New Ancient Strings: Alice Coltrane’s Carnegie Hall Concert
50 years late, we're finally treated to one of the greatest live shows of the 70s
What’s my favorite album of 2024 so far? Beyonce? MGMT? No, predictably, it’s an obscure oddity recorded in the 1970s that’s only now seeing the light of day.
Alice Coltrane may be a familiar name to you. Known to most as the wife of the better-known jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, who's responsible for some of the most core jazz recordings in a variety of subgenres, it’s a bit of a cliche to say she had a career of her own, but she certainly did. Originally a vibraphone player from Detroit by the name of Alice Macleod, she joined his band in 1966 and got on keyboards, becoming (along with Pharoah Sanders and Rashied Ali, who both had their own impressive careers) a member of his spiritual "final group" as he pushed further and further into dissonance, 20+ minute solos, and free jazz. This era is recorded on other archival documents, such as the excellent Concert in Japan.
After John’s untimely death from liver cancer in 1967, Alice started coming into her own as a solo artist, creating a unique fusion of spirituality, psychedelia, free jazz, and world music. Her debut album was "A Monastic Trio" (1968), one of her first recordings on harp, her main instrument from then on. It didn't stun, but a couple years later, she delivered a truly unbelievable run of records - Ptah the El Daoud, Journey in Satchidananda, Universal Consciousness - the list just goes on.
Ptah is excellently arranged (note standout track “Turiya & Ramakrishna”) and Universal creates a beautiful otherworldly atmosphere, but Satchidandanda merits special mention. Coltrane was always interested in world music and cultural influences (Ptah has a vague Ancient Egyptian theming, with the album being named after a god of knowledge) but her next release took it a few steps further by including a tanpura player. The record combines jazz and Indian modes of improvisation, with three shorter tracks on the A-side and two sublime longer ones on the B-side.
The Carnegie Hall concert was recorded on February 21st, 1972, only a week after Satchidananda, and prominently features extended versions of two of those shorter tracks, both clocking in around 15 minutes. The title track is stretched out into a deliciously slow, meditative experience, with the iconic 6/4 bassline only coming in after the 1:30 mark, while Pharoah Sanders’ immense overblowing saxophone lights up the slightly more uptempo “Shiva-Loka.”
The band is a similar lineup as on the album, which itself was practically a reunion of the final John Coltrane group. Pharoah Sanders' horn stars in the high-end; Cecil McBee's bass provides a low-end that keeps up with the psychedelic chaos of the other instruments. Archie Shepp is also on saxophone, and Jimmy Garrison of the original John Coltrane Quartet is on second bass. The tanpura player, the mononymous Tulsi, is back, lending the proceedings a distinctly Hindustani-influenced atmosphere. There are two drummers, Ed Blackwell (from the Ornette Coleman/Don Cherry sphere) and Clifford Jarvis (a widely playing artist who worked with people as far apart as Sun Ra and Freddie Hubbard). Topping it off is Kumar Kramer (not the Seinfeld one; I feel like whoever he was, he heard that a lot in the ‘90s) on harmonium.
In the second half of the concert, Coltrane plays two songs composed by her late husband - “Africa” and “Leo.” “Africa,” from the 1961 LP Africa/Brass with Mccoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, was originally done with a big band, lending a hypnotic atmosphere that contrasted the more emotional pieces elsewhere on the album. Already about 16 minutes long, filling a whole side of the album, this rendition stretches the composition out to 28, turning its dark jungle ambiance and animal noises into something almost evocative of Afrofuturism. (The spiritual jazz movement’s link to the concept is tenuous, since the term wasn’t even coined until the 1990s, but Alice Coltrane’s work is a clear precursor; she’s even been sampled by people like Flying Lotus and The Last Poets.) The Carnegie Hall “Africa” uses those double drummers and basses to hypnotic effect, creating a distinctly West African atmosphere with harp and saxophone floating mysteriously above low polyrhythms.
“Leo” closes out the set with a cover of a song that hadn’t actually been released yet. John Coltrane recorded the album Interstellar Space, a series of seriously far-out free-jazz duets with drummer Rashied Ali (who’s also on some of Alice’s albums, though not this one) in 1967, the year of his death. It was shelved for a bit, seen as too anti-commercial, but released as archival in 1973, a year after the concert. The first edition didn’t have “Leo” either, actually - you’d have to wait until 1991 to hear it as a bonus track on the CD reissue. As with the other songs on the original album, the melody is just a short phrase before the song knots itself into perfectly dissonant genius/chaos, with that melodic line occasionally coming back in slightly altered form. The Carnegie Hall version gives it more structure, but keeps the hazy freeness. Coltrane gets on piano, evoking McCoy Tyner with very “out” harmonic sensibilities.
The show itself was well attended; in an insane crossover, Coltrane was billed alongside ‘60s songwriting titan Laura Nyro. The circumstances that caused the album to sit in the vaults for 50+ years simply amount to the original (4-track) master tapes being lost - the recording had to be painstakingly reconstructed from a 2-track mix and a partial bootleg. Coltrane, who had already played there once in 1968, would go on to perform at Carnegie Hall five more times over the course of her life.
Overall, the four-song, 80-minute set is quite tight - there's not a minute wasted. Hard to believe something as expansive as this was made only 20 or so years after the pre-LP era, when jazz musicians had to cram everything into a 3-minute single. It's a perfectly arranged recording from an artist at the peak of her career.