Book description
Alice Coltrane was a composer, improviser, guru, and widow of John
Coltrane. Over the course of her musical life, she synthesized a wide
range of musical genres including gospel, rhythm-and-blues, bebop, free
jazz, Indian devotional song, and Western art music. Her childhood
experiences playing for African-American congregations in Detroit, the
ecstatic and avant-garde improvisations she performed on the bandstand
with her husband John Coltrane, and her religious pilgrimages to India
reveal themselves on more than twenty albums of original music for the
Impulse and Warner Brothers labels.
In the late 1970s Alice Coltrane became a swami, directing an
alternative spiritual community in Southern California. Exploring her
transformation from Alice McLeod, Detroit church pianist and bebopper,
to guru Swami Turiya Sangitananda, Monument Eternal illuminates her
music and, in turn, reveals the exceptional fluidity of American
religious practices in the second half of the twentieth century. Most of
all, this book celebrates the hybrid music of an exceptional,
boundary-crossing African-American artist.
Ebook Edition Note: All images in center photo section have been
redacted. "...writing about Alice Coltrane matters--because her
music and life bears on major ethnological questions of today concerning
hybridity, globalization, and the late-capitalist music
culture."--Peter Monaghan, Chronicle of Higher Education FRANYA
BERKMAN is an assistant professor in the Department of Music at Lewis
& Clark College.
