He was her soulmate and collaborator, and together they had four children before John's untimely death from liver cancer in 1967. She returned to the US after her first marriage ended, where she played with vibist Terry Gibbs (she appears on his 1963 album Plays Jewish Melodies In Jazztime) who introduced her to John Coltrane in 1963. She later moved to Paris where she studied piano with the great Bud Powell. Before she was twenty, she had gigged with saxophonists Cannonball Adderley and Sonny Stitt. In her teens, she discovered bebop through her older half-brother, the bassist Ernie Farrow, and was entranced. Gospel remained a great love and its influence can be heard throughout her work. She's also a major influence on contemporary jazz innovators like Joshua Abrams and Amirtha Kidambi, who clearly respond to her unorthodox approach.īorn in Detroit in 1937, the young Alice McLeod was a musical prodigy, learning piano from an early age, and playing organ in Mount Olive Baptist Church by the age of nine. The Los Angeles beats & jazz community centred around her nephew Stephen Ellison, aka Flying Lotus, has played a key role in raising her profile, and there's undoubtedly a heady whiff of Alice in Kamasi Washington's symphonic jazz arrangements. Her music has always attracted open-minded music fans - Journey In Satchidananda is one of the cult albums – but in recent years it has enjoyed a new lease of life, with Radiohead, Four Tet and Sunn 0))) among the acts paying homage. Coltrane was hugely respected by the heavyweight musicians she worked with, who were clearly less hung up on genre boundaries than many critics. Such wrong-headed attitudes are thankfully on the wane. As the normally on-point Richard Cook writes in his Jazz Encyclopedia, "Her albums of her own music often come across as soft-headed and incoherent rambling… one wonders if she would have enjoyed any attention at all if she had remained plain Alice McCleod." Others simply didn't get what her music was about, dismissing it as so much hippy twaddle.
Some viewed her in the way many view Yoko Ono: responsible for the break-up of her husband John Coltrane's classic quintet a sexist and demonstrably untrue claim. Although her achievement is now being recognised, for many years Coltrane was misunderstood and dismissed by many of jazz's gatekeepers.
Alice Coltrane is one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, with a sublime musical vision that encompasses jazz, blues, gospel, Indian classical, North African music, and European modernism.
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