Alice Coltrane - S/D

you mean the music itself is liable to change, or that the listener's subjective experience of it changes when someone else is present?

xp

because yeah, it's a little of both!

i can't have late 60's/70s sun ra on when someone else is present, because even if it's a calm and relatively melodic section, who knows what is going to happen at any moment. it can totally change character at any moment (which is part of the appeal!)

but also, i can listen to a pretty standard "jazz" album and think it's peaceful and non-distracting, but if someone else walks in they might fixate on all that ring-ting-tingling on the cymbal and want to change it immediately

Dave Alvin (yes, the Blasters/X/Flesh Eaters dude) has a new band called The Third Mind with ex-members of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven, and the first track on their self-titled album is a fairly Dick Dale-ish version of "Journey In Satchidananda":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C6iXB911F4

Yes to all of that, Karl Malone! There's something about tuning into jazz that gets disrupted when another consciousness enters the room - it can go from something edgeless and erotic to all hips and elbows and tripping over one's own toes in seconds.

all that ring-ting-tingling on the cymbal

btw, that was a reference to a classic ilm thread that i can never seem to find, but i finally remembered!

What's with that constant cymbal tapping in jazz drumming?

for those who haven't read it, it starts with this classic pair of posts

This is one of the things I find annoying in the sound of a lot of jazz. Why did this become so common? Does anyone else find it annoying?
― Rockist Scientist, Wednesday, December 25, 2002 3:46 PM (seventeen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

aaarrggghhh, yes, that endless ride cymbal tapping, it drives me NUTS. one of the biggest reasons that i hate jazz. oh, what, apart from it being crap and all. argh, the treble overpower of it all...

idk about all this -- i am going through the jazz unit in my music appreciation class rn and with this new online teaching situation, i don't get the chance to listen to jazz WITH my students and it is really bumming me tf out. my class is at least 40% less enjoyable for me and for them because we don't have the communal listening experience.

i used to play "journey..." as entry/class starting music all the time :( :( :(
i loved it when they would walk in and be like...what IS this?

oh yeah! journey is also my go-to jazz record to play for people who i suspect haven't heard it before - it never fails!

La Lachera, my music appreciation club has had a couple of online meetings using a combination of Zoom and an app called Jqbx that works with spotify. The drawback is that all users have to have spotify premium. It's worked pretty well so far though.

Ugh, La Lechera, apologies for spelling.

my go-to jazz record to play for people who i suspect haven't heard it before

who haven't heard jazz before ?

haha, no, i mean people i know who haven't heard alice coltrane before.

i guess that kind of sounds stupid and needs some unpacking! i think Journey is a really rare combination of strange, accessible, and good, so much so that if someone who likes music hasn't heard it i assume they'll love it. and they almost always do, it seems! it's like the undefeated champion

Thanks for the tip! Wish I could use it but my students aren’t all Spotify subscribers and this is a college class. I can’t ask them to do anything extra at this point :(

Also lots of people haven’t ever really heard jazz before — it’s not absurd!

I think lots of people have heard jazz but haven't listened to jazz, which is a different thing altogether.

Wow! Thanks for the Sarathy Korwar heads up.

Here's another version by Matthew Halsall & The Gondwana Orchestra

https://matthewhalsall.bandcamp.com/track/journey-in-satchidananda

yeah that one is great ... !

xp @ KM yeah i figured, was just being silly, sorry.

a really rare combination of strange, accessible, and good

i agree !

beautiful 15 minute documentary from 1970

Alice Coltrane Black Journal segment

"The 16mm color film print is a short documentary made for a segment of National Education Television's Black Journal television program. The segment focuses on the life of Alice Coltrane and her children in the wake of the death of her husband, famed jazz magician John Coltrane. This film was shot sometime during 1970; three years after the death of John Coltrane."

yo, thanks for this!

this is incredible

it really is. amazing, thanks for sharing. that shot at the end of her waving goodbye in the yard with her kids, so beautiful.

does anyone know what she's referring to at the very end of the interview, about being within an inch of her death?

yessssss, goddamn, this should be a two-hour doc!

xp she is probably referring to this period:

In quick succession, Alice suffered the loss of both her husband and her half brother Ernest. Her account of her spiritual awakening between 1968 and 1970 in her self-published tract, Monument Eternal, is harrowing: her weight plunged from 118 to 95 pounds, and her family worried for her well-being. In her telling, her weight loss was not the result of grief and depression but due to extreme austerities undertaken for spiritual advancement. It leads to detached remembrances, like: “During an excruciating test to withstand heat, my right hand succumbed to a third-degree burn. After watching the flesh fall away and the nails turn black, it was all I could do to wrap the remaining flesh in a linen cloth.”

The rainbow-covered booklet makes no mention of her jazz music career, her husband, or her travels to India. Instead, she matter-of-factly details making a doctor recoil in horror at the sight of her blackened flesh, what occurs when one experiences supreme consciousness, the nuances of various astral planes, her ability to hear trees sing, and scaring the family dog with her astral projections. Amid this, her family feared for her sanity: “My relatives became extremely worried about my mental and physical health. Therefore they arranged for my return to their home for ‘care and rest.’” Later she adds: “Communicating with people was found to be like suffering judgment. In fact, it was almost impossible for me to dwell upon earthly matters, and equally impossible for me to bring the mind down to mundane thoughts and general conversations.”

(from https://pitchfork.com/features/from-the-pitchfork-review/10009-transfiguration-and-transcendence-the-music-of-alice-coltrane/)

alice was WAAAAAAAAY out there

xp thanks tyler!

love the faces on the kids when pharoah is going wild

i wonder if there's a full concert tape somewhere

man if they had footage of that entire show, it'd be on the level of Aretha's Amazing Grace concert doc ...

so great, thanks

SOOOOO GOOD!

Great taste in cars too.

Amazing. I met Rashied Ali a couple of times in the ‘90s and he *looks exactly the same in the film*!

Bless the Coltranes.

are there any available recordings of this two-bassist lineup?

also, the footage of her harp improv is :O

might be mistaken, but I think McBee and Garrison are both on the Carnegie Hall 71 recording.

xp bill wood AKA vishnu wood plays oud on "journey in satchidanda" but apart from that i don't know much about him or this lineup

nice doc! there's got to be more footage of that concert out there somewhere.

CAPTION
This 16mm film is a documentary segment focusing on the life of Alice Coltrane and her children in the wake of the death of her husband, famed jazz magician John Coltrane.

:)

thanks for this, Brad.

A photo I'd never seen before, of John and Alice in Japan:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EbS0OuQXYAE_hQD.png

<3

Nice.

right click save as

#goals

https://img.discogs.com/CI6Hr_1-XmVhPLvIC8EcetPmd60=/fit-in/600x800/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-6599602-1422902810-8507.jpeg.jpg

the perfect prescription

Alice is great but I still wouldn’t mind that pill tbh

Impulse! is doing a big 60th anniversary self-celebration campaign and among other things, they're doing something pretty cool:

This summer, Impulse! Records will release a true rarity, Turiya Sings, by Alice Coltrane. Turiya Sings is a record of devotional chants recorded in the early 1980s at her ashram – the only place it was ever available. It is Alice Coltrane at peak spirituality and features her playing organ and chanting.

A version of this music was released on cassette in 1982, with synth and strings added, but never released after. For the first time ever, Turiya Sings will be released in its purest form – just organ and voice –as Alice’s son and reissue producer Ravi Coltrane has long wanted to do. This was the wish of her son and jazz musician Ravi Coltrane who heard the original tapes. Turiya Sings (Deluxe Edition) will feature both versions of this spiritual recording – both remixed, remastered and released for the first time digitally and physically on CD and LP.

I have two of her other devotional albums, Divine Songs and Infinite Chants, but not Turiya Sings, so I'm looking forward to checking that one out. I suspect I'll probably like the original version better than the stripped-down remix, but I definitely want to hear both.

oh hell yeah, it's the best one IMO

^^

and hell yeah, i can't wait for that. wonder if they'll make a cassette version as well?