Alice Coltrane

Bandleader and multi-instrumentalist Alice Coltrane was pivotal in opening up jazz to new mystical and global dimensions. Born Alice McLeod in 1937, the Detroit native grew up immersed in gospel before studying classical and jazz piano (the latter with Bud Powell). Marrying fellow jazz musician and spiritual seeker John Coltrane in 1965, she was part of his ensemble until his death from liver cancer in 1967. Alice Coltrane’s turn to Hinduism during the grieving process profoundly influenced her solo career. The fusion of Indian music, radical eclecticism, and religious universalism on landmarks like 1971’s Journey in Satchidananda and 1976’s Eternity shaped spiritual jazz, new age, and world music. Coltrane—who renamed herself Turiyasangitananda, Sanskrit for “the Transcendental Lord’s highest song of Bliss”—had largely left jazz behind by the ’80s, instead creating gospel-inspired devotional music for her California-based Vedantic Center. She released one more studio album, 2004’s Translinear Light, before succumbing to respiratory failure in 2007. In the years since, posthumous collections like 2017’s World Spirituality Classics I: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda have further cemented her legacy as a visionary for whom the musical and spiritual paths are one.