REISSUE OF THE MONTH 7/10
ALICE COLTRANE
Kirtan: Turiya Sings IMPULSE
Turiya’s divine songs and infinite chants pared back, repackaged and empowered.
By Richard Williams
REISSUES | COMPS | BOXSETS | LOST RECORDINGS
TTHE 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. 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. 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. 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”.