Alice Coltrane is hardly an unknown musician, yet one of the most extraordinary parts of her catalogue spent years largely outside the normal music industry.
After establishing an ashram in California, she recorded devotional music during the 1980s and 1990s and distributed it primarily within that spiritual community on privately released cassettes. The recordings combined influences from the gospel music she had known in Detroit with Indian devotional practice. They also contain synthesizers, organ, harp, strings, percussion and choirs, and include some of the first recordings in her catalogue on which she sings.
These tapes complicate the familiar version of Alice Coltrane as simply an important spiritual-jazz musician connected to John Coltrane.
She was creating another musical system.
What interests me is the audience for which these recordings originally existed. They were not primarily trying to enter charts, jazz criticism or record-store culture. Music was functioning inside a community and spiritual practice.
When the recordings were later recovered from master tapes and brought to a wider audience, their context changed completely.
The music had not suddenly become important.
The rest of us had finally gained access to something that had been important somewhere else for decades.
