16. “Shiva-Loka,” Alice Coltrane, from Journey in Satchidananda (1971)

Alice McLeod and John Coltrane married in 1965; their partnership was tragically brief—John died of liver cancer in 1967—yet it would transform not only their respective careers but also the entire landscape of contemporary music. In many ways, they were co-conspirators, always listening to and processing jazz, classical, and world music sounds together, and daring one another to try new things.
 
A classically trained pianist from the age of seven, Alice fell in love with modern jazz in high school and began playing with her half-brother—bassist Ernest Farrow, who would go on to record extensively with saxophonist Yusef Lateef—in a group that gigged around her native Detroit. In the late ‘50s, she traveled to Paris to study with pianist Bud Powell, a fiery bebop innovator; she also worked there as intermission pianist for the Blue Note Jazz Club. By 1962, she was back in the U.S. and playing with vibraphonist Terry Gibbs at New York’s Birdland when she first shared a stage with her future husband.
 
When McCoy Tyner left Coltrane’s band, Alice Coltrane took his place and developed a manner of playing that matched drummer Rasheid Ali’s own busy, textured, time-free playing. “When I became a part of the group, I only played through two or three octaves like we all did, chording for the soloists,” she explains. “But John said, ‘you have all those keys. Why don’t you play them as completely as you can?’” Thus did Alice Coltrane arrive at a style that was less percussive than Tyner’s, but more expansive, with endlessly cascading arpeggios—and perfectly suited to her husband’s new direction.
 
Unfortunately, many critics were unable or unwilling to see Alice Coltrane clearly—in part because of John Coltrane’s outsized presence, but also due to the difficulties women generally had creating space for themselves in a male-dominated jazz scene. Add to this her omnipresent spirituality: Alice and John meditated and read the Quran and the Bhagavad Gita together; after his death, her interest in Vedic practice exploded. In 1969, she met her guru, Swami Satchidananda—famous for giving the opening address at Woodstock—and began to use her music to explore Indian culture and religion.
 
The result was Journey in Satchidananda, a hushed, dream-like album featuring her former bandmates Pharoah Sanders and Rashied Ali but defined by the droning sounds of the Indian tanpura, the lute-like Middle Eastern oud, and the plucked chords and shimmering glissandi of Alice’s concert harp—an instrument she and her husband had ordered just prior to his death. “Anyone listening to this selection should try to envision himself floating on an ocean of [Swami Satchidananda’s] love,” she suggests in the album liner notes, “which is literally carrying countless devotees across the vicissitudes and stormy blasts of life to the other shore.”
 
After releasing a dozen or so albums in the ‘70s—first on her husband’s old label, Impulse; then more lucratively for Warner Brothers—Alice Coltrane withdrew from the secular music world. She became known as Swamini Turiyasangitananda, a Sanskrit name meaning “the highest song of God;” in 1983, she established the Sai Anantam Ashram in Agoura Hills, California. Though she turned her back on the industry, she continued to create soaring, otherworldly sounds on her own terms, singing Sanskrit mantras and playing an Oberheim OB-8 synthesizer on a series of cassettes recorded for her devoted followers throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s.