Monument Eternal, page 2
For better or worse, Alice experienced the fate of many exceptionally talented women married to men recognized for their brilliance: while her own contributions received attention, she never really got a fair shake. During the late 1960s, many of John Coltrane’s fans viewed her as an accomplice to the so-called anti-jazz experiments of his final years. Her notoriety was further exacerbated by the tremendous power she assumed when she took control of Jowcol Music, her husband’s publishing company, and decided the fate of his unreleased materials after his death. In particular, her choice to overdub her own playing on his signature recording of “My Favorite Things” angered many in the jazz establishment.
While Alice’s eccentricities and her role as the wife of a legendary musician surely contributed to the marginal, if not contested, status of her own music, other discursive forces also played a significant part. As subjects of study, black female musicians have been quintessential others, either overlooked because of—or overdetermined by—the categories of gender, race, and class. To a great extent, social constructions of difference burden black male musicians as well: their lives are routinely viewed in light of the pervasive challenges of racial discrimination they encounter, and whether they represent their group as “race men.” However, compared to black male musicians, black female musicians rarely transcend difference and obtain the status of artist. Even in the noblest attempts to explore the music and lives of black female musicians, scholars have tended to focus on personal hardships and identity politics. Few have challenged “the current romanticization of the black subject and the refusal of complexity in the representation of the lives of black women,” and even fewer have focused adequately on their music (Carby 1992, 178).
When women instrumentalists have garnered attention for their talents in the male-dominated jazz world, their success has usually hinged on the supposedly male qualities of their playing: they are praised for their strong rhythm, big sound, and aggressive improvisations. Conversely, when a woman plays sensitively or with quiet dynamics, her musicianship tends to be dismissed for lacking sufficient masculine characteristics. This gendered mediation is evident everywhere in the assessment of Alice’s solo career. Critics who expected to find the aggressive intensity that characterized her work with John Coltrane’s ensemble were frequently disappointed. For instance, in his Down Beat review of her 1970 release, Ptah the El Daoud, Ed Cole wrote: “It seems incredible that a group so heavily stamped by the late John Coltrane would not be able to pull off an album, but that’s just what happens here. It’s not that this is not good music, because it is, but it doesn’t come close to the potential of the individual players. It seems that each subdued his talents to accommodate the others” (1971, 20). In his review of A Monastic Trio (1968), John Litweiler commented: “the harp side of this LP presents waves of sound, a wispy impressionist feeling without urgent substance” (1969, 22). Ekkehard Jost asserted that “Alice Coltrane is not a ‘hard’ pianist who drives the music with rhythmic accentuations” (1974, 98).
Listeners also tend to equate musical characteristics such as loud dynamics and jarring timbral effects with the counterculture and political resistance, especially during the 1960s, when such explorations were still novel. As a result, Alice’s more intimate albums from the late 1960s did not have the palpable political innuendo that one could feel in the music of her avant-garde colleagues. She may indeed have lost some of her avant-garde audience by 1970, at least those louder-is-better “free-jazz” fans who were unaware of her aggressive approach in albums such as Universal Consciousness (1971) and Transfiguration (1978). Alice’s seemingly apolitical choices have also placed her at odds with the models of resistance and radicalism that black women of historical importance typically embody.2 Although during the height of the civil rights movement she was playing dissonant, freely improvised jazz—a style that tends to be associated with cultural nationalism and black militancy—she opted not to engage in a direct or public manner with “the struggle.” She was not a song leader or educator such as Bernice Johnson Reagon,3 who used black spirituals to effect social change. Nor was she politically outspoken like Abbey Lincoln or Nina Simone. Gentle in demeanor, a devoted wife and mother of four, Alice’s persona was, in many respects, consistent with the patriarchal helpmate image that the revolution espoused, an image that has since been scrutinized by black feminist theorists.4
While Alice conformed in her domesticity to this conservative aspect of black liberation ideology in the 1960s, her universalist views ultimately challenged many of the Afrocentric tenets of black liberation popular at the time. In her writing and interviews, she consistently expressed the importance of transcending category and limitation. Beginning in the late 1960s, she expressed belief in a transcendent oneness, a “universal consciousness” that subsumes all creativity and religious faith. Despite the ostensible forms of ethnicity one finds in her devotional music and religious practices, cultural specificity and racial identity did not figure in her religious or creative philosophy. Her universalist views, therefore, were—and still are—at variance with those of musicians and scholars who make blackness or an African worldview central to African American cultural production.
Spiritual Aesthetics
A religious sensibility steadily guided Alice Coltrane’s artistry—a feeling that music “had to come from the composer’s heart and spirit and soul, not just his mind” (quoted in Lerner 1982, 23). This attitude, combined with her uncanny musical skills and an experimental temperament, led her along a path that was not only musically but spiritually daring. Compared to the conservative Christianity of her childhood in Detroit, Alice Coltrane was a religious maverick. During the late 1960s, she and her husband began to explore meditation and a universalist approach to religion. Their spiritual pursuits as a couple extended to the bandstand, where they played a personalized version of spiritual music in the form of dissonant, free-meter improvisation. After her husband’s death in 1967, Alice experienced what she called a “reawakening.” From that point on, her music either attempted to express her experience of the divine or was written and performed as an offering to God.
In 1969, she befriended the Indian guru Swami Satchidananda and discovered the philosophical and spiritual teachings of the Vedas. She was still raising her four children when she recorded the majority of her albums, which, like John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme (1965), included extensive liner notes that testified to her personal transformation. The albums feature devotional compositions and improvisations that increasingly drew on both free-jazz idioms and the bhajans that she discovered on her pilgrimages to India, as well as semi-orchestrated works and harp pieces reflecting her deepening mysticism.
In 1976, she had a revelation in which she was instructed to become a Hindu swami. She had founded the Vedantic Center in 1972, and in 1983, after she had joined the monastic order, she established Shanti Anantam Ashram, later renamed Sai Anantam Ashram. She served as spiritual director for the ashram and regularly played for services and delivered sermons until her passing on January 12, 2007. After a long hiatus from public performance, interrupted only periodically by benefit concerts in honor of her late husband, she returned to touring in the last years of her life, playing with a jazz quartet featuring her son, the tenor saxophone player Ravi Coltrane, and her former bassists, Reggie Workman and Charlie Haden.
During her monastic period, she wrote four little-known spiritual treatises—Monument Eternal (1977), Endless Wisdom I (1981), Divine Revelations (1995), and Endless Wisdom II (1999)—all of which were published by her own Avatar Book Institute. Monument Eternal documents her spiritual rebirth from 1968 to 1970. As she described the work in its preface, it is “a book based upon the soul’s realizations in Absolute Consciousness and its spiritual relationships with the Supreme One.” The two volumes of Endless Wisdom make up a comprehensive treatise that explores the nature of the divine and the proper relationship between humanity and God. Here Alice claims no authorship; in the preface to the first volume, she explains that she was “divinely sanctioned” to “inscribe” the words of the Lord based on “sacred communications” (9). Divine Revelations is written in the form of a diary, with entries that document revelations between 1968 and 1995. Each entry recounts conversations that she had with avatars in the form of Rama and Krishna, or with the living guru Satya Sai Baba, whose followers consider him to be an embodiment of God.
As a self-proclaimed mystic and composer of devotional music, Alice might be compared to numerous Western art-music, jazz, and gospel musicians who have written sacred works. Several figures immediately come to mind: the medieval saint Hildegard of Bingen, the twentieth-century French composer Olivier Messiaen, Duke Ellington and Mary Lou Williams with their jazz masses, and Thomas Dorsey, who was “called” to compose his famous gospel song “Precious Lord.” However, Alice’s commitment to universal spirituality as a guiding principle and her use of wide-ranging religious and musical sources distinguish her from these other composers. In her liner notes and spiritual treatises, she employed mythic imagery from a host of religious traditions, including Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, and the religion of ancient Egypt. In a parallel fashion, her music brought together diverse musical styles and cultural traditions in an attempt to portray her experience of spiritual transformation and exaltation.
One might praise her for anticipating what is now the rather common postmodern trend of mixing and juxtaposing genres from vastly different historical periods and cultural traditions. However, her devotional compositions lack the oppositional irony typically associated with postmodern aesthetics. Rather, I suggest that it was her extraordinary religious experiences and her universal spiritual philosophy—infused by the Vedic notion that the paths are many, yet the destination one—that inspired her to draw from so many diverse sources in her musical composition and her written testimony.
As a devotional musician, Alice appropriated and synthesized numerous genres according to divine inspiration, using them as vehicles for meditation, ecstasy, praise, and worship. Her spiritual fervor granted her enormous artistic license, which has been a source of contention among critics and colleagues. This, coupled with her mystical claims, has made her rather suspect in the eyes of the neoconservative jazz establishment, and not without warrant.5 Many devotional musicians emerged during the 1960s and 1970s. Some emulated John Coltrane, while others were swept up in the popularity of Eastern mysticism; still others profited from the market potential of the cosmic, exotic, and occult. Alice Coltrane, however, belongs in a category by herself. Her religious transfiguration during the era resulted in music of great emotional and artistic depth, as well as a lasting commitment to spiritual duties that ultimately took precedence over musical composition and performance altogether.
In assessing Alice’s “spiritual music,” one should also keep in mind that its hybrid nature is not uncommon in religious musical genres. Although they have not been studied comparatively, ecstatic musical traditions tend to appropriate an unusually wide array of source materials. For instance, the melodies of Hasidic nigunim (wordless devotional tunes) are frequently popular songs deemed sacred by a rabbi; some are even military marches.6 Similarly, bhajan melodies in India have been lifted from famous film scores and then matched with religious texts; their widespread familiarity has made them ideal for communal song. This mode of secular cross-fertilization is also common in black Protestant music. Scholars have documented a process of constant exchange: though the texts and lyrics might change, the musical components of genres such as spirituals, gospel music, and the blues often sound indistinguishable.
The breadth of Alice Coltrane’s music also results from the diversity of musical styles available to contemporary musicians and composers. In Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West, Mark Slobin calls attention to the intricacy of musical exchange that occurs in late capitalist societies. For Slobin, “micromusics” result from a complex “web of affiliations” that individuals and groups encounter at the intersections of three types of cultural experience: the “supercultural,” “subcultural,” and “intercultural.” “Super-cultural” refers to coercive aspects of culture produced by large-scale social and political structures such as government and industry.7 “Subcultural” refers not only to groups united by common factors such as ethnicity, class, and gender but also to more subtle, frequently flexible categories determined by individual choice and belonging. “Intercultural” refers to the complex exchange that occurs across the boundaries of a nation-state through “the commodified music system” or “the diasporic linkages that subcultures set up across national boundaries.” Given this view of culture, Slobin argues, “we need to see music as coming from many places and moving along many levels of today’s society, just as we have learned to think of groups and nations as volatile, mutable social substances rather than as fixed units for instant analysis. Yet at any moment, we can see music at work in rather specific ways, creating temporary force fields of desire, belonging, and, at times, transcendence” (1993, xiv).
An African American Spiritual Narrative
Even while her nonsectarian religious philosophy led her down extremely unconventional roads for an African American woman from her generation and fostered her avant-garde and hybrid musical aesthetics, Alice Coltrane always remained deeply connected to the African American spiritual and musical locus of her family’s origins. If one looks beyond her surface eclecticism, it quickly becomes apparent that Alice’s creative impulse was firmly rooted in time-honored forms of African American religious expression. Specifically, her collective works can be seen as a form of religious testimonial, or “testifyin’,” a ritual act situated in the religious traditions of her youth.8 As James Cone writes,
Testifying is an integral part of black religious tradition. It is the occasion when the believer stands before the community of faith in order to give account of the hope that is in him or her. Although testimony is unquestionably personal and thus primarily an individual story, it is also a story accessible to those in the community of faith. Indeed the purpose of testimony is not only to strengthen an individual’s faith but also to build a faith community. (Cone 1982, 14)
As a poetic and evocative frame for this study, I propose that Alice Coltrane’s various forms of testifying—in both text and music—constitute a multidimensional, African American spiritual autobiography. I draw this broad parallel for a number of reasons, first and foremost because the confessional and autobiographical nature of her oeuvre invites this manner of interpretation. With a heartfelt message to her listeners in the liner notes of A Monastic Trio (1968), the first album she made after her husband’s death, she began a lifelong and increasingly extensive narrative about her relationship with God and her own spiritual evolution: “unable to answer all of the wonderful cards and telegrams sent me during the summer of 1967, I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you, sincerely, on behalf of my family and myself, for your kindness.” By 1971, she was prefacing each tune with an edifying message, a teaching, or an evocative description of the process of spiritual transformation. In her liner notes, she discussed how particular pieces were motivated by conversations she had during her meditations with the Lord and his emissaries, and how various compositions were written as offerings to God.
Valuable historical, sociopolitical, and literary connections can also be drawn between her own confessional statements and those found in African American spiritual autobiographies, past and present. Historically, spiritual autobiographies, particularly Protestant versions, have been written to “help initiate others into the experience” and to “teach, edify, persuade and exhort” (Brereton 1991, 3). In the hands of African American writers, the spiritual autobiography has also had a radical purpose. According to William L. Andrews, the African American spiritual autobiography has provided “a way of declaring oneself free, of redefining freedom and then assigning it to oneself in defiance of one’s bonds to the past or to the social, political, and sometimes even moral exigencies of the present” (1986a, xi). It is characterized by “the reconstructing of one’s past in a meaningful and instructive form, the appropriating of empowering myths and models of the self from any available resource, and the redefining of one’s place in the scheme of things by redefining the language used to locate one in that scheme” (7). Andrews also asserts that the history of black autobiography has been one of “increasingly free story telling.” That is, “the journey of black autobiography toward free telling first had to pass through intervening consciousness of amanuenses and editors, then had to challenge generic conventions and discursive properties of writing itself, before finally undertaking the greatest task of all, the appropriation of language for purposes of signification outside that which was privileged by the dominant culture” (290). Alice’s adventuresome and genre-defying qualities as a writer and musician function within this economy of “free telling” that Andrews describes.9
