What does the enthusiasm for spiritual jazz really amount to? A sceptic would say that its protagonists are looking for an easy way to enjoy or play jazz, entering through a gate beyond which lies little of the challenge that characterised the music of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman and, of course, John Coltrane himself, whose late work will provoke heated arguments for as long as people still listen to recorded jazz.īut it was Alice’s husband who can be credited with laying the foundations for spiritual jazz – not least with a composition called Spiritual, included on an album called Coltrane “Live” At The Village Vanguard in 1961. Yet from the work of her nephew Steven Ellison ( Flying Lotus) to explicit homages paid by Paul Weller, Laura Veirs, Sunn O))) and others, the textures and flavours of the albums Alice made between her husband’s death in 1967 and her own departure for other planes of being in 2007 are now a common resource, forming a part of the fabric of modern music and an object of reverence for exponents and admirers of “spiritual jazz”. ORDER NOW: The Beatles are on the cover of the September 2021 issue of Uncut.And one of the less ecstatic reviews of the recent Floating Points/ Pharoah Sanders album observed that the music seemed to be doing little more than trying to replicate the mood of Alice’s recordings at their most trance-like and undemanding. A distinguished John Coltrane scholar who teaches at an American university told me earlier this year that, while his students are extremely enthusiastic about Alice, they listen to John and don’t understand what the fuss was about. The recent popularity of Alice Coltrane’s music among a new generation of listeners can be a puzzle to longtime admirers of her late husband’s work.
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