The Seeker

The death of John Coltrane brought profound psychological and spiritual crisis to his wife and musical confederate, Alice. But from it came her adoption of the harp, followed by music of transcendent beauty. In this extract from his magisterial new ALICE COLTRANE biography, ANDY BETA reveals how she stepped into the light: "The piano is the sunrise and the harp is the sunset..."

Portrait by CHUCK STEWART

THE FUNERAL FOR JOHN COLTRANE WAS held four days after his death, on July 21, 1967. Over a thousand people convened at St Peter’s Lutheran Church in Midtown Manhattan. Hundreds stood outside the church. Upstairs in the balcony, saxophonist Albert Ayler and his quartet played Truth Is Marching In, and the primal cry of Ayler sounded the angst and grief of the gathered.

“Rarely have so many musicians congregated in one place,” the Rev John G Gensel sermonised. Coltrane’s casket could barely be seen under the profusion of yellow roses and white lilies. Bouquets sent by Duke Ellington, Nina Simone, Stan Getz, Max Roach and others crowded the altar.

In the following days, the silence inside the Coltranes’ home at 247 Candlewood Path, Dix Hills, Long Island was deafening. Alice had woken up countless mornings to the sound of her husband playing flute or his horn, now she sat in stunned silence on the royal purple carpet of their bedroom.

“In terms of the children, it was very difficult for me,” she said years later. “The youngest was only four months old. The older ones couldn’t understand why their dad did not come home from the studio. I had to wait until they were older before I could fully explain his absence.”

His spirit had flown to be with the ancestors, and Alice was left behind in her body. Her own skin felt like a shell. “I felt his real seeking. He was a man who believed in his heart that he could realise God and reveal God through his instrument. He was looking for God,” she said. “That is why we heard music that we hadn’t ever heard before, because I believe it wasn’t all from this world. He played from another realm, a spiritual realm.”

EARLY ONE MORNING, SOME MONTHS LATER, AN immense wooden crate showed up on Alice Coltrane’s doorstep. As the kids danced around in wonder, she prised it open, and the crate revealed a Lyon & Healy Style 11 double-action concert grand harp with a resplendent gold finish. John had special-ordered it for Alice as a gift. It had taken over a year to be constructed traditionally by hand at a factory on Lake Street in Chicago.

The harp was still seen as primarily a classical instrument and one used more for embellishment than as a lead instrument. But Alice had intimate knowledge of its possibilities dating back to her time in Detroit on the club circuit. Alice’s vocal group the Premiers often shared the stage with fellow Detroiter Dorothy Ashby, who pioneered the use of the harp in a jazz setting, managing its 47 strings and making it coherent in a bebop setting. In Alice’s mind, Ashby was “a most beautiful harpist, the very best”.

John was no longer of this world, but he appeared to manifest in the form of this magnificent harp. “For that reason, when I began to play the harp, it was something particularly close to me,” she said.

The recording studio in their basement was also completed during this time, with both a live room and control booth. The Coltranes’ Dix Hills neighbour, Roy Musgnug, a recording engineer for Decca Records, helped Alice design and build the studio and get it up to spec. Once the kids were all tucked into bed, she could just walk downstairs and get to work.