Higher knowledge and a cosmic jazz revival

Alice Coltrane's album is a musical, spiritual progression, she tells Stuart Nicholson.

Unperturbed by the weight she carries on her shoulders, Alice Coltrane, the widow of tenor saxophonist John Coltrane (who died in 1967), released her own album, Translinear Light.

It's an album that seamlessly seems to pick up from her last album, recorded in 1978. "It was almost as if no time had passed at all." She now spends her time engaged in spiritual activities at her ashram, the Vedantic Center in California. "I've been in India practically every year over the past 10 years, and also [working on] projects here, so time has prevented me recording. My son was in a position of practically pleading, 'Mom, please make a CD.'"

Since it has been almost 40 years since she took up the pursuit of the universal Om, it's perhaps unsurprising that Translinear Light is deeply infused with the influence of Hindu religious music and unifying messages of love, with titles such as Sita Ram, Jagadishwar, The Hymn or Satya Sai Isha.

"I think it is a basic continuation of where you are in your life," she explains. "If you are going forward then you are seeking higher knowledge and spiritual experience, you wish to reach new vistas of understanding and purpose; Translinear is moving in that line."

Also included are two compositions by her late husband, Leo and Crescent, where her sweeping keyboard flourishes and Eastern, blues-tinged harmonies combine with son Ravi Coltrane on tenor saxophone. But it's in their collaboration on the album's title track, a shade under 10 minutes long, that Ravi reawakens memories of his father's intense passion. Aware of his limitations yet confident of his abilities, he seems balanced between a recovery of jazz's past and the stirrings of an individual personality. His brother Oran, an alto saxophonist, duets with his mother on The Hymn, a strangely moving yet impeccably serene incantation that has echoes of "Cosmic Jazz" for which his mother is now remembered.

After John Coltrane's death, Alice became a bandleader in her own right with a series of albums including A Monastic Trio, Universal Consciousness or Ptah the El Daoud. In tune with the finger cymbals and incense era of the late 1960s, when a fascination with Eastern religions swept Western culture, it was branded "Cosmic Jazz" because of references to space, spirituality and tranquillity. Along with artists such as Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders, she infused her music with passages of lyrical abstraction interspersed with calm reverie. Viewing her work as a meditative art form, by the end of the 1970s she had drifted out of jazz to concentrate on spiritual pursuits.

An accomplished pianist, as Alice McLeod she arrived on the New York jazz scene of the early 1960s from Detroit. At the time she was one of the few women instrumentalists. "I had parents who encouraged me to be the best at what I wanted to try," she says. "I had one relative living in Harlem. I stayed with her and it wasn't long before I was working, I had people like Barry Harris call me . . . Johnny Griffin, Sonny Stitt, from there to Terry."

Vibist Terry Gibbs' Jewish Melodies in Jazztime, recorded back in 1963, was re-released recently, with Alice on piano. In his autobiography Gibbs recalls, "All the musicians flipped out every time she played. She was making those Eastern-style runs of the minor songs and making them sound very authentic." In turn, Alice looks back on her time with Gibbs with affection. "He was such a gentleman and a fine musician, it was nice time of my life."

At the time her piano playing was in transition, "from like Bud Powell to John Coltrane," she says, "by being in his proximity because he never really instructed me on improvisation!" She started dating John Coltrane, married him and in 1965 joined his group. By July 1967 she was his widow with four children (her daughter from a previous marriage and three sons by Coltrane).

It's clear she misses what jazz musicians of a certain age call "the old days". It was brought back to her when she made an unscheduled appearance sitting in with son Ravi's group at Joe's Pub in Manhattan in 2002 when lines of well wishers formed up after the concert. "You don't forget those lines of people just waiting to say hello or thank you," she says. It convinced her son the time was right for an album. So at 67 years of age, is this the beginning of a new career? "No it isn't. We could change it, but I think it's okay as it is!" - Guardian Service

* Translinear Light is on Impulse! Records.