In his new book Cosmic Music: The Life, Art and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane, journalist Andy Beta charts her expansive life in music. Here, he highlights the many worlds she moved through beyond spiritual jazz.

For the longest time, Alice Coltrane’s music was treated as a footnote to the career of John Coltrane. Yet for those who’ve ventured deep into her world, Alice’s transcendent music stands entirely on its own: cascading, ecstatic, timeless meditations, performed on harp and piano, that are the very definition of cosmic jazz. The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, the 2017 compilation of the wonderfully strange, synth-embellished devotional music she performed at her Californian ashram through the 1980s, only deepened the fascination with Alice, expanding her influence to a new generation. Cosmic Music: The Life, Art and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane is a new, long-overdue account of her life, work and legacy. As its author, music journalist Andy Beta, explains here, while Alice’s connection to spiritual jazz is already well established, she had ties to many other musical forms too.

She lived next door to Berry Gordy

Around the time that Alice McLeod was born, Berry Gordy’s family moved from the west side of Detroit to the east side, at the corner of Farnsworth and St Antoine Street, in the Black working-class neighbourhood of Paradise Valley. Alice’s family lived across the street and the two families would often mingle. Before becoming the Motown mogul, Berry Gordy used to always come by the McLeod house and “eat out the pot”, joining the McLeods for dinner.

She was inspired by gospel royalty

Alice began playing piano and leading the youth choir at Mt Olive Baptist Church. A child prodigy, she was soon leading three different choirs, while also checking out the other talent to be had. One visit to Mack Avenue Church of God in Christ introduced her to the Lemon Gospel Chorus, led by the future Mom and Pops Winans of the legendary Winans Family. She would later call it “the most powerful musical and religious experiences of my youth… The Lord just completely swept through.”

Her first band was a lounge act

Alice’s earliest band was a buzzed-about vocal lounge act, the Premiers, where she sang, did vocal arrangements and played Wurlitzer in all the hottest nightspots in Detroit. As her bandmate and future Motown arranger George Bohanon described it, “Motown and the concept of Black vocal pop was still a few years away, so the Premiers were ahead of their time, really, for any Black groups to sound like that. There was no one that would play that kind of music.”

She played classical percussion in high school

Future Headhunter Bennie Maupin was three years Alice’s junior at Northeastern High School. The first time he saw Alice, it was at a school assembly. “She was playing timpani and chimes and glockenspiel and snare drum and all the percussion stuff that’s found in an orchestra or symphonic band, and I was just really impressed with that, because you don’t think of women or young ladies doing that.” Later that year at another school assembly, Maupin was struck again as Alice now led a piano trio.

She was a stone-cold bebopper

Vibist/bandleader Terry Gibbs was a big draw on the nightclub circuit, packing houses and appearing on late-night television. When he needed a new pianist, he knew within four bars of her audition that Alice was the one. “On the first song, I knew that she was something else,” Gibbs recalled. “She sounded just like Bud Powell. She played chorus after chorus, and every note was a gem.” (On YouTube, you can find a clip of young Alice leading a jazz band while she lived in Paris, delivering a stellar version of Dizzy Gillespie’s Woody’n You.)

She learnt harp via Laura Nyro

In the wake of her husband John Coltrane’s passing from liver cancer in 1967, which left her to raise four young children on her own, Alice Coltrane underwent a spiritually arduous four years. By the end of the decade, she began studying with the famed guru and Woodstock benediction-bestower Swami Satchidananda, putting her in close proximity to other spiritually minded rock acts like Laura Nyro and the Rascals. Her harp playing entwined with Hubert Laws and Ron Carter on the Rascals’ hippiefied Peaceful World and provided afterglow to the erotic charge of Nyro’s Christmas and the Beads of Sweat. Alice would also share the stage with both acts at her famous Carnegie Hall concert for Satchidananda.

Her music was a staple of 1970s light shows

Alice famously collaborated with Carlos Santana on the way-out jazz fusion album Illuminations, but at the same time, her music began to be prominently featured in a setting miles away from the jazz circuit. The early rock concert light shows of the psychedelic 60s became events in their own right in the 70s, offering sensorial bliss to auditoriums full of stoned teenagers. Early outfits like Retina Circus and Heavy Water recognised that Alice’s mind-dilating music was a natural fit, slotting in alongside recordings by the likes of Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane.

She was supposed to play harp on Songs in the Key of Life

Stevie Wonder asked Alice to play harp on his 1976 double album, Songs in the Key of Life. By this time, Alice was deep in her religious studies, having recently become a guru, establishing the Vedantic Center in the San Fernando Valley and taking the honorific of Swamini Turiyasangitananda. After a week or so in the studio, Turiyasangitananda silently asked the Lord if she needed to be there and was informed she could leave. She never played a note, but was thanked in the credits, and the harp part was played by another legendary Detroit harpist, Dorothy Ashby.

Doja Cat lived at her ashram

While her family only lived at Turiyasangitananda’s Sai Anantam Ashram for a few years, the young Amala Zandile Dlamini perhaps absorbed some of Swamini’s musical talents, en route to becoming better known as Doja Cat. Kittenz may not soon mistake Doja Cat’s music for the spiritual bhajans Swamini played at her ashram, but look at the cover of Luaka Bop’s 2017 compilation The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, and you’ll spot Doja Cat to her right in a pink dress.