#446: Alice Coltrane, ‘Journey in Satchidanada’

IMPULSE!, 1971

When John Coltrane died of *cancer, he left a broken hearted Alice Coltrane. Alice lost her partner in music, spirituality and love. They were perfect equals and collaborators opening new doors of consciousness for one another and building worlds of possibility for others.

They had only been married for 2 years, together for about 5 years. They had 3 sons & one daughter from a previous marriage). Their shared interest in the spiritual world influenced John Coltrane’s 1964 hallmark Love Supreme album. Jazz would never be the same.

His death in 1967 broke her open.

She worked vigorously on her healing and sited the work by Swami Satchidanada, the guru who found fame (and controversy) at Woodstock.

Alice moved from being a hot jazz pianist and harpist to writing music solely for the divine and worship. She became a swamini- an ascetic choosing the path of renunciation, opening her own Vedantic center and Shanti Anantam Ashram in California which sadly burned in the 2018 Woolley fire.

This album is the intersection point of her commercial career to the spiritual. It is the story of her healing. It is the loss of love to entering divine love. It is a woman choosing hope.

Often in our tragedies it is easier to submit to our loss than to the hope that there is still much to receive. Actively choosing hope is tragically difficult. Many do not choose it because it requires traveling into that despair to understand where we actually need to hold that hope. It requires acknowledging and seeing the loss in its fullness in order to choose the hope as it’s foil.

This is Alice Coltrane’s brilliant tribute to hope. This is her moment of making the most perfect, blissed out spiritual jazz album while tributing her late husband but also leaning forward into the divine.

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Top songs: Something about John Coltrane