Her corpus remains one of the most varied and underappreciated in jazz, complicated by her unorthodox religious convictions and the towering legacy of her husband, whose vision she often claimed to be fulfilling.Īlice stopped recording commercial albums in 1978, but she continued creating music with members of the Shanti Anantam Ashram, a religious community in Agoura Hills, California, that she founded in 1983 and would lead until her death in 2007, at the age of sixty-nine.
After John passed away, Alice recorded a dozen albums under her own name, ranging from straight-ahead jazz to experimental mixtures of orchestral music and improvisation to Hindu chants performed in gospel arrangements. His widow, Alice Coltrane, who had had spiritual inclinations since childhood, took the Sanskrit name Turiyasangitananda (which she translated as “the Transcendental Lord’s highest song of bliss”) and donned the saffron robes of a Hindu swami in the late 1970s.Īn important jazz musician in her own right, Alice Coltrane played piano in her husband’s groups from 1966 until his death the following year. When the saxophonist John Coltrane was asked in 1966 what he hoped to be later in life, he replied, “I would like to be a saint.” He would be canonized by the African Orthodox Church in the 1980s, but John wasn’t the only holy person in his family. Alice Coltrane and her son Ravi with a photograph of John Coltrane, September 4, 2004
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