It would be easy to assume that Coltrane, like Lee Krasner (Mrs Jackson Pollock) or Dorothea Tanning (Mrs Max Ernst), was a great artist who spent her life as the wife of a great artist. But she knew the free jazz pioneer John Coltrane for only four years. They met in 1963, married two years later, and by the time he died from liver cancer in 1967 they somehow had three children (they were also raising her daughter from a previous marriage). Following her husband’s death, she suffered a breakdown so extreme that her weight fell to just under 7 stone and she underwent a series of visions – mostly of John – that she interpreted as an ascetic experience. It was only after this that she began to play the harp, the instrument for which she is best known, became a band leader, and released more than 15 solo albums. She was also, for the last 25 years of her life, a cult leader of sorts, in an ashram on the West Coast of the United States. She died in 2007 and a decade later the Sai Anantam Ashram was destroyed by fire.
You can’t have someone write about Alice and John and not buy in to the spiritual side of things. In Cosmic Music, a new biography of Alice Coltrane, Andy Beta has a lyrical sense of the ideological mountains the couple were trying to scale with their work. Beta explores the heady Christian brew that the then-named Alice McLeod was raised on, in her local Detroit church: spirituals from slavery days, 18th-century Calvinist hymns and songs from the Protestant revival – or Second Great Awakening – that swept the United States in the 1850s. She had requested piano lessons by the age of seven. In the story of any woman who made her name in the world of jazz instrumentalists – Carol Kaye, bass player of the Wrecking Crew, is another who comes to mind – there were exceptional beginnings: parents who, for whatever reason, allowed their teenage daughters to play jazz clubs. Alice McLeod moved to Paris in 1959 with her first husband, the jazz vocalist Kenny “Pancho” Hagood, and studied with her favourite bebop pianist, Bud Powell.
Hagood was a heroin addict, though, and McLeod returned to Detroit as a single mother, moving back in with her parents. In 1961, she heard John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass and it crystallised something. While the record confounded critics with its unorthodox big band arrangements, minimal key changes and shrieking sax sound, it was the start of Coltrane’s move into free jazz, which released him from the genre’s established modes, meters and harmonies. It is funny to think that jazz – which seems such a wild kind of music – felt so restrictive to some players in the early 1960s, but it was full of rules. By 1965 John Coltrane was playing atonal, loud and formless: his star pianist, McCoy Tyner, quit his band, later saying, “All I could hear was a lot of noise.” Alice replaced him on piano, and for this – in a parallel world to the Beatles, on the other side of the Pond – she was known as the “Yoko Ono of jazz”.
John Coltrane, like Alice’s first husband, had been a heroin addict, but unlike him, he’d had a spiritual conversion. Alongside the rise of the Nation of Islam, and a renewed interest in Egyptology, he studied the Koran, the Kabbalah, Plato, Buddhism, you name it. Beta sees John’s wife as the catalyst for his growing spirituality: “Without Alice’s own roots in the ecstatic spirit of the Church of God in Christ services and a shared interest in a less dogmatic and more universal understanding of God – to say nothing of their love and devotion to each other – would Coltrane’s own spiritual transformation have occurred?” It is impossible to say, just as it is hard to know what influence she had on his creative output, note by note, but soon after he met her, he made A Love Supreme, his most famous record and the high point of his big, short life. Just as Coltrane wanted to find a universal religion, he wanted a “universal music”: he called it the “New Thing”. When his widow made her solo debut, in Carnegie Hall in April 1968, she billed the show as “Cosmic Music”: there were no reviews of the concert in the New York press, and no recordings remain.
The Carnegie debut was made on the harp, rather than the piano – a tantalising part of the Alice Coltrane story, because no one really knows quite how she learned it. Beta gives the full account of this “Lyle and Healy-style, double-action, hand-gilded, concert-grand, crowned-pedal” instrument and how it came into her possession. Coltrane had ordered it for her as a gift; it took over a year to be made, and it turned up on the doorstep one morning, shortly after his funeral.
For his widow, it was his heavenly presence in her home: why wouldn’t it be? John Coltrane believed he could reveal God through his instrument, and this is the one he wanted his wife to learn. She mastered the vertical hand patterns in their basement studio, after she had put the kids to bed: “I usually practise at night because during the day I’m with the children and I can’t really concentrate,” she said. She did not want to work in clubs, or travel with a band because of the children, she later said; she just wanted to present Coltrane’s music “in the right way”. Beta adds, “This can read like the free jazz equivalent of Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels.”
John Coltrane’s liver cancer was likely the result of his years as an addict. Yet he would not visit the doctor, and he played on through crippling pain. It is a familiar story. His wife did not want to bug him with questions, or get in his way – besides, she was busy with the children. Even when he was diagnosed, he told people that he was going to be fine. Her hallucinations began when he was still alive. She slipped into what, in medical terms, was severe depression and psychosis; the children were looked after by a neighbour. She once burned the flesh off her right hand, as a personal test of endurance. [...]
While reading this book, it struck me that Alice Coltrane sought a God as much as a husband. Sometimes we’re drawn to people in whom we see a creative spirit we already possess on our own. Only with her husband’s death could she lead a solo career: not because he would have stopped her, but because as long as he was alive, she was in his service, by her own choice. With him gone in bodily form, he became an energy – her “true directive energy”, as she called it. It was an energy that had always been inside her.
by Kate Mossman, The New Statesman | Read more:
Image: Chuck Stewart /@Alicecoltraneofficial
[ed. I was listening to Alice the other night and thinking I needed to post some of her music here. I'm sure I will soon.]
[ed. I was listening to Alice the other night and thinking I needed to post some of her music here. I'm sure I will soon.]
