Remembering Alice Coltrane in advance of tomorrow’s birthdate.
—Ed.
The resurgence of interest and the increase in esteem for the work of Alice Coltrane is an unambiguously sweet thing, but it’s also not an especially new development, as her reputation’s been on the steady upswing for quite a while now. However, the first-time vinyl reissue of the pianist-organist-harpist-arranger’s 1972 LP Lord of Lords is a recent turn of events, and it sounds better than ever. Featuring bassist Charlie Haden, drummer Ben Riley, and a 25-piece orchestra, the record is the third in a trilogy that established Coltrane as a spiritually questing and musically trailblazing American original.
For decades, the seven albums in a roughly five-year stretch that Alice Coltrane made for the Impulse label were essentially rated (by those with a favorable disposition to her work, anyway) as the crowning achievement of her recording career. Opinions unsurprisingly differed over which of her releases was the strongest, but it was almost certain the array of choices would derive from 1968-1972.
That is, until last year, with the arrival of World Spiritual Classics Volume I: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, a collection of recordings she made in the ’80s after leaving the commercial biz and establishing the Sai Anantam Ashram. Initially distributed in small cassette runs to the members of her spiritual community, Luaka Bop’s collection is a revelatory hour of material that while not usurping the primacy of her Impulse period in my personal esteem, does stand head and shoulders with it in terms of quality and sui generis verve.
Such was the fervent response to World Spiritual Classics I that no doubt many disagree and consider it to be Coltrane’s finest work. And who knows, maybe in a year or five I’ll be swayed into concurring with that line of thought. I say this not as a platitude but as a preface to relating how my esteem for Lord of Lords has grown since I evaluated it as worthwhile and occasionally superb but, in the end, a little lesser than 1971’s Universal Consciousness.
That LP kicked off the trilogy that Lord of Lords culminates (in between is World Galaxy, like the record it precedes released in 1972), and it also began what’s essentially the second phase of Coltrane’s Impulse run. Her prior material, ’68’s A Monastic Trio, ’69’s Huntington Ashram Monastery, and the pair of efforts from 1970 Ptah, the El Daoud and Journey in Satchidananda, document her continued exploration of the late work she helped to establish from her departed husband John, and by extension the budding territory of subsequent spiritual-free jazz.
Her trilogy of ’71-’72 isn’t disconnected from the work of her husband (to the contrary, World Galaxy features, controversially at the time and for a long while afterward, explorations of “My Favorite Things” and “A Love Supreme”) or the sounds of spiritual improvisation (as the titles of the records should make clear), but it did heighten Coltrane’s stamp of originality as she focused on her own arranging skills for strings.
It’s not a shift in approach she developed as the trilogy unfolded, though Universal Consciousness does find her working with transcriptions from Ornette Coleman (the arrangements are all hers, however). As on that album, Lord of Lords is lacking in horns (World Galaxy featured a young Frank Lowe on saxophone), but what really distinguishes the third in the trilogy is Coltrane’s comfort and level of investment in exploring arranged strings as a vessel for spiritual transcendence.
And the more I listened in preparation for this review, the more the LP presented the combination of individualism, which has always been an aspect of her solo work (undeniable even by detractors), and pure mastery, a credit that she’s not often accrued, at least not until the last 20 years or so. But ultimately, I think it’s a fair assessment, for starters in how her desire to work in an orchestral setting (most fully realized here in the size of this ensemble) incorporates Coltrane’s prior interest in Modernist Classical.
This has multiple benefits on Lord of Lords. First is the non-syrupy if surely enveloping sweep of her arrangements, and right off the bat with “Andromeda’s Suffering.” Second is her fruitful exploration of Eastern spiritual motifs as exemplified by “Sri Rama Ohnedaruth” and the title piece, which are appealingly weighty rather than blissfully insubstantial. And third is the inspiration and her direct (yet still markedly unique) interpretation of Igor Stravinsky in “Excerpts From The Firebird.”
Coltrane’s bypassing of a jazz sensibility in Lord of Lords has been commented upon, and the observation is fair; improvisation is essentially absent as Haden and Riley’s contributions are felt not in solo heft or individual approaches but in keeping with classical music in how their playing lifts the music that Coltrane designed. Haden and Riley do, and quibbles over jazziness are in my experience rendered moot by the immersive beauty of the whole.
With this said, Lord of Lords’ final track “Going Home” does exude much gospel derived flavor, in large part through Coltrane’s wonderfully gnawing organ tone. It helps to broaden and solidify a record of striking dimension, though unlike most LPs (jazz or otherwise) it’s not peppered with highlights but instead a collection of four grandly unfurling moments that the listener will either wholeheartedly accept or totally reject. But that doesn’t mean there’s not room for personal reevaluation as the evolution of Alice Coltrane’s achievement continues well into the 21st century.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
