In the waning weeks of 1970, Alice Coltrane put the finishing touches on her latest album, Journey in Satchidananda, recorded in the basement of her Long Island home, in a studio her late husband John Coltrane had conceived, but didn’t live to see through to completion. She wrote the album’s liner notes and commented on her imminent five-week trip through India and Ceylon (soon to be rechristened Sri Lanka) with her guru, Swami Satchidananda. But for the seekers and yoga students who idealize the spiritual airs of India, the street-level air of the country can be a rude awakening. There’s a reason that both meditation and incense originate there, as the sensory overload is profound and pungent. Mindful breathing might include snootfuls of diesel exhaust and frangipani, curry and cow dung, rot and sandalwood. Coltrane’s grand-nephew, Flying Lotus, would later describe that scent to me as “the funk of ages” recalling travelling with her there decades later.
And then there was Alice, a tall Black woman from America, amid the bustle of the country, lugging a magnificent harp everywhere. “It was stunning to people there that somebody came from the West to play. She made quite an impression—but she was always very modest,” one student said. A 16 mm film documenting the travels of Satchidananda at that time also offers up the sight of Alice Coltrane—who grew up in the Baptist church in Detroit’s Paradise Valley neighborhood—being plunged in the frigid, clear sacred waters of the Ganges River way up in the Himalayas. She would welcome the new year in India. After five weeks there, Coltrane returned to the United States revitalized and reborn.
As she would explain in an interview with Columbia University student radio station WKCR later in 1971: “The past four years have really been involved in that aspect of really trying to see what’s going on and finding my place in the spiritual world. So now I feel that I’ve gotten some answers; I’ve gotten quite a few answers. There isn’t such an urgency as it was before to really go into meditation and spend so many hours in-drawn. Now I feel that I’ve been given an opportunity to come out, to be with you tonight, to play, and get into music. This is really what I felt from the meditation. Now is the time to really look at music.”
That urgency, those answered answers, that sense of her place in the spiritual world, that deep look at music, all are conveyed in Coltrane’s fifth studio album, Universal Consciousness. Composed barely five months after the spiritual jazz masterpiece Journey in Satchidananda, Universal Consciousness is every bit the equal of its predecessor and at times soars even further into stratospheric realms.
It had been a tumultuous, harrowing five years of bereavement for her. She had met the love of her life, John Coltrane, with whom she had three sons (she also had a daughter from a previous marriage). Then, in quick succession, she lost her mother, her father, her husband, and her half-brother. If one wished to perceive the true temporality and impermanence of this life, to get at the true essence of earthly suffering, this would be a surefire way. In the wake of her husband’s death in 1967, Alice undertook a severe form of tapasya, an austere spiritual discipline in the Hindu tradition, one that whetted the mind and withered the body. To an outside observer, it was horrifying to bear witness to.
As she would recount years later in her book Monument Eternal, her weight plunged to 95 pounds. She isolated herself in her purple-carpeted bedroom, where even her young children barely saw their mother, meditating upwards of 20 hours a day. Alice was wracked with visual and aural hallucinations. She described looking down to see herself on fire or else realize that she was bleeding, yet not knowing why or how. As she put it: “Marked from head to toe, the greater part of my body resembled the stigmata of a crucified person—blood issued from almost every part of it.”
Yet ever so slowly, Coltrane returned from the brink. An old friend from Detroit suggested she check out the lectures of Satchidananda, then at the height of his fame from delivering the opening benediction at an upstate music festival near Woodstock. She began visiting him at the original Integral Yoga Institute on the Upper West Side in Manhattan and then at his lectures at the nearby Universalist Church on Central Park West. Passage to India would bring this part of her life and spiritual practice full circle.
The seeds for Universal Consciousness were planted there. While traveling through the country, she encountered centuries-old hymns known as bhajans (which would become foundational to her later works). And while Journey had featured the buzzing tamboura of her IYI friend Tulsi Reynolds, she also experienced firsthand recitals that featured sitar, vina, tamboura, harmonium, and the shruti box. She began to envision a sound that wouldn’t be reliant on breath or strummed strings. Piano keys attack, but they also decay, thrummed harp strings fade away, and reed instruments briefly go quiet on an inhale to sound the next note. She wanted something that could replicate the feel of the infinite, something that could also exemplify her newfound strength and self-determination. “When we talk, we break, we breathe, we go through all of our human tendencies,” she said. “Things heard from an astral or spiritual place –coming from a spiritual place– does not contain unbrokenness. No breathing, agitation. It’s like a perfection, it’s pure and unbroken.”
She loved the sustained vibrating “Auuuuuum” that the harmonium imparted, but couldn’t quite find its equivalent back home. She tried out one portable organ but it wasn’t quite right. Then, in a meditation, “the precise instrument I should get was revealed to me,” she told biographer Franya Berkman. “I could even read the insignia right there on the wood. So I went out to find the Wurlitzer I now have. I didn’t need to do any research; it was just conveyed to me.” In the Wurlitzer 805 Centura—fitted with two full-size keyboards and an Orbit III analogue synth on top—she discovered a liquid electricity that could evoke the church organ of her youth in Detroit, the droning waves of Indian music, as well as the strafing fury of her late husband’s saxophone runs. While she would utilize a reedman like Frank Lowe on future recording dates, she no longer required the likes of Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, or Joe Henderson on the frontline. All of that fiery sound could be contained within herself now.
And while Journey in Satchidananda eased listeners into her supple soundworld, gently building up from bass, tamboura, and harp to reach sublime heights, with Universal Consciousness, she plunged her audience right into the deep end, no preamble. The opening seconds of the title track couldn’t be more bracing. Violins slash and Alice matches that with frenzied harp figures as drummer Jack DeJohnette’s skittering hi-hats and snares seek to corral it all. For Universal Consciousness, Coltrane assembled a violin quartet of Joan Kalisch, John Blair, Julius Brand, and Leroy Jenkins, with Ornette Coleman providing the transcriptions. It’s a fascinating assemblage of players: Blair and Kalisch were classically trained, while Jenkins made his name as a free jazz player for firebrands like Anthony Braxton and Shepp. But just as you orient yourself amid the onrush, there’s a tape splice a minute in and suddenly Alice’s Wurlitzer manifests, growling and matching DeJohnette’s driving rhythms, the two in a footrace up the side of the Himalayas. When the strings and harp punch back in, it sends the piece even higher. And just as quickly, it halts, leaving you breathless at the top.
If there is an organizing principle to the music, it might be a recreation of the aural hallucinations she experienced from her tapasya, or a glimpse of the spiritual world she now inhabited. The music moves like mercury throughout its brief 36 minutes, never settling for more than a moment. There are two duets with drummer Rashied Ali, her former bandmate in the final Coltrane band. Alice’s Wurlitzer suggests the whorls of white-hot energy that her late husband could conjure on his horn. In hindsight, one can draw a straight line from this album to John’s freeform saxophone-drum sparring on Interstellar Space, though it would be another three years before the general public heard those duets. The two master players engage in a thrilling give-and-take on “Battle at Armageddon,” a piece Alice described in the liner notes as “this great spiritual battle [that] takes place within the nethermost regions of the human soul, literally, every day.” With some added reverb on her organ at times, you can find yourself drifting in the pitch black of space. Much like the country that inspired this music, it matches the sense of tumult and peace that exist side-by-side.
“Oh Allah” accentuates the interplay between Alice’s Wurlitzer and the violins, conveying a preternatural sense of drift. Rather than the four violinists entering en masse, there’s a natural fraying to this otherwise elegant sound. The strings switch between a monolithic mass of sound and a tactile messiness that imparts a visceral, live-wire energy. You would never mistake these strings as an attempt at Western classical, a buttoned-up Third Stream experiment, or the kind of sophisticated swinging fare of Charlie Parker With Strings.
The influence of Coltrane’s travels in India becomes most apparent on the second side of the album. “Sita Ram,” based on a bhajan chant she heard while there, featured Tulsi’s tamboura, with Alice layering little plucked upper register harp filigrees and her incantatory organ atop it. The music seems to breathe, rising and falling in unmetered fashion, an approximation of the amoebic alap section in Indian classical music, with Clifford Jarvis’ intermittent snares, bells, and shakers replicating the supple rhythms of the tabla. It would remain in Alice’s repertoire, performed in concert and even appearing in a new rendition on her 2004 comeback album, Translinear Light.
By early 1971, “Hare Krishna” was still rarely heard outside of Tompkins Square Park or on the Haight. And while you could recite that chant atop the slow-moving melody when Alice’s organ enters, the piece soon soars off into a rarefied air. The violins convey the disembodied sensation of your body cresting over a bank of clouds, with Tulsi’s tamboura, Jimmy Garrison’s bowed bass, and Alice’s organ supporting such flight, making for a sublime eight minutes of untethered sound. Experienced in the right frame of mind, it’s a downright transformative piece of music, as breathtaking as anything Alice ever set to tape.
Over 50 years later, Universal Consciousness remains an audacious statement, as white-knuckled on the hundredth listen or your first. There’s nothing like it in jazz or classical music, an assured amalgam of the two that is indebted to neither. Alice never settles or falls back into a previous pattern or musical concept. She’s restless as a seasoned mountain climber, revealing gorgeous new vistas yet looking ahead to the next peak. Universal Consciousness would be the last album recorded at the Coltrane home studio. Soon, Alice would receive a directive from the Supreme Lord to move to California and establish an ashram there. The music itself became a beacon to those attuned to its message.
A few years after its release, a young spiritual seeker named Purusha Hickson was volunteering at the One Mind Temple, a non-denominational church in San Francisco inspired by John Coltrane’s music. One day, while cleaning tables after a free meal service, an album playing in the background at the temple rose to the forefront of his mind. In his book Journey to Turiya, he described the sensation of hearing Universal Consciousness for the first time: “It was otherworldly. Ethereal. Cosmic…Pulsating celestial music flowed from the speakers.” As he gazed upon the photo of Alice Coltrane inside the gatefold, he had a divine realization: He knew that she knew. She was an enlightened being. Within a few months, Hickson would become Coltrane’s first student at her ashram. Her time as a jazz musician and famous widow was drawing down as Coltrane pivoted to her new role as a guru. In Universal Consciousness, there’s space for all of these lives to co-exist.
