I found myself with two boat trips in two days (to and from Liverpool) and downloaded a number of podcasts for the journey…..including the Coltranecast! To my enduring shame, I had never listened to it.
Now I find that @el-hombre-malo recommended further listening to Alice Coltrane – so I’m asking the rank badjin himself, and anyone else with a view to share – where does a novice begin with Alice Coltrane?
Thanks in advance….
PS: also to @Twang @tiggerlion and @Mike_H …..thoroughly enjoyed the podcast, chaps….proper “mile melter”, to borrow Nick Lowe’s descriptor…..
Excellente Fitter!
Not particularly representative but I do like her collaboration with Carlos Santana – Illuminations
Yes, indeed – thanks. I remember that one being mentioned during the podcast (see, I was awake and paying attention…)
Not as easy as you might think to choose.
Her music is a proper tangent away from conventional jazz structures and thus will not please everybody, but it retains the feel of jazz.
Mostly I’m familiar with her early albums. There are quite a few later ones I’ve never heard.
An obvious early one would be “Journey In Satchidananda”. It’s the one always seems to top any list of her work and is wonderful, but there are others that are just as good IMO.
CD bargains to be had at Amazon. “Journey..” for £4.99 and a couple of cheap “doubled-up” Impulse releases to be had, I noticed. “Universal Consciousness/Lord Of Lords” for £6.49 and “Huntington Ashram Monastery/World Galaxy” for £8.96.
I’m not familiar with “World Galaxy”, but the other three are all good.
All of these and several more are on Spotify. If you do Spotify, you can “taste and try before you buy”.
Good point, Mike – I might have to finally bite the bullet and try Spotify….
Thanks for the suggestions.
Can I add that HMV have quite a few at the £4/5/6 mark if you don’t Amazon.
Turiya and Ramikrishna from the album Ptah, the El Daoud
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUMuDWDVd20
Plenty of Alice on YouTube if you dont want to go down the Spotify path.
It’s all good…….apart from last years’ “World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda”
I like it. It’s very different, of course, designed for private consumption on the Ashram she founded, when she gave up the secular life, to help devotees in their meditation. It’s hypnotic, mantra-like with a gospel tinge. I find it best to listen in a quiet place and just let the mind wander.
..my mind certainly wandered…
Another contrarian here, I thought it was excellent stuff. It even worked for me in a noisy factory.
The factory played Alice Coltrane! Wow! Your employers must have been very enlightened.
No dancefloor bangers on Alice’s albums, that’s for sure.
Err….. I played AC on my headphones in a noisy factory.
My bosses wouldn’t know Alice if she chanted in their face.
*disappointed face*
So sorry, there is literally no one at my place who would who she is. There is even one of the drivers who when Bowie died said “I didn’t like him, I don’t really like any music”. But to be fair he is a massive knob.
It’s not your fault. Keep plugging away. You never know.
How is it possible to not like any music? Apart, perhaps, from being dead inside.
If you could hear OK, but your brain could not differentiate between different pitches of sound, I reckon it would make musical appreciation pretty much impossible.
Apart from ?! ‘Ecstatic Music’ is utterly sublime. Truly divine cosmic transcendence. Give it another go Tim. Open your mind chakra and let if flood in. Sponge the bliss.
Hi Rob – how’s it hanging? Still bliss-sponging?
Hi Fitter – how’s it going? Things are pretty cool. Quite a busy year or so since I was last here. In some ways good, others not so much. Everything’s insane now. Virtue signalling spittle throthers versus the braying suited kerchingers. A rain forest shitfest of cardboard as Godwin dances on his law and behind the scenes Beelzebub is your actual Punch and Judy Man. He has a big house in Switzerland and a fuck off yacht called Kali Yuga.
Keep It Prog!
Lovely to see you, Rob _/ \_
Thanks Tiggs. Hope all is well in your funky yurt.
*not saying that it smells of detergent and cordite*
Hello Rob – I think I’m too earth bound but will try it again…
Definitely worth it Tim. Might just be a grower (or not – no matter). Nothing is made to ‘get into’ anymore, is it? All just ephemeral product, and that’s putting it politely.
Worth seeking out is the unreleased Impulse album “Yang-Yin – Polarity Of Opposites” which features John Coltrane playing Alice’s harp, and Alice on John’s sax. From the sleeve notes (sleeve “slicks” were printed up): “It’s the most beautiful thing we ever did, like breathing, like the wind, John getting these sounds from his spirit, somewhere inside, given birth by the strings, and me pushing my breath through the reed, thinking reeds in the stream. the stream of life!”
Unfortunately the label heard a different album, and it was withdrawn. The master tapes were lost, and all we have is a fourth or fifth (opinions differ) generation tape, with the hiss and distortion you’d expect. It’s a challenging listen, two side-long tracks of what might uncharitably be called “noodling”, but it deserves an official release.
Let’s hope it gets one. ‘Divine Songs’ is very hard to find on cd too. Rare/pricey.
Au contraire – wasn’t that tape hiss the centrepiece of the work. The masterstroke is that, with repeated plays on a cassette, the in vogue medium of the times, the tape hiss became even more prominent.
How could you miss this ?
It’s a good theory in every sense that doesn’t involve actual correctness, Junes. It was slated for release in late ’66. Recorded at Sensoji Temple, in Japan. Pharoah Sanders, Jimmy Garrison, and Rashied Ali (the touring band) thought John was “doing it to please Alice” and so didn’t attend the session. “I mean, who wants to hear John play the harp? Or watch Alice pick up his sax? Not us, man!” (From a Downbeat interview with Jimmy Garrison.)
Sensoji temple you say? No doubt using their in-house 16 track recording studio.
The tour was a “catastrophe”, right at the end of his career, recorded for broadcast but unreleased until recently. I don’t know how they recorded it but portable tape recorders were certainly common back then. Paul Horn recorded inside the Taj Mahal in 1967, the album finally released in ’69. The album is dedicated to Coltrane (who died in ’67) and was inspired by the Sensoji Temple recordings. The sleeve notes to this album (vinyl) are one of the very few mentions of the Sensoji Temple recordings, although they’re well enough known on jazzbo forums.
I can no reference to this recording and still can’t work out if you are taking the piss.
If you turn to page 196 in your copy of Ralph Gleason’s bulkily-titled “Celebrating the Duke and Louie, Bessie, Billie, Bird, Carmen, Miles, Dizzy & Others” you’ll find the only other reference to it in print that I know of: “…Yan-Ying The Polarity Of Opposites, an unreleased session recorded during the tour at the Sensoji Temple where Alice and John swapped instruments in an attempt to cleanse their musical palates …” There’s a bit more but that’s about it. A Famous Producer (no, really) who contributed to a music forum I used to dip into posted the cover slicks and what he remembered of the “music”. He wasn’t too impressed.