In 1981, Alice Coltrane sang on record for the first time, at the behest of God. Having lived many musical lives—church organist, bebop pianist, cosmic jazz visionary, intrepid experimental composer—she was by then serving as spiritual director for her interfaith Vedantic Center in Southern California, seeking new modes of transcendence. It would be a couple of years before Coltrane opened her Sai Anantam Ashram in Agoura Hills, but already she was deep into a personal journey in consciousness. She had begun a transfiguration following the death of her husband John in 1967, and her auspicious meeting, not long after, with guru and counterculture icon Swami Satchidananda.
“Several years ago, following a long period of elementary meditating and reading of some of the diverse books on spirituality and world religions, I felt the deepest transcendental longing to realize the Supreme Lord,” Coltrane wrote in her spiritual autobiography, Monument Eternal, in 1977. “This longing within the depths of my heart was soon acknowledged, for within a short period of time I experienced the first rays of illumination and spiritual re-awakening.”
Coltrane is still best known for her 1971 record bearing Satchidananda’s name, which mixed cascading harp and droning tanpura with Pharoah Sanders’ expressive saxophone. But a sense of spiritual awe suffused her music from her 1968 debut as bandleader onward. Whether in her glittering post-bop or her orchestral proto-noise psychedelia, Coltrane’s compositions make you feel connected to yourself and the world with preternatural clarity. They make you believe things you otherwise wouldn’t; they may even facilitate the process of temporarily suspending fear. Coltrane spent the second half of the 1970s releasing revelatory albums like 1976’s Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana and 1977’s Transcendence, which fulfilled and challenged her major-label recording contract with manifestations of her Universal Consciousness.
Turiya Sings was the first album she made alone. Having left the commercial music industry behind, she released these uncanny compositions based on Hindu devotionals, or bhajans, on cassette through her Vedantic Center’s publishing imprint, Avatar Book Institute. Luxuriating in every prayerful syllable, naming deities like Krishna and Ramachandra, Coltrane made a small number of the tapes available to her students and Vedantic Center visitors. Though she used relatively spare components—the subtitle of the original album cover read, “Devotional Songs in Original Composition with Organ, Strings and Synthesizer”—they contain an unusual, self-contained grandeur. In the aching shimmer of these hymns, which evoke both South Indian classical music and the Black church, you can hear Coltrane’s life coursing through: her journey from gospel accompanist to jazz prodigy, the drama of the European classical music she loved, the soulful melodies of her Detroit youth, grief and exaltation. Yet the power of this music is elemental. The tone of the original Turiya Sings is as certain and spectral as anything associated with the Coltrane name. Her voice hovers distantly above the mix as if she’s floating, or astral projecting—which she wrote about extensively in Monument Eternal—like a woman actively inhabiting a higher dimension.
The recordings of Coltrane’s ashram period have taken on a mythical status in her catalog over the past decade, particularly Turiya Sings, which has circulated online and on bootleg cassettes, never officially re-released. The 2017 Luaka Bop compilation of Coltrane’s ecstatic music included no tracks from Turiya Sings. If there is reluctance to make those particular recordings commercially available, it’s understandable: The music emerged at the very moment Coltrane was trying to divorce herself from the material world. On a more technical level, according to a label representative, the original Turiya Sings remains formally unreleased because the Coltrane family has never found its master synthesizer recordings.
What Coltrane’s son Ravi did find—around the time of his mother’s final album, 2004’s miraculous Translinear Light—were 1981 recordings she made of Turiya Sings featuring only her voice and Wurlitzer electric organ, an instrument that she once said came to her in a divine vision. (“In one meditation… the precise instrument I should get was revealed to me,” she said in an interview. “I didn’t need to do any research; it was just conveyed to me.”) These pared-back tracks of Coltrane’s most minimal music are now released as Kirtan: Turiya Sings, like seeds of the cassette that also, in some sense, expand it. As Ravi Coltrane writes in a producer’s note, this is “functional music,” meant to guide the practice of chanting: creating vibrations inside of oneself in order to transcend, like embodied meditations. During a call-and-response kirtan performance, the leader sings devotionals, typically with a harmonium pump organ, and the audience joins in collectively. Despite the surge of interest in kirtan in the U.S. in the 1990s—and Coltrane’s groundbreaking fusion of gospel and jazz elements into the form—her spiritual music remained little known in the U.S., as scholar Franya J. Berkman notes in her 2010 Coltrane biography, in considerable part because she didn’t perform it outside of her ashram.
Where before, the stately music of Turiya Sings had evoked celestial bodies, inquisitive synth lines whirring as if in accordance with their own cosmology, now there’s the tactility of earthly reality. The click of the organ on “Jagadishwar” makes its soul-stirring melody—which Coltrane reimagined unmistakably on Translinear Light as well—feel newly intimate, and she enunciates each word with enlightened precision. It puts you in the room, into electric air. By this point, Coltrane had been playing the Wurlitzer for a decade, having first used it on 1971’s mind-bending galactic trip Universal Consciousness. Her subtle flourishes of extra notes make the compositions bloom and groove anew. Her mystic organ lines seem attuned to the drone of the universe.
Coltrane’s singing is rich and stoic, putting stillness, humility, and conviction into every incantatory curve. Many of these Sanskrit chants are about non-attachment, channeling the ancient wisdom found in such sacred texts as the Bhagavad Gita, the Vedas, and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Through a resolute melody on the liturgical centerpiece “Charanam,” she praises a “Supremely unattached/God of Gods,” and on “Jai Ramachandra” she delivers “Victory to Ram, who destroys worldly ties.” Her newly autonomous sound was one of self-liberation, delivering a direct line to healing. The fact that Coltrane is able to command so much movement with such stark instrumentation, as on the sweeping, 11-minute “Rama Katha,” or in the deep, wild melodic contours of the closing “Pranadhana,” is enchanting and entrancing. This was a woman who had a decade prior conducted her own 25-piece orchestra, distilling all of that singular majesty into a solitary voice for the purposes of collective rapture.
Listening to the Kirtan: Turiya Sings recordings feels less like discovering a hissy cassette lost in time than what it must have been like to experience Coltrane leading the songs at one of her legendary Sunday services. Each composition steadily ascends with a charge of aliveness. “Music can be very complex, very technical, very experimental, but it can also be very spiritual,” Coltrane told Yoga Journal in 1982. “Out of all of these considerations, spirituality, as music, is what I appreciate the most.” Like a great sacred text, the music of Kirtan: Turiya Sings is concentrated and rigorous, yet simple and full of ease. Like the original Turiya Sings, it’s also a pleasure. The cover of the 1982 album depicts a devout portrait of Coltrane surrounded by deep unclouded blue. Once, she wrote in Monument Eternal, the Lord said to her, “Hey Turiya [...] be so big, that sky will learn Sky.” Listening is an act of expansion. But to really understand Kirtan: Turiya Sings is to answer its call with your voice.
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