composer / arranger making radically unorthodox music within the patriarchal world of jazz, as a peerless harp and piano/organ player, as a spiritual thinker whose attempts to combine disparate strands of devotional tradition into a universal system of belief exhibit a power and dedication that goes way beyond mere ‘new age’ hippie-era dabbling… for all these things Alice Coltrane deserves our respect, but beyond all that, the main point here is that the albums she made for Impulse between 1968 And 1973 feature some of the most beautiful, transformative, genuinely psychedelic music I have ever heard.

In fact, I've deliberately avoided reading much about the context, personal detail and critical opinion of her albums, just because they're so stunning in their own right that I neither need nor want any outside interference.

So just listen to this cut from 1970’s "Journey in Satchidananda" and tell me this lady wasn't some mighty kind of a genius. Appropriately enough, it’s an evocation of Shiva in his aspect as “the dissolver of creation”;

Shiva Loka

The line-up here is Alice Coltrane on harp, Pharaoh Sanders on sax, ‘Tulsi’ on Tamboura, Cecil McBee on bass and Rashid Ali & Majid Shabazz on percussion.

Hope you enjoy (you'd be a fool if you didn't I fear), and good luck to AC on whatever unimaginable cosmic voyages her spirit has planned.