Alice Coltrane – The Carnegie Hall Concert (Impulse!, 2024)

For many people this record will be like a revelation, since Alice Coltrane, due to some not properly achieved steps like the release of Infinity, an album of recordings by the last John Coltrane reimagined through orchestral backgrounds and re-dubbed rhythm section parts that in 1972, the year of the release of the record by Impulse!, was criticized by fans and experts. The risk for Coltrane’s wife and last pianist was to be taken as an inaccurate exploiter of her husband’s legacy.

Nothing more far from the truth. In reality, Alice Coltrane was an accompished musician/composer in her own right. Her first four releases as a leader, from A Monastic Trio (Impulse!, 1967) to Journey in Sathcidananda (Impulse!, 1970) were showing an artist able to play with mastery and sensitivity both harp and piano, and an interesting composer. Those qualities couldn’t be tarnished by a single release, and if you think how much Coltrane loved to experiment with music – he releasaed albums such as John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman (Impulse!, 1963) with a classic jazz singer – that release is at least comprehensible as an attempt to give Trane solos a different context.

More than that, it is difficult to understand why musicians like Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Jimmy Garrison or Ed Blackwell, just to name a bunch that are available also in this double recording from the Carnegie Hall, should have played with an inferior or non compliant musician, being exposed to criticisms as all the actors of free jazz were in the 1960s. It has been written as an example by Peter Niklas Wilson that not always Albert Ayler was able in the second part of his career to chose the right players for his music, but, even if I’m not of that opinion, for sure it isn’t the case for the people I have mentioned.

Anyway, in 1971, the year of this recording, Alice accomplished a personal and surely passionate path through the loss of her beloved husband due to a liver cancer. This loss was not only serious for the jazz environment, but also painful for all the people around him in particular. A trip to India and the encounter with Swami Satchidananda, the religious teacher who will become Alice Coltrane’s guru, will help her to get out of grief and to focus on what she wanted to achieve as an artist.

No surprise so that in that year Alice Coltrane gave life to a show in honour of and to raise funds for her spiritual guidance. The music, recorded properly for a future record release but unpublished until now, and so fully enjoyable as far as content and as far as form, features two compositions by Alice Coltrane, the title track for the album relased by Impulse! the year before Journey in Satchidananda, and Shiva-Loka, from the same record, plus a couple of famous John Coltrane Compsitions, Africa from 1961 and the most recent Leo from another masterpiece, Interstellar Space (Impulse!, 1967).

The musicians involved in this recordings are Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders at tenor and soprano saxophones, flutes and percussions; Jimmy Garrison and Cecil Mc Bee on bass; Clifford Jarvis and Ed Blackwell on drums, and finally Tulsi on tamboura and Kumar Kramer on Harmonium. As said previously the quality of the recording is excellent, but for the two drummers who are not separated in the equalization process, so it is difficult in this case to understand who is playing what as far as their instruments.

Alice Coltrane plays harp on her compositions, and switches to piano for her husband works. Journey in Satchidananda, the opening track, begins with the usual small percussions and bass to create a climate of recollection for the listeners. Finally the bass start to depict the line of the composition and the harp enters with her ascending and descending figures. The waves delineated by the harp give life to something more similar to the sea waves than to a music.

On this texture the voice of Sanders and the flute of Shepp are added at about minute 6, creating a fascinating melody, then finally we are introduced to Sanders first solo on soprano, something that is reminiscent of one of his first records as a soloist like Thembi – similar is the emotional temperature of the piece – until the drums depict a small figure that leaves the sound of the soprano free to paint smaller and gentler melodies.

An arco bass line enters and start a small talk with the soprano, then is the turn of small percussions to take the foreground. Gently we’re arrived almost at the end of the piece, and the waves of the harp and of the saxophone lead us to a spiritual quiet. It’s time for Shiva-Loka, another composition from Alice Coltrane, where the saxophone lines by Sanders and Shepp are decisely more preeminent and articulated even if the mood is still meditative and introspective while the two drums supply a small circular pulse, both more careful about nuances than about pushing.

Disc two opens with John Coltrane’s Africa, a composition I really believe each one of you remembers since present also in last year release of the album Evenings at the Village Gate featuring Eric Dolphy. The melody played by Shepp is obviously the same as John’s original, as faithful is the structure of the composition, but Alice Coltrane goes far beyond McCoy Tyner’s voicings orchestrations on her piano, leaving space to open dissonance and to a music that is more reminiscent of Coltrane mid-60s sound with two drums and horns than of the swinging perfection of his historical quartet of the first part of that decade.

Fire music, as not only for the presence of Shepp, but also for the strenght of the collective effort to be faithful to the original John Coltrane pursuance of unknown lands of expression, with Sanders boiling up until the turmoils that were typical of his collaboration with his late colleague, the music reach another great point where the horns shut up leaving first the piano, then the drums accompanied by the flutes, then again the two basses, free to give life to a sonic landscape made of trembling notes and of a contemplative, final climax at the same time.

Leo, original conceived as a duet between John Coltrane tenor saxophone and Rashied Ali drums, is another piece whose different versions vary as far as the number of musicians involved and consequently as far as arrangement. I have read reviews of this concert in which the reviewers state that this Alice Coltrane is even more in command than in albums like the 1966 live recordings of John Coltrane At The Village Vanguard Again! and Live In Japan, both released by Impulse!, but if a certain progression in mastering her art is surely possible, a comparison between those performances is almost useless.

First of all because the renditions of John Coltrane compositions live were mostly comprised not only by technique and will to experiment but also by the mood of that particular night. As an example, trying to compare the versions of Leo taken from Live in Japan or Interstellar Space and this rendition is impossible, since the differences in personnel and feeling or frame of mind.

One can but notice an increase in the substance of the music itself, such as in reaching a culmination where Leo stands at the opposite of Journey in Satchidananda. The two tenors, the instrument for which John Coltrane is mostly known, are finally free to invoke the true spirit of this music as initially intended by his creator, while at the same time her wife Alice Coltrane is free to run across her keybord as she was doing during the live recording of The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording.

According to the Universal website, this release is only the first step in an initiative held in order to celebrate Alice and John Music through all this year 2024. If this means there will be new music in the near future, we will be only happy to hear such new stuff, hoping, as it happened, that the quality of the recorded sound will improve and increase from the first 2000s releases of live albums until the present times. And we also hope this music will be a good starting point for an younger generation of musicians as an inspiration source.