Alice Coltrane to release Translinear Light

By editor: Jermy Leeuwis on August 12, 2004.

It seems like a lifetime ago that we last heard something new from Alice Coltrane on record.

Details Artist: Alice Coltrane Title: Translinear Light Release date: 05/10/04 Record label: Impulse! Records Single: Official website: Verve Buy at: Amazon Send to a Friend

Make that 24 years, to be exact (1980's Transfiguration on Warner Bros. which was recorded live in 1978). Her son Ravi Coltrane was 15 years old at the time of that release. Now 39 and a father himself (his son William Narayan Coltrane - Alice's grandson - is now five), Ravi has made significant strides in his own career. A highly regarded player, composer, and bandleader in his own right as well as a label head for his RKM Records, he has accomplished a great deal since picking up the tenor saxophone in 1986 and getting his feet wet with the Elvin Jones Jazz Machine in the early '90s. And yet, there is one goal that had eluded Ravi throughout his burgeoning career - a serious recording project with his mother. Translinear Light, which marks the triumphant return of Alice Coltrane to the recording scene, is the realization of that dream.

Says Ravi, who produced this rare mother-son collaboration, "I feel more proud and more happy about this than any musical project that I've been involved in."

The seeds of this remarkable recording were planted on June 14, 1998 when Alice Coltrane emerged from her jazz retirement to perform in concert with Ravi and his band at Town Hall in New York, as the first half of a special generation-spanning program that concluded with Ravi Shankar (for whom Ravi Coltrane was named) and his daughter Anoushka. That appearance by Alice with Ravi was hailed by critics and fans alike as a major triumph, spurring notions that the pianist-organist and widow of John Coltrane was indeed on top of her game and still very much a creative force to be reckoned with. And yet, her priorities clearly lay elsewhere. As Ravi explains, "To hear someone who still has all of this beautiful music to offer and who chooses not to do it on a professional basis anymore is kind of shocking to some people. I think it's hard for a lot of people to understand but the professional 'jazz life' was something that she felt she had done and she was ready to do something else."

As Alice herself acknowledges, "There were other spiritual interests that I put a lot of time into - meditation, yoga, going on pilgrimages and things like that. And as far as recording and doing public performances, I kind of reached that point where I began to think, 'Maybe it's time for the next generation to move into place. Our part is done. Let these youngsters who are really interested in music and are serious about it take over. It's time for them now.'"

Though she has devoted most of her time and energy to spiritual pursuits since forming her Vedantic Center in 1975, Alice Coltrane has never stopped playing. Ravi recalls seeing his mom playing organ and piano around the house while he was growing up in California. And music has always been a part of the services at her spiritual center. "Music and spirituality have always been deeply connected for her," notes Ravi. "They're so closely tied."

And while she did go into the studio on several occasions during the '80s and '90s to record cassette-only releases of devotional music (made available through the Avatar Book Institute), Alice harbored no grand plan to reconnect with the jazz record industry. That is, not until Ravi began floating the idea following that gala Town Hall concert in '98. "The Town Hall performance was a big catalyst for this project," Ravi recalls. "After that gig it started becoming more and more important to me to try to do something with her . . . put some things on tape, get a record out, anything. Because I felt that I had chosen music late in my life and it was after a time that she had already left music professionally. So since the Town Hall concert it became a priority for me to start a project with her."

Ravi and Alice began their initial recording sessions for Translinear Light in April of 2000 at Ocean Way Studios in Hollywood with Jack DeJohnette on drums. Then in November of 2002, to help launch the simultaneous release of Verve's Deluxe Edition of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme along with Ashley Kahn's book A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album (Viking Press), Alice agreed to perform once again with her son in a special engagement in New York at Joe's Pub, which led to her association with Verve and the realization of this long overdue recording.

Translinear Light is part of a continuum of heightened expression that had its beginnings in latter day John Coltrane Impulse! recordings like Expression, Live at the Village Vanguard Again! and Stellar Regions and carried over to Alice Coltrane's own riveting recordings as a leader for Impulse! like 1970's Ptah The El-Daoud, 1971's Journey in Satchidananda, 1971's Universal Consciousness, and 1972's World Galaxy. While she strictly played piano on the '66-'67 recordings with her husband, Alice began exploring the harp on her recordings as a leader for Impulse! while also finding her own unique voice on the Wurlitzer organ. And though she plays no harp on Translinear Light, she does revive that wholly personal Wurlitzer organ voice on the powerful tracks "Sita Ram", "This Train", and "Leo".

Says Ravi, "When I tell people, 'My ma's playing organ on this record,' they immediately think of the (Hammond) B-3. They immediately hear that sound of traditional jazz organ playing. But her sound on the Wurlitzer organ is very particular, very unique, very personal. She found a voice on it that is pretty exciting. It really has got a powerful sound that's sort of beyond jazz."

The collection opens on a joyous note with "Sita Ram", a traditional Indian number that Alice had previously recorded on 1971's Universal Consciousness on Impulse! Her signature pitch-bending phrases on Wurlitzer organ here add a unique double reed quality to the proceedings while Jack DeJohnette uses a synth drum to create tambura and tabla textures. DeJohnette also played on the 1972 recording which was more ethereal and open-ended, reflecting the beginning stages of a raga. Whereas, this current version carries the kind of forward momentum that invokes the rhythmic section of a raga.

On the spiritual "Walk With Me", Alice goes all the way back to her Detroit roots on piano, recalling her early church experiences. "I started in church playing music at the age of seven," she says. "And this culture of people that I'm from . . . even through the hardships and all of the oppression, there was always that happy side, that joy, that hope for tomorrow, that faith. You know, that looking forward to a new and brighter day. We don't always have to look at the negative side, we can also see how God has placed joy on our hearts. That's what I tried to convey in that piece and I think that it spoke somehow close to that belief."

The title track is a beautiful ballad by Alice Coltrane, recorded here for the first time. Opening with a dramatic solo piano intro, it segues to an introspective and lyrical dialouge between Alice's piano and Ravi's soprano sax, then evolves into a quartet as DeJohnette and bassist Charlie Haden enter at the two-and-a-half-minute mark. Alice sails over the modal groove with sharp, jagged block chords and cascading single note runs. Nudging her son with provocative ascending and descending statements, she plays the sly harmonic foil to Ravi's darting, mercurial lines while Haden's sparse, resounding bass tones and DeJohnette's coloristic approach to the kit add a layer of depth to the proceedings.

Alice's composition, "Jagadishwar" is an affecting, calming hymn with Ravi's robust tenor sax carrying the simple melody with little embellishment, save for some blues-drenched phrases along the way. Alice's synth washes on a Korg Triton provide a glistening cushion beneath James Genus' pithy bass lines and Jeff "Tain" Watts' spare time-keeping. The composition subtly modulates from major to minor and, near the end, a shift back to the major key, providing a burst of sunlight at the resolution.

"This Train" is another traditional tune, the kind that Charlie Haden grew up playing in his family folk-gospel band that performed on the radio and at the Grand Ole Opry. Charlie's bass solo here against Jack's lightly swinging backbeat is joyful and melodic while Alice's right hand is a freewheeling juggernaut with its own surging momentum and intuitive tendencies.

"The Hymn" has Alice engaging in some soulful call-and-response with her son Oran, who provides some inspired alto work against her harmonic textures and synth seasoning. "Oran is at an age when he's influenced by the music of his age," says Alice. "He has his own band and it's contemporary and he has fun at it. But I told him, 'Don't forget there's something else here...more than you can imagine. God has given you something in your spirit and you don't want to ignore that.' Because when he plays, people hear something special there. I know he's not had formal training, but when he plays you can see it's far beyond his own thinking, his comprehension, his understanding or his human scope. It's pure expression. You're going to hear his heart and his spirit when he plays."

"Blue Nile," an Alice Coltrane original previously recorded on her 1970 album Ptah The El-Daoud on Impulse!, again teams Genus and Watts in the rhythm section while also showcasing Ravi's depthful tenor work. The piece opens with a brief drum invocation by Tain, leading to the contemplative bass figure and opening, deep-toned tenor statements. Alice offers up spiky chords on piano, nudging and tweaking the form as Tain maintains a steadfast pulse underneath. By the 2:21 mark, Ravi begins stretching, once again urged on by his mother's harmonic suggestions. By the 3-minute mark he's dealing in deep waters. And while it may be tempting to make comparisons to his fabled father, particularly when he's tackling familiar Trane vehicles like the melancholic ballad "Crescent" or the fiercely surging "Leo" (from the volatile Interstellar Space duets with drummer Rashied Ali) Ravi remains resolutely his own man.

Alice's piano solos on both "Blue Nile" and "Crescent" beautifully showcase her gentler, lyrical tendencies while her Wurlitzer organ fusillades on "Leo" have her edging into more provocative territory. Alice unleashes with sheer abandon here while Ravi really digs in, erupting for some of his most explosive tenor playing on the recording. Both are urged on by DeJohnette's whirlwind intensity on the kit. A percussive marvel, Jack's propulsive, polyrhythmic drumming throughout this dynamic piece fuels the track while his unaccompanied solo is a masterful showcase teeming with unparalleled virtuosity. At ten minutes, this renditon of "Leo" may be much shorter than the sprawling 45-minute version that Alice engaged in back on July 22, 1966 with her husband John, Pharoah Sanders, Jimmy Garrison and Rashied Ali (documented on Trane's posthumous Live in Japan 4-cd set on Impulse!) or her own 37-minute version she recorded in 1978 with Roy Haynes and Reggie Workman on Transfiguration, but it shares the same fearless spirit of adventure and heightened intensity that those previous recordings exhibited.

"Triloka", an improvised dialogue with bassist Charlie Haden that serves as the calm after the storm of "Leo", reunites the two longtime friends who first played duets together on Haden's 1976 A&M recording, Closeness. (Haden also appeared with Alice on 1971's Journey in Satchidananda and 1972's Lord of Lords, both on Impulse!, as well as 1976's Eternity on Warner Bros. He also recorded with John Coltrane on 1960's Avant Garde.). The two exhibit a poetic oneness on this gentle, introspective offering.

The collection closes on an uplifting note with "Satya Sai Isha", a chant with members of Alice's Vedantic Center. "I felt that was a beautiful way to end the record," says Alice. "It was a way to acknowledge the Divine of life because that's where we come from . . . not from our own science or philosophy, not from our knowledge of the human anatomy or the whole human system of life. We have to acknowledge the Divine that's brought forth all of the peoples of the world. And I didn't want to make a reappearance without acknowledging that truth."

"All this is so amazing," Alice says of her long-awaited return to the recording scene. "I didn't want a second career and my son knows it. For years I had been telling people, 'My time came and went.' But Ravi had been asking me over a five-year period to do this, so I finally decided the timing was right. Something was on my son's heart, so I felt I could surely make time. And it did seem to work out very well."

That's an understatement. Translinear Light stands as yet another profound expression in Alice Coltrane's extraordinary career. And this time out, it's a family affair.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

A pioneering woman in jazz, Alice Coltrane has distinguished herself as an important composer/conceptualist, pianist, organist, and one of the rare people to ever bring the harp into jazz. Born Alice McLeod on August 27, 1937 in Detroit, Michigan, she studied classical music as a child and participated in the gospel band at church. Her older brother Ernie Farrow, a bassist who in the '50s and '60s played in bands led by Barry Harris, Stan Getz, Terry Gibbs, and Yusef Lateef, introduced her to jazz early on. As a teen, Alice became quite taken with bop and its offshoots and began playing at school dances at Cass Technical High School. After graduating in 1955, she played various engagements around the Motor City with her own trio and also with female vibes player, Terry Pollard. She later played piano on recording sessions with Detroit jazz masters like saxophonist Lateef and guitarist Kenny Burrell before traveling to Paris in 1959 to study with Bud Powell. In Paris she also played with saxophonist Lucky Thompson before returning to the States the following fall. Alice originally met John Coltrane at a party in 1960, when he played a date in Detroit. Their next encounter was at the Olympia Theater in Paris, where he was playing with the Miles Davis sextet. Their next face-to-face meeting did not take place until July 18, 1963 at Birdland. By then, Alice had been touring and recording with vibes player Terry Gibbs (she appears on Gibbs' 1963 album, Terry Gibbs Plays Jewish Melodies in Jazztime) and Trane was on the same bill with his own quartet. She began playing piano in Coltrane's band - replacing McCoy Tyner - at the outset of 1966 and they were married later that year. She appears on such important latter day John Coltrane recordings for Impulse! as Live at the Village Vanguard Again!, Live in Japan, Expressions and the posthumously-released Stellar Regions.


After John Coltrane's death on July 17, 1967, Alice continued working with members of her husband's last group, including bassist Jimmy Garrison, saxophonists Pharoah Sanders and Carlos Ward, and drummer Rashied Ali. She began playing the harp and organ as well as piano, began utilizing Indian sitar, tamboura and tablas in the ensemble, and turned fully to Eastern cultures for inspiration. Her own recordings as a leader for Impulse! started out as small group settings, as on 1968's A Monastic Trio, 1969's Huntington Ashram Monastery, 1970's Ptah the El Daoud and 1971's Journey in Satchidananda, but they eventually developed into large scale productions with elaborate Stravinsky-esque string orchestrations, as on 1971's Universal Consciousness, 1972's World Galaxy and 1972's Lord of Lords. She also helped coordinate a number of posthumously released John Coltrane recordings in the early 1970s, especially Infinity with its psychedelic kaleidoscope album cover, and she recorded her own version of his A Love Supreme, complete with invocation from her Hindu guru. She also appears on McCoy Tyner's 1970 Blue Note album Extensions, Joe Henderson's 1973 Milestone album The Elements, and on Carlos Santana's 1974 Columbia album Illuniations. She moved from the Impulse! label to Warner Brothers in the mid-1970s and subsequently released Eternity in 1975, Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana and Transcendence in 1977, and Transfiguration in 1978.


In the later 1970s, Alice's music became highly infused with Hindu religious music, whole sides of her albums being devoted to arrangements of religious chants. She was a devotee of Swami Satchidananda, and eventually adopted the Hindu name of Turiya. In 1975 she formed the Vedanta Center in California as a center for her spiritual activities. In her spiritual life she is now a devotee of living Hindu saint Satya Sai Baba, and goes by the name Swamini Turiyasangitananda. In the 1980s and 1990s she made a number of recordings of devotional music that are not very widely distributed but are made available through the Avatar Book Institute out of California. In 1998 she emerged from jazz retirement to play a concert in New York City with her son Ravi's band, and in 2002 she performed with Ravi again in New York at a concert to celebrate the simultaneous release of Ashley Kahn's book A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album and Verve's deluxe reissue of the album. And now Alice and Ravi document that collaboration on Translinear Light, Alice Coltrane's first studio recording in nearly 30 years.

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