Coltrane Alice

Alice Coltrane's landmark Journey to Satchidananda reveals just how far the pianist and widow of John Coltrane had come in the three years after his death. The compositions here are wildly open and droning figures built on whole tones and minor modes. And while it's true that one can definitely hear her late husband's influence on this music, she wouldn't have had it any other way. Pharoah Sanders' playing on the title cut, "Shiva-Loka," and "Isis and Osiris" (which also features the Vishnu Wood on oud and Charlie Haden on bass) is gloriously restrained and melodic. Coltrane's harp playing, too, is an element of tonal expansion as much as it is a modal and melodic device…

Within the first 30 seconds of "Spiritual Eternal," the opening track on Alice Coltrane's final studio album, Eternity, the listener encounters the complete palette of Alice Coltrane's musical thought. As her Wurlitzer organ careens through a series of arpeggiated modal drones, they appear seemingly rootless, hanging out in the cosmic eternal. They remain there only briefly before an orchestra chimes in behind her in a straight blues waltz that places her wondrously jagged soloing within the context of a universal musical everything as she moves through jazz, Indian music, blues, 12-tone music, and the R&B stridency of Ray Charles…

For his third duet album, Carlos Santana performed the works of John Coltrane, paired with Coltrane's widow, harpist/keyboardist Alice Coltrane, on this instrumental album…

Kicking off what will be an Alice Coltrane year with more releases to come in the next 12 months, is a previously unreleased, killer live recording from 1971. Recorded live, by Impulse! at a charity gala given at Carnegie Hall for the benefit of the Integral Yoga Institute in 1971, this incredible set never saw commercial release until now. The gala concert was one of two halves with the first two transcendental tunes by Alice taken from the album she had just released on Impulse! and then two explosive tunes by her late husband John Coltrane. Naturally, à la Coltrane/Dolphy at the Gate, which picked up the recent Grammy nomination for Best Liner Notes, the package includes some knockout editorial, with essays by Lauren Du Graf and Alice’s producer Ed Michel.

The fifth and final volume in Universal's massive John Coltrane: The Impulse! Albums in the Originals series, contains five recordings, all issued posthumously between 1970 and 1973. Two of these, Transition and Sun Ship, feature Coltrane's classic quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones. Of the remaining albums, two are live recordings – Live in Seattle and Concert in Japan – the remaining one being the infamous Infinity.