Alice Coltrane and The Carnegie Hall concert: the rebirth of an icon
On a cold February evening in 1971, hoards of New York jazz junkies flooded the entranceways of Carnegie Hall, escaping from the bitter temperatures within the warmth of the historic venue. This was to be a night of comfort and relaxation, hearing the soothing tones of Alice Coltrane. However, as the gifted pianist and harpist stepped out on stage, it became abundantly clear that this was not the Alice Coltrane that the audience had been expecting.
Today, Alice Coltrane is remembered as one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time, a progenitor of spiritual jazz and an utterly revolutionary artist. However, this reputation was not always attached to the unique tones of Alice Coltrane; at one time, she was a virtual unknown, grief-stricken at the loss of her husband, John, and slowly losing her grasp on reality. The Alice Coltrane that we all know and love was born, or reborn, inside the walls of Carnegie Hall in 1971.
In the years leading up to the historic concert in New York, Alice Coltrane had gone through a particularly tumultuous time in her life. After years of playing small jazz clubs around Detroit, she had met the legendary saxophonist John Coltrane, and the pair had hit it off. At the same time that she was getting married to John and starting a family, her musical began to receive widespread acclaim within jazz circles; everything was on the up-and-up until tragedy struck.
In 1967, her husband, John, succumbed to liver cancer, passing away and leaving Alice a single mother of four and, to top that off, her half-brother Ernie Farrow died shortly thereafter. The loss of a beloved spouse is virtually unimaginable, but Alice Coltrane had no time to grieve. She had a family to look after and a music career to uphold. Soon, this stress and untreated grief started to manifest itself in unhealthy ways. The pianist became distant, experiencing auditory hallucinations and regularly self-harming.
As is to be expected for an artist of her ilk, Coltrane dealt with the intense difficulty of this period by channelling her grief and sorrow into her music. During the latter part of the 1960s, she produced her first solo studio records, in 1968’s A Monastic Trio and Huntington Ashram Monastery a year later. Coltrane, along with her husband, had been deeply interested in the world of spirituality, and Alice continued that fascination following her husband’s passing. During this time, she found solace in the teachings of Swami Satchidananda.
Satchidananda accompanied Coltrane on a trip to India and Sri Lanka in late 1970, a trip which would alter the course of her artistic career indefinitely. She later revealed, “The trip to the East gave me the spiritual motivation to come out more — to do more with my music.” though that much was blatantly obvious with the change in her musical output. Her next few commercial releases would be imbued with a much heavier sense of spirituality and far-out sounds, but when she came to Carnegie Hall in 1971, nobody had heard it yet.
It was on this cold February evening that Coltrane debuted her renaissance and cemented herself as a truly iconic figure within the world of jazz. With a backing band made up of legendary figures like Pharaoh Sanders, Cecil McBee, and Clifford Jarvis, among others, the concert was truly a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. If you were to put an exact date on the discovery of spiritual jazz, it would be that night. However, the audience at Carnegie Hall was relatively small. The rest of the jazz-obsessives would have to hear this new era of Alice Coltrane on the LP Journey in Satchidananda, released the same week as the concert. Originally, the concert was set to be released commercially by Impulse Records, but it never was, despite being one of the single greatest live recordings in jazz history.
Thankfully, after years of poor quality bootlegs, The Carnegie Hall Concert was finally issued by Impact! before the full concert was released, allowing jazz fans to hear the rebirth of Alice Coltrane as it was meant to be heard. The anger over why it took so long to be released is only quelled by the sheer brilliance of the recording. Countless iconic names have performed on the legendary stage at Carnegie Hall, but few reached the same sonic perfection and transcendental tones as Coltrane did on that fateful February evening.
