FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
Alice Coltrane: The Carnegie Hall Concert
_________
IT has been a while since…
PHOTO CREDIT: Echoes/Redfern/Getty Images
I was last in Vinyl Corner. I wanted to come back to focus on a magnificent live album. Alice Coltrane: The Carnegie Hall Concert is an album that you really need to hear. I don’t think you need to be a big fan of Coltrane or know much about her. It is about the power and beauty of the performances and music. I would advise people to seek out this album on vinyl. Here are a few more details about an extraordinary live experience:
“A previously unreleased, killer live recording from 1971. Recorded live, by Impulse! at a charity gala given at Carnegie Hall for the benefit of the Integral Yoga Institute in 1971, this incredible set never saw commercial release until now. The gala concert was one of two halves with the first two transcendental tunes by Alice taken from the album she had just released on Impulse! and then two explosive tunes by her late husband John Coltrane. Naturally, à la Coltrane/Dolphy at the Gate, which picked up the recent Grammy nomination for Best Liner Notes, the package includes some knockout editorial, with essays by Lauren Du Graf and Alice’s producer Ed Michel”.
I wanted to expand a bit more and give some more detail and background to Alice Coltrane and her performance at Carnegie Hall. Among the greatest Jazz performances the space has ever seen, it did seem to be this revelatory moment. You get a sense of what the crowd felt and the feeling in the air in 1971. So transcendent and divine. That live album was recorded in the same year she released the masterpiece, Journey in Satchidananda (the title track and Shiva-Loka are played during the Carnegie Hall set) You can stream the live album of course, though this is well worth investing in. Get the vinyl copy too:
“Described by a writer for Pan African Music as “a splendid and ecstatic memento of spiritual jazz with some of its greatest masters,” Alice Coltrane’s 1971 Carnegie Hall concert (and its corresponding album release) left an indelible mark on audiences and the history of jazz music as a whole.
Born Alice McLeod in Detroit, Michigan, Coltrane embarked on her musical journey at a young age, displaying prodigious talent and a deep-rooted connection to spirituality. Her marriage to legendary saxophonist John Coltrane further ignited her passion for music, propelling her into the realm of jazz luminaries.
Coltrane made her Carnegie Hall debut on April 14, 1968, in a program titled “Cosmic Music,” which featured her original music in addition to works by John Coltrane and Jimmy Garrison. Just a few years later, on February 21, 1971, she brought together an all-star cast of jazz legends to the Hall in a benefit concert for Swami Satchidananda’s Integral Yoga Institute.
Coltrane performed on both piano and harp, joined by saxophonists Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp, bassists Jimmy Garrison and Cecil McBee, and drummers Ed Blackwell and Clifford Jarvis. Also featured were rock band The Rascals and singer-songwriter Laura Nyro.
Coltrane would go on to perform at Carnegie Hall five more times, the last of which were back-to-back performances on September 21, 1984, alongside pianist Marilyn Crispell with saxophonist Sam Rivers and bassist Reggie Workman. According to the review published in The New York Times, Crispell opened with a solo piano set, followed by the Alice Coltrane Quartet, which recreated John Coltrane’s Impressions in commemoration of his birthday on September 23”.
I am going to end by bringing in a couple of reviews for Alice Coltrane: The Carnegie Hall Concert. MOJO were among those to share their thoughts on an album that was released via Impulse! Back in March. The more I pass through the album the more it impacts me. You can be completely new to Alice Coltrane and it will not affect what you get from this album. It is an astonishing thing to behold:
“WHEN ALICE Coltrane took the stage at New York’s Carnegie Hall on February 21, 1971 she’d just returned from a five-week sojourn in India where she’d swum in the Ganges, visited the holy city of Rishikesh, and found a certain kind of peace, a salve to the pain she’d been experiencing since the death of her husband, John, in 1967. As quoted by Lauren Du Graf in the long-form essay that accompanies this release, Coltrane said, “The trip to the East gave me the spiritual motivation to come out more – to do more with my music.” Part of a series of benefit performances to raise money for her guru, Swami Satchidananda [pictured above], the Carnegie Hall concert finds Coltrane in an intense state of divine liberation.
Playing with an expanded double quartet comprised of Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp on tenor and soprano sax, Jimmy Garrison and Cecil McBee on bass, Ed Blackwell and Clifford Jarvis on drums, plus Swami Satchidananda followers Tulsi Reynolds and Kumar Kramer on tamboura and harmonium, Coltrane sets off proceedings with a new composition, Journey In Satchidananda, from her recently released fifth studio LP. It begins as a heavy, creaking procession anchored in slow contemplation by bowed and plucked bass and chiming cymbals before Coltrane’s cascading harp glissandos and Pharoah Sanders’ breathy, keening flute fill the groove with layers of bright, glistening sunlight. Then, Archie Shepp’s soprano sax breaks through with a high, hovering gospel-blues wail. It’s a massing of the troops, an indication of just what this double-quartet are capable of. Another harp number, Shiva-Loka, goes deep into a world of slow, ethereal meditation, the percussive, double-kit groove of Blackwell and Jarvis locked in conversational communion as Shepp and Sanders’ soprano saxes chatter and cry over the surface.
However, little prepares us for the epic, half-hour version of John Coltrane’s Africa that follows. Beginning with a Blackwell and Jarvis floor-tom battle, Coltrane’s agitated, roiling keyboard chimes are soon interlaced with wild-free blowing from Sanders and Shepp in an extended act of screeching liberation that is simultaneously joyous and terrifying. Ultimately, it feels like a cabalistic mass, a summoning of the spirit of John Coltrane and Africa itself. Defined by an hypnotic 10-minute bass solo, McBee hands over to Garrison who imitates the vocal cadences of the Nigerian talking drum before all nine players return for a wailing Africa coda and a barnstorming, funk-heavy and utterly free rendering of John Coltrane’s 1966 composition, Leo. Remastered from Ed Michel’s 2-track “reference mix” (after both 4-track masters were lost), The Carnegie Hall Concert now sounds magnificent despite a few rare spots of distortion. What began as a benefit for Swami Satchidananda and evolved into a summoning of John Coltrane’s spirit now stands as a tribute to the liberating force of Alice Coltrane herself. It’s a communion. Drink deep”.
I will wrap up with a review from Pitchfork. In one of the most extensive and detailed examinations In many ways, this album is a good entry into the work of Alice Coltrane. It might compel you to look further and wider and seek out her contemporaries. You will get so much from Alice Coltrane: The Carnegie Hall Concert:
“There are a lot of reasons to be excited about The Carnegie Hall Concert. It’s only the second full live album in the official Alice Coltrane catalog (an incomplete version of this same Carnegie Hall concert was previously released as a bootleg), and it dates from her most celebrated period as a bandleader, recorded just one week after the release of her acknowledged masterpiece Journey in Satchidananda. It features generously roomy renditions—including versions of two key Journey tracks, each clocking in at more than double the length of the original—that readily transport and at times overwhelm despite the occasionally rough sonics of the source tape. (Sadly, the 4-track master tapes of the concert were lost over the years—“Don’t ask me how,” writes Coltrane’s frequent producer Ed Michel, who oversaw the original Carnegie Hall recording, with palpable frustration in his production notes—so the release is drawn from a 2-track reference mix.)
And the album’s supporting cast is extraordinary, bringing together musicians from Journey—Pharoah Sanders on tenor and soprano sax, flute and more, Cecil McBee on bass, and Tulsi Reynolds on tamboura—with bassist Jimmy Garrison, a previous sideman to both Alice and John; Archie Shepp, a collaborator of John’s and, like Sanders, a strongly established saxophonist-bandleader in his own right; dual drummers Ed Blackwell and Clifford Jarvis, the former of whom had joined John on 1960 sessions co-led by Don Cherry; and harmonium player Kumar Kramer.
But there’s another, perhaps even more valuable aspect to the album, exemplified by the “Africa” reentry described above: the way it helpfully complicates Coltrane’s rapidly crystallizing legacy. At this point, Coltrane’s overdue canonization has fully taken hold. During roughly the past decade, thanks to a series of illuminating reissues and tributes and a steady stream of namechecks (from tastemakers including Solange and André 3000), her work has been given its rightful due apart from the long-enshrined catalog of her iconic husband and collaborator, reaching a slew of new listeners in the process. But as her name has morphed into a kind of buzzword—often invoked in conjunction with the now-inescapable descriptor “spiritual jazz”—her image has at times been reduced to a near-caricature, that of the serene queen of the ashram, smiling benevolently from within her brilliant orange robes.
While there is of course some truth to that characterization, Alice Coltrane was not all prayer rugs and incense. As Flying Lotus—her grandnephew and frequent, outspoken champion—noted in a 2021 interview, Coltrane “was the matriarch of the family, but she was also the Godfather. She took care of everybody, but you couldn’t mess with Auntie.” In a starker way than any other prior Alice Coltrane release, The Carnegie Hall Concert allows us to glimpse these two incarnations side by side: Coltrane as both matriarch and Godfather; Coltrane as spiritual-jazz mystic and formidable heir to the harshly ecstatic fire music that her husband had spearheaded in the last few years of his life.
That juxtaposition seems almost intentional, as the concert is divided into two neat halves. First comes the Journey material, the title track and “Shiva-Loka,” as they’re sequenced on the album. In starting the show this way, Coltrane was both showcasing her new LP and honoring her guru. As Lauren Du Graf lays out in her helpful and detailed liner notes, the Carnegie Hall performance was actually part of an all-star benefit for the Integral Yoga Institute founded by Swami Satchidananda, Coltrane’s spiritual teacher at the time, her guide both out of grief, in the wake of her husband’s death, and on a transformative 1970 trip to India, and—as she’d cited in the Journey liner notes—a “direct inspiration” for the album.
Coltrane’s harp work on these first two tracks is flat-out gorgeous, but she seems content to play a mainly textural, supportive role. That changes dramatically on the final two pieces, 20-minute-plus renditions of two compositions by John, “Africa” and the minimal, staccato fanfare “Leo,” both featuring Alice on piano, the instrument she’d played in John’s band and worked at diligently in her earlier, largely undocumented musical apprenticeship in Detroit. These performances are as shatteringly intense as the first two were quietly meditative. The ensemble seems to be not just performing John Coltrane repertoire but consciously channeling the relentless rush of his most forbiddingly dense free-form work. “Africa” has a strong flavor of Trane circa the mid ’60s, when he beefed up his working band with extra drummers and saxophonists—with Shepp joining in occasionally and Sanders eventually signing on as a permanent addition—to create ever-escalating action paintings of sound.
As Alice switches instruments, so do Shepp and Sanders, picking up the tenors they proudly hoisted alongside Trane on 1965’s Ascension, and seeking out similarly furious peaks (Shepp’s roaring, ragged cries around the 5:00 mark are particularly arresting, as are Sanders’ multiphonic shrieks around 8:00). Alice also had plenty of experience playing alongside John in this mode—check out Live at the Village Vanguard Again! or Live in Japan, both recorded in ’66—but here, she’s even more commanding. During her solo, she establishes the firm bedrock of the piece while letting fly with swooping, swirling right-hand cascades. She often sounds here like either two or three pianists playing at once, nodding to the great McCoy Tyner, who was at the keyboard for John’s original version, while blasting off into her own distinct stratosphere.
More magic comes during her extended feature on “Leo,” a piece she had performed many times with John and would often reprise in later years. Starting around the 5:00 mark, she conjures a massive wall of rippling notes before launching into a series of breakneck dashes with the double-strength rhythm section, punctuated by prismatic storm clouds of sustain. You rarely hear Alice Coltrane mentioned in the company of the great power pianists of free jazz—Cecil Taylor, Don Pullen, Matthew Shipp, and others—but her staggering performances during this latter portion of the show confirm just how much she deserves to be regarded as a titan of that idiom.
Ultimately, the release of The Carnegie Hall Concert feels right on time, providing a welcome jolt of focus to a widespread impression of Alice Coltrane that’s started to seem just a tad vague. She’s here in full: the matriarch we now know well and duly appreciate; the Godfather we may not have ever properly reckoned with. The devotee of Satchidananda; the torchbearer for John. And the bandleader and instrumental powerhouse who marshaled formidable talents like Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp, and found space for them within her rapidly expanding musical vision. There were more Alice Coltranes still to come, as she moved into challenging orchestral music, mind-bending organ work, and, ultimately, decades filled with devotional song. As this set shows, she always contained multitudes”.
I have not offered too many of my own insights and interpretations. I feel that others can do it better and with more clarity and expertise! I was drawn to this album when it was reissued/released on vinyl. It sounds exceptional! I am thinking of adding it to my collection. Such an affecting album from the great Alice Coltrane, I think a lot of people have discovered her music after hearing this album. Alice Coltrane: The Carnegie Hall Concert is an album that hits…
ALL the senses.