Alice Coltrane - World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda (Luaka Bop)

Add Date: 05/02
Focus Tracks: 1, 4, 5, & 9
FCC: Clean
Format: College, Jazz, Triple A, World

Artist Info: Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda’s devotion to spirituality was the central purpose of the final four decades of her life, an often-overlooked awakening that largely took shape during her four-year marriage to John Coltrane and after his 1967 death. By 1983, Alice had established the 48-acre Sai Anantam Ashram outside of Los Angeles. She quietly began recording music from the ashram, releasing it within her spiritual community in the form of private press cassette tapes. On May 5, Luaka Bop will release the first-ever compilation of recordings from this period, making these songs available to the wider public for the first time. Entitled World Spirituality Classics, Volume 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, the release is the first installment in a planned series of spiritual music from around the globe; curated, compiled and distributed by Luaka Bop. 

This powerful, largely unheard body of work finds Alice singing for the first time in her recorded catalog, which dates back to 1963 and includes appearances on six John Coltrane albums, alongside Charlie Haden and McCoy Tyner, and 14 albums as bandleader starting with her Impulse! debut in 1967 with ‘A Monastic Trio.’ The songs featured on the Luaka Bop release have been culled from the four cassettes that Alice recorded and released between 1982 and 1995: Turiya Sings, Divine Songs, Infinite Chants, and Glorious Chants. It will be released as an eight-song digital set. A special vinyl edition features two additional songs, the previously unreleased “Rama Katha” from the Turiya Sings recording session and “Krishna Japaye” from 1990’s Infinite Chants.