After Alice Coltrane’s death in January 2007, the numerous who mourned her passing and celebrated her influence — from the jazz world, Hindu and new-age communities, and beyond — did so with a shared sadness and fervor, but for various reasons. They even called her by different names.
To musicians she was firstly Alice Coltrane, the Detroit-raised pianist who met John Coltrane in Latest York City in 1963, married him and joined his band in its late, avant-garde phase before his death in 1967. She went on to release essential albums herself, playing piano and harp, accompanied by a few of his predominant musical acolytes.
To spiritual seekers, nevertheless, she was Turiyasangitananda — Turiya for brief, or just Swamini, the Hindu term for a female religious teacher. After John’s death, she traversed an intense period of meditation, physical trials and revelations. In 1972, she moved from their house on Long Island to California; just a few years later, obeying what she experienced as a divine command, she founded an ashram near Los Angeles. There, the music was devotional, laced with Sanskrit mantras, a part of a community life focused on study and worship.
Her impact in her lifetime was significant but segmented. At a memorial gathering on the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in May 2007, this system was so wealthy with jazz greats that it merited a music review in The Latest York Times. It also featured members of yogic groups whose chants, the critic Nate Chinen wrote, “nodded promisingly toward polyphony but ultimately faltered into vagueness.”
Over time, nevertheless, the memory of Alice Coltrane — by any name — has overflowed these niches and seeped into broader culture. A musical biography by the scholar Franya J. Berkman, published in 2010, was the primary to treat her oeuvre in full, from Detroit gospel roots through Hindu bhajans. Recent reissues of obscure or rediscovered albums have widened the critical attention.
Last yr, the harpist Brandee Younger led tribute concert events in several cities, while the Indian American vocalist Ganavya released a critically praised album wealthy with Alice Coltrane covers and references. On the pop-culture extreme is a bumper sticker that popped up just a few years ago: “Keep Honking! I’m Listening to Alice Coltranes 1971 Meteoric Sensation ‘Universal Consciousness.’”
It almost feels, said the producer and composer Flying Lotus, who’s Alice Coltrane’s grandnephew, as if she now has the greater cachet. “I hear more people discuss my Aunt Alice than about John Coltrane, which is fascinating,” he said.
Now, an exhibition on the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles is breaking latest ground by examining Alice Coltrane’s influence in a field that she didn’t practice herself but where her life story has resonated and her ideas have found purchase: contemporary visual art.
The show, “Alice Coltrane, Monument Everlasting” — the title comes from a brief text by Coltrane about her spiritual journey that’s being reissued this month after years circulating as a cult item — mixes previous and newly commissioned work by 19 advantageous artists, some distinguished, like Martine Syms, Rashid Johnson and Cauleen Smith, and others less known or simply emerging. Roughly half work or have roots in Southern California, anchoring the project within the region.
Organized by the Hammer curator Erin Christovale, with the curatorial assistant Nyah Ginwright, the exhibition proposes several ways to explore Coltrane’s influence. Some works offer direct references, like Smith’s film “Pilgrim,” which she partly filmed on the ashram shortly before the property was sold in 2017, or Ephraim Asili’s film “Isis & Osiris,” which features Younger playing Coltrane’s restored harp. In others — like an installation of business lighting fixtures by Devin T. Mays — the connections are more abstract.
Undergirding the show are materials from Coltrane’s archive that, in lots of cases, have never before circulated outside her family and ashram circles. Christovale consulted closely with the family and devotees; for among the show’s latest commissions, artists found inspiration within the documents they shared.
For Christovale, who nurtured this project for years, the possibility to focus a up to date art exhibition on Alice Coltrane went beyond stoking her own avowed fandom.
Coltrane, she said, consistently recurred in conversations with artists — mentioned as an inspiration, her music playing of their studios, with the sense, notably but not solely amongst Black female artists, that her example radiates richly. “She is someone who is an element of their artistic experience,” Christovale said. “I might say that it goes beyond music. It’s like a sonic healing that inspires creatives writ large.”
‘The Air Got Thinner and Purer’
The ashram, in its day, was an easy constructing set on 48 acres in Agoura Hills, within the Santa Monica Mountains. The edifice not stands: It burned in 2018, after the property’s sale, in the large Woolsey wildfire. The spiritual community has dispersed to a level, but many devotees stay in contact and gather at different homes or online for worship. There may be also a small diaspora of young individuals who grew up on the ashram, including the rapper and singer Doja Cat.
Michelle Coltrane, Alice’s oldest daughter and a singer herself, still lives where the family settled within the late Seventies, on a quiet block in Woodland Hills, within the San Fernando Valley. One afternoon in December, over tea and snacks in her lounge, several of the ashram’s elder devotees shared how their path led to Alice Coltrane — or Swamini, as they preferred to call her — a long time ago.
Shankari Adams had traveled to California from the East Coast within the early Seventies on an undirected quest. “I used to be trying to find churches, paths, anything,” she said. In San Francisco, she found the One Mind Temple, which was dedicated to John Coltrane. However it was a concert by Alice Coltrane, in Berkeley, that blew her mind. In line to satisfy Alice after the show, she felt a force, she said: “As I got closer the air got thinner and purer, like once you go up in an airplane.”
As for Purusha Hickson, he had come up in Black radical politics, as a teen in Westchester County, N.Y., and as a student at SUNY Albany. “But I had plenty of questions,” he said. “It looked like sometimes among the activities that we were doing within the movement were creating more chaos than harmony and liberation.” He hitchhiked and rode Greyhound to San Francisco, then stayed in California. He received Vedantic initiation in 1975, then joined Alice Coltrane’s community. He continues to show hatha yoga today.
Within the ashram’s heyday, services mixed regulars and drop-ins, with an open-door policy. Swamini played organ and sermonized on life, devotion and divinity. She followed Swami Satchidananda, then Sathya Sai Baba, and traveled to India, but studied all religions and developed a message of universal human understanding. In audio excerpts she varies cadence and tone, in the way of Black church preaching. “She was raised in Detroit,” Christovale said. “Don’t get it twisted.”
Coltrane was only 69 when she died, though she believed she had experienced many past incarnations. She was conversant in premature death — John Coltrane died at 40; one in all their three sons, John Jr., died in a automotive crash at 17. Either way, she was prepared. “She was at all times very frank with us,” Michelle Coltrane said. “‘I’m not at all times going to be here.’”
In her capability as a primary steward of the legacy of each John and Alice Coltrane, Michelle (who also uses the Hindu name Sita) frequently fields requests of many kinds, but “nothing like this one,” she said of Christovale’s exhibition concept. Gathering the archive and oral histories for the show, she said, only deepened her awe at how much her mother — a widow with 4 young children in 1967 — achieved.
Over time, Michelle has observed her mother’s cultural prominence grow, she said, noting the circulation of bootlegged records and her own encounters with music students versed within the obscure works. “It’s shorthand for cool” to learn about Alice Coltrane, she said. In her view, the coronavirus pandemic can also have drawn people to Alice’s work. “Perhaps people were trying to find something else, something to feel,” she added.
Sensory Experiences
In conversations with several artists within the exhibition, the shared pattern was a previous awareness of Alice Coltrane that has focused and sharpened, sometimes prompting specific artworks, but much more so serving as a type of compass for his or her life and practice.
Adee Roberson, who has made a platform sculpture that visitors can step onto and listen to a sound work composed with the musician Nailah Hunter play from directional speakers, first heard Alice Coltrane’s music some 20 years ago. A punk-rock kid with Jamaican roots, she respected Coltrane’s place in jazz. As an adult, personal setbacks helped her appreciate Coltrane’s trials, while Roberson’s spiritual and healing work — she is trained in several massage and body work practices — unlocked the music’s force.
“When I believe of her, I believe of how sound really does heal you physically and emotionally and psychically,” Roberson said in her bungalow home-studio in South Los Angeles. Her sculpture is fabricated from selenite — probably the most cleansing stone, she said. It is formed like a disc and marked in quadrants after the Kongo cosmogram, which represents the cyclical relationship of fabric and ancestral worlds.
For the artist Suné Woods, who works in video and collage, the show provided a chance to interview a spread of individuals — ashram members, her family and others — about their spiritual lives. She wove a few of these reflections into the soundtrack for her two-channel installation, “On at the present time in meditation,” which incorporates original and located footage of Los Angeles-area landscapes made with a thermal camera. While completing the work, Woods meditated every morning at 4 a.m.
The piece is a sensory experience that goals to reflect “what comes through after I meditate,” she said, sitting on the narrow deck of her very small house — a type of aerie — perched on a steep hillside within the Echo Park neighborhood. “It’s a piece where I would like you to feel.”
Nicole Miller, a filmmaker in Los Angeles who has these days been working with an early type of laser animation, drew on Alice Coltrane’s Vedic star chart, which was preserved within the archive, to write down short phrases that light up in her installation “For Turiya” when sounds run through a synthesizer. The references to the chart are kept oblique, Miller said, out of respect. “I desired to work out a method to honor her as an alternative of mining from her,” she said.
An architectural piece by the sculptor GeoVanna Gonzalez, who lives in Miami, involves an aluminum platform structure together with stained glass and a woven rug. Its inspiration is the house that Alice and John Coltrane shared all too briefly within the Dix Hills section of Long Island, which the couple had rigorously decorated with furnishings chosen for his or her spiritual associations. (The house is now a registered historic site and is being restored.) Gonzalez’s work will function as a stage for performances in the course of the show’s run.
For some artists, Alice Coltrane’s life yields prompts of a sort. Bethany Collins, for example, who lives in Chicago, learned that “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was a favourite of Coltrane from her Detroit church music days. Collins is thought for works on paper that blur or alter scores of musical pieces that recur in several times and social contexts. Her series within the show is predicated on that hymn and on the Largo from Antonin Dvorák’s “Latest World Symphony” — itself drawn from Negro spirituals, and which Coltrane adapted on one in all her albums.
As for Mays, a sculptor and performance-based artist who grew up in Detroit and lives in Galveston, Texas, his installation of lighting fixtures collected by a selected rule — they need to be used, and never discarded or scavenged, but given to him — could appear abstract, yet draws on his understanding of Coltrane’s example.
Alice Coltrane modeled a discipline and dedication that he seeks to emulate as an artist, Mays said. From her, he added, “I could make sense of how one finds a method to stay in practice and to proceed to practice on a regular basis.”
“Monument Everlasting” isn’t a lot an exhibition on Coltrane than it’s a show that thinks with Coltrane through a gamut of methods that, in a way, she makes possible. It arrives in a tough time, not least for artists in Los Angeles grappling with last month’s fires. (The family of Syms, who grew up in Altadena, lost their multigeneration home.) That the ashram constructing itself was destroyed by fire is an echo that resonates with Christovale, though all the pieces is simply too raw just now to digest further.
Perhaps, Christovale said by phone recently, the exhibition generally is a salutary gathering space. “Her whole expression is rooted in a way of healing and connecting to a divine power,” she said of Coltrane. “You are feeling it at a cellular level once you hearken to her music. I hope that if anything, a show like this, in a moment like this on this city, generally is a space for people to let their shoulders drop.”
Alice Coltrane: Monument Everlasting
On view Feb. 9 through May 4. The Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles; 310-443-7000, hammer.ucla.edu.
