Cosmic Music: The Life, Art and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane

Musician, wife, mother, daughter, sister, grandmother, collaborator, guru, iconoclast: Alice Coltrane is one of the most forward-looking yet misunderstood artists of the last fifty years.

 

For most of her life - and even in the decades since her passing - she was seen merely as the widow of the late John Coltrane, one of jazz's 'great men' who has long been worshipped with an almost religious fervour and devotion. Yet ever so slowly, that level of love and appreciation is also being bestowed upon Alice. Her influence can be felt on new generations of musicians, especially women, people of colour and artists who seek to combine jazz with other musical forms. In Coltrane's music, we can observe the transformation of Black American music in microcosm: the gospel roots giving rise to jazz and bebop, then intermingling with soul and R&B, then onto rock, modern classical, psychedelia and new age.

Cosmic Music is both the first full-length biography of Alice and a long-overdue corrective to the historical and critical record. Based on extensive research and scores of new interviews by acclaimed music journalist Andy Beta, it is the definitive account of a visionary whose influence is only just beginning to be appreciated in full.

If you have yet to explore her cosmic music, begin, as Andy Beta did, with Journey in Satchidananda, then open this detailed and illuminating biography. And prepare to be transported. - Observer