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In 1971, Alvin Ailey choreographed “Cry!” as a birthday gift for his mother. Alongside music by Laura Nyro, Alice Coltrane’s elegiac “There’s Something About John Coltrane” anchors the choreography, which features a Black female solo dancer, costumed in regal all-white, who moves from pantomimes of brutal labor under captivity to ecstatic but brooding liberation silhouettes that wheel and wallow in the restoration of her sovereign identity. Her body maps the path and rites of passage of Black womanhood so eloquently that the stamina the dance requires is hardly perceptible to the spectator, which itself speaks to the conditions of Black femininity: Make harrowing exertion appear effortless, gorgeous, all by yourself, and don’t act isolated, be your own accompaniment.
Judith Jamison was the first to interpret “Cry!” It’s remained in the company’s repertoire for decades, and the use of Coltrane’s elegy for the love of her life has made that music into two dirges, one for husband John Coltrane and another for the woman on the invisible mourner’s bench honoring and channeling him for the rest of her days. The cry here is not one of vulnerability or angst but the unruly register of creative freedom, of calling your power back.
Alice Coltrane’s life and legacy is a series of those callings. She was a natural mystic who spoke in a lilting near-whisper sometimes, with the measured timbre that makes you lean in closer and yearn for her words until you come into their chorus, delicate but fierce in intellect. “Cry” and cries aside, her work is in and out of revival, while John Coltrane’s is a cultural metronome such that even his inaccessible-for-some late-period recordings and live performances — during which he squealed and screamed his way toward another realm of psalm — are embraced by critics and jazz fans who dismiss the jazz avant-garde, his free playing their only exemption. He pleases even stalwarts who treat jazz as a series of trivia questions about who played on what LP, and who was in what band and when. Meanwhile, Alice Coltrane, despite having been one of John’s pianists, is maneuvered into the margins by subgenre euphemisms like “spiritual jazz,” by which many mean, music for hippies and poets, while mainstream jazz is for men who read Esquire and smoke performative cigars on business trips.
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The sensuality of Alice’s compositions is an imposition on those who were seduced into loving Miles’ impervious cool or Art Blakey’s hard bop sound. And yet when people need a portal into or proxy for spiritual awakening, Alice Coltrane’s music often becomes integral, a newfound household name, because her staggered textures are gracious enough to accommodate both the ascetic and the philistine. Hers is the sound of belonging in and transcending any instant you find yourself in. Because of this, along with her uncanny ability to be both accessible and impossible to contain, her sound and style often become stand-ins for life’s pivots to desolation and blank slates, as if we were constantly using her as our master of ceremonies for a homegoing service and entreating: Pray for us, while we pray to you.
The deification of our jazz dead is stunning to behold that way. We can’t help it. They become archetypes in the Black American mythmaking tradition and arbiters of our constantly shifting Black myth. In the case of Alice Coltrane, the myth of the pious Black saint only she can inspire makes us feel enveloped in the holiness we project onto her until an abyss of good distorts the actual idiosyncratic person she was and we get a pin-up Alice, a good, clean symbol.
Alice Coltrane’s nephew, musician Steven Ellison, stage name Flying Lotus, played a gorgeous DJ set on the opening night of “Monument Eternal,” on Feb. 8, at the Hammer Museum’s ongoing exhibition devoted to Alice Coltrane’s life and work. This is a group show curated by Erin Christovale, with archival contributions from Alice and John’s children Michelle and Ravi Coltrane, the Coltrane Estate and many of the members of the ashram community that Alice created in L.A.’s Agoura Hills neighborhood from the 1970s onward. Every Sunday, in a concert series curated by Christovale and Ross Chait, a close associate of the Coltrane family, there’s a live concert within the exhibition, set on a stage built by GeoVanna Gonzalez. This series began with harpist Brandee Younger and includes Michelle Coltrane, Jeff Parker, Mary Lattimore, Jasper Marsalis and Radha Botofasina, among many others, through the end of April.
“It has a groove, it has freedom, it’s a beginning for some who can’t just dive right into experimental improvisational music, to start there,” Michelle Coltrane tells me in our conversation about the show. The rebirth is necessary, an unburdening and a kind of justice for her and her family.
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The exhibition itself is a tension between the deeply private spiritual leader Turiya — the Sanskirt name Alice assumed after John died at 39 — and the public-facing brand that is Alice Coltrane, the widow of John Coltrane, turned by some into a relic and representative of a member of the royal court of jazz’s bittersweet golden era. This music doesn’t just evoke nostalgia, it invents the sonic texture of nostalgia and gives us excuses to covet the frequencies of the past as if they could save us from a bleak and dire series of unknowns ahead. John purchased the harp that Alice would learn to play before he died, and it arrived at the family home after he was gone. Her evolution into Turiya occurred alongside him that way; she carried him with her. He was the harp strings made of guts of animals sacrificed for music; her hands bled into them as communion. He was what she embraced in his absence as ether, as resonance. Michelle tells me in an interview that one day a plane landed in the backyard of their home outside of Philadelphia, and Alice took it as a sign to pick up and move West with their four children. Her song “Om Supreme” describes the sense of being ordained to reunite in California, as if this would be the site of their shared reincarnation. She wasn’t so much superstitious as obedient, devoted to making the ineffable routine and mysticism accessible even to the uninitiated.
“Monument Eternal” deftly repurposes archival materials, such as programs from ashram services and vintage concert bills, alongside dreamy images of Turiya that exude divine consciousness, the way a church might display saints or priests. But access alone cannot translate the depth of a spirit that wants to exist on her own terms. The walls of these rooms accomplish a kind of muting of her aura, a place where veneration feels austere or regimented by bureaucracy. I get an uneasy feeling, searching for her echo in these galleries, like she doesn’t want to be found there. The light is too harshly angled and full of diodes, too precise, too careful and still somehow not careful enough, not surreal, sepia and tender enough. Perhaps it is simply too literal to have her things on display. The dynamic in the exhibition is redeemed by the live events within it and their play against the archive, which feel earned but also alienated from the original artworks.
We gather now to let her be real.
At home, it’s Alice Coltrane’s laughter that could break this spell or stupor or almost hagiography. When I speak with Michelle Coltrane about her mother, her expression carves out the space where grief and awe meet, a burnt auburn aura of the sacral orange they wear in ceremony, and she recalls a woman from Detroit by way of the bandstand by way of Philly by way of California, a traveler with a steady hand who invented the road as she walked it; and she walked alone as well as in the company of her children and many apprentices.
Michelle Coltrane, now the matriarch of the family, and Ravi Coltrane, his father’s near-twin and torch bearer, inheritor of his skill on the horn, harbor so much reverence for the family legacy it covers them like a penance. For years now I’ve been interviewing the Coltrane family, beginning in 2021 with an oral history of the ashram performed live at L.A.’s 2220 Arts, and most recently on assignment in Detroit, covering the jazz festival there and a performance of Alice’s compositions. Once in a while, Michelle texts me about a show of her own or one of Ravi’s, or sends me a photo from that first event in 2021. I get the clear sense that she was raised to allow people in but also keeps a safe psychic distance, a spiritual boundary that, when respected, falls away.
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I learn things in our conversations, like how Alice Coltrane condemned vanity but not at the expense of grooming, how she rebuked the cult of fame and celebrity but never abandoned legacy — her husband’s, the creators or her own. Alice Coltrane, though not militant, upheld the tenets of co-terminal groups like the Black Panthers in forming a self-governing collective, though hers was not overtly racialized; it was radical in the sense that it broke with dead roots to plant new ones that endure until now. The ashram she built in the Santa Monica mountains was as subversive as any free school or fringe arts cohort, just without the shrillness of dogma. The household was vegetarian before this was trendy or socially acceptable, and yet not in an uppity way. Michelle recalls her and her siblings riding bikes with the Jackson family children in some idyllic nondenominational order of Black music.
Ravi bears an eerie resemblance to John on the day of the Super Bowl, when we gather at Michelle’s Topanga home for an ashram service for which Alice’s voice is the master of ceremonies. She laughs into the room, about vanity again, against it, about the soul. We sing Sanskrit bhajans as an ensemble and break to watch Kendrick’s halftime show. Black music is so relentlessly true to itself when you look away from the trappings of industry, it’s the closest estimation we have of utopia. Ravi circles the room with a camera the way his father did to capture footage of family road trips from the early 1960s. It’s not luck that sustains this closeness but dedication, to the spirit of Alice and that of John, so that the now-decadent obsession with them is both warranted and a threat to all this depth and private beauty.
Commercialized saint-making is dehumanizing, and bypasses genuine mourning by reducing people to idols. The unsuspecting saints may be gone by the time they realize that the pedestal to which we annexed them was a cliff or tripwire trapping them in the theater of an idea of themselves. Then their effigies become our pedestals, which we stand on to feel whole (they have no say in the matter).
I don’t see a way out for Alice Coltrane other than through the extractive and back into the quiet. Maybe a museum retrospective offers just that, and the ability to pose these ideas.
In the galleries, Coltrane is divinity itself, the muse, where a muse is someone who remains silent so that you can speak for her as you wish. But it’s not possible to use her in this way undetected. What we ultimately witness is the feeling of the Hammer itself praying on her altar, which is what’s brilliant about the curatorial work of the project: Its limitations become the artistic statement.
