Unlike most artists that will be covered on this site, Alice Coltrane is someone who dedicated all of her discography to the topic of liberation, albeit mostly on the spiritual side rather than the political. Despite her single-pointed focus, her body of work has an incredible diversity to it. Her music ranges from aggressive chants to slow hymns, from avant-garde classical to her brand of spiritual jazz. The song “Transcendence” is a powerful combination of those last two genres. It begins with a modernist string section swelling in ascension as Coltrane’s harp slides up and down underneath. The harp then takes over for a solo, only to have the strings intrude with a loud glissando. The strings fluctuate between European and South Asian influences as she maintains these impressive runs on the harp. There’s some great use of extended techniques in the strings to bring a certain amount of grit to counterbalance the beauty of the harp.
The interplay between the harp and the other strings seems to create a sonic story, one of a persistent transcendent force (the harp) persisting through the violent shifts of rebirth and Samsara (the strings). Her Hindu belief system of Advaita Vedanta plays heavily into her music. She describes it as going “to your fullest and highest potential and not [being] limited by some tenets of some doctrine that says we come here, here’s the minister, and we pay our tithes and go back to our home or our job or business or whatever and do everything you want.”
This liberation from dogma is important to the philosophy, so much so that it does not require a renunciation of any other faiths and instead seeks a goal of interfaith understanding. This religious freedom comes up later in the album as well, with a chant dedicated to Sri Nrsimha, who is an avatar of Vishnu who comes to Earth to destroy evil and end religious persecution. Alice Coltrane was a woman who dedicated her life’s work to spiritual liberation in a time where negativity was the most pervasive tone in musical culture. While both positivity and negativity have their place, I think people underestimate how radical it is to put forward a positive vision of the future. I hope that Alice’s music can inspire those positive visions and that we can materialize them here on Earth.
Freeing Music 