Her debut as an organist is stunning, and the instrument accentuates the Bud Powell-inspired chops occasionally referred to in contemporary commentary but rarely hinted at in previous recordings. By the making of Journey In Satchidananda two years later, Alice Coltrane was central to the Indocentric jazz of the early ’70s, arguably the first instance of a female instrumentalist assuming a defining role in a jazz subgenre.Ĭoltrane trumped herself with Universal Consciousness. Like John’s first soaring soprano solos, the emergence of Alice’s cascading harp on her debut as a leader, A Monastic Trio, signaled a spiritual ascent. Subsequently, she took a page from his playbook and brought a second instrument to the foreground of her music. More importantly, Coltrane shared her husband’s instincts in taking great artistic risks to pursue a spiritual quest. The albums shared a penchant for modal themes and mid-tempo vamps, though her temperament was more meditative than ecstatic.
Unsurprisingly, she initially took incremental steps to emerge from her husband’s long shadow on the four Impulse albums that preceded 1971’s Universal Consciousness: A Monastic Trio (1968), Huntington Ashram Monastery (1969), Ptah the El Daoud (1970) and Journey in Satchidananda (1970). But despite her tenure in John Coltrane’s last ensembles, she had to virtually start from scratch, having no prior opportunities to document her music on her own terms. Unlike most women, Coltrane had a thriving family business with a sterling brand name. Alice Coltrane did what most women have to do when they lose their partners and have kids to raise: she went to work.