Alice Coltrane

Detroit and Paris

Alice Lucille McLeod was born in Detroit on 27 August 1937, the fifth of six children of Solon and Annie McLeod. By the age of nine she was playing organ for services at Mount Olive Baptist Church. Her half-brother was the bassist Ernie Farrow, and her younger sister Marilyn McLeod went on to write songs for Motown.

In the late 1950s she moved to Paris and studied with Bud Powell. In 1960 she was the intermission pianist at the Blue Note there, and appeared on French television with Lucky Thompson, Pierre Michelot and Kenny Clarke. Back in Detroit she led her own trio and played in a duo with the vibraphonist Terry Pollard. A 1960 marriage to Kenny "Pancho" Hagood, which gave her a daughter, Michelle, ended over his heroin addiction.

With John Coltrane

In 1962 and 1963 she was the pianist in Terry Gibbs's quartet, and there she met John Coltrane. The couple bought a house in Dix Hills on Long Island in 1964 and married the next year in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Their sons John Jr., Ravi and Oranyan were born in 1964, 1965 and 1967. In January 1966 she took McCoy Tyner's place at the piano in her husband's group, and she recorded and toured with him, on records including Live at the Village Vanguard Again! and Expression, until his death on 17 July 1967.

The years that followed were spent largely in isolation, fasting, prayer and meditation. She began recording as a leader in the basement studio John had started building in the house, still unfinished when he died. A Monastic Trio came out on Impulse! in 1968, the first of thirteen full-length records she made in the next decade.

The basement at Dix Hills

Ptah, the El Daoud, recorded there on 26 January 1970, was the first of her records to make full use of horns, with Pharoah Sanders and Joe Henderson on tenor saxophones, Ron Carter on bass and Ben Riley on drums. Made in grief after John's death, it entered Billboard's jazz chart at number 13 in February 1971. Its second track, Turiya and Ramakrishna, is a piano trio blues.

In 1970 she met Swami Satchidananda and became his disciple. Journey in Satchidananda, named for him, was recorded at home on 8 November 1970, with one track taken from a Village Gate concert that July. Her harp sits at the centre of the title track, with Sanders on soprano. In December she travelled with Satchidananda and other students for five weeks, to the Ganges, Himalayan ashrams and Sri Lanka, and she told Essence the trip moved her to do more with her music. The album came out early in 1971, and on 21 February she gave her first concert as a leader, a Carnegie Hall benefit for the Integral Yoga Institute.

My music isn't jazz, not really. It is closer to spiritual music.

Alice Coltrane

Turiyasangitananda

Universal Consciousness, World Galaxy and Lord of Lords followed on Impulse!, and in the early 1970s she left New York for California. She made Illuminations with Carlos Santana for Columbia in 1974, then Eternity, Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana, Transcendence and the live Transfiguration for Warner Bros. In 1975 she founded the Vedantic Center, and in the mid-1970s she was initiated into sannyasa and took the name Turiyasangitananda. Her spiritual autobiography, Monument Eternal, appeared in 1977.

From 1982 she issued devotional cassettes privately for her community, among them Turiya Sings, Divine Songs, Infinite Chants and Glorious Chants, and in 1983 an ashram was established near Malibu. Translinear Light (2004), her first album in over 25 years, was her last. In 2006 she returned to the stage, playing Ann Arbor on what would have been John's 80th birthday and the San Francisco Jazz Festival with Ravi Coltrane, Roy Haynes and Charlie Haden. She died in Los Angeles on 12 January 2007 and is buried beside John at Pinelawn Memorial Park in Farmingdale, New York.

After

Luaka Bop's World Spirituality Classics 1 brought the ashram recordings to wide release for the first time in 2017, ten years after her death. Her grand-nephew Flying Lotus sampled Blue Nile, and Radiohead, Paul Weller and Sunn O))) have all made music that echoes her. Rolling Stone placed Journey in Satchidananda at 446 on its 2020 list of the 500 greatest albums. The Dix Hills house, bought by the Town of Huntington in 2006 after a demolition threat, has plans to restore its basement studio. Impulse! made 2024 a Year of Alice and released The Carnegie Hall Concert, and Andy Beta's Cosmic Music (2026) is the first full biography.