The harp has the power to unite opposites. It’s large enough to dwarf its player, yet it produces a gentle twinkle. Players pluck a rapid succession of notes by running their hands across the strings, yet the effect is soothing to the ear. You can find one in the hands of angels in religious iconography, or on the logo of a Guinness beer.

It’s fittingly odd, then, that the harp was the instrument of choice for Alice Coltrane, a pioneer at the intersection of eastern and western music. A jazz combo, techno DJ, orchestra, and religious choir joined forces at Carnegie Hall to celebrate her legacy. 

Alice Coltrane (1937-2007) is best known for being married to saxophonist John Coltrane and playing piano in his band during his final years, but it was her strength as a pianist and harpist in her own right that got her there. Alice and John Coltrane shared an insatiable yearning for the holy spirit. If John’s abrasive and frenetic playing was the musical equivalent of speaking in tongues to access the divine in a Christian context, Alice drew from Hindu devotional traditions, paving a meditative path of Indian instrumentation and Hindu chanting over languid jazz forms. Her most active years as a bandleader lasted from John’s death in the late 60s through the 1970s.

Opening Invocation

The core performers were a jazz septet featuring Alice and John’s son Ravi Coltrane on saxophone, Brandee Younger playing Alice’s restored harp, David Virelles on piano and keyboard, Robert Hurst on bass, Jeff “Tain” Watts on drums, and an unnamed young woman reclining behind a tambura (the Indian droning instrument often heard accompanying sitar). 

Our seats, high enough in Carnegie Hall’s nosebleed section that we should’ve been the angels playing harp instead of hearing it float up from below, gave us a head start on the night’s goal of spiritual elevation. The septet began with Coltrane’s most famous piece, “Journey in Satchidananda.” Droning tambura, shimmering cymbals, and cascading harp found their earthly anchor in a trance-like ascending bass line. Kneeling down, Ravi Coltrane gently punctured the ethereal swirl with an understated tenor sax melody. 

The band next kicked into a brisk trot with “Los Caballos”. Led by a psychedelic pitch-bending electric keyboard, the uptempo Afro-Cuban gallop grew increasingly frantic before giving way to a shapeshifting drum solo from Watts.

They turned the boil down to a simmer with “Turiya and Ramakrishna,” which describes nirvanic consciousness through a repeating bluesy piano riff. As the music levitated out of scales and meters, Ravi Coltrane switched from blowing sax notes to making wind sounds using his foot pedals.

Flying Lotus Encounters Turbulence

The entry into nirvanic consciousness was seamlessly handed off to DJ Flying Lotus, grandnephew of Alice Coltrane who had a successful string of jazz-infused electronica albums in the 2010s.

A pool of rising voices, Moog synthesizer notes and jingling bells grew in volume as the live band exited the stage. Swooshing spaceship sounds navigated the audience through the clouds before dropping into a constantly changing assortment of club beats. Sometimes the beats ricocheted like a tribal dance around a campfire; sometimes they clanged out like metal being struck in a junkyard factory. 

The shuffling between beats felt abrupt and random after the calm that preceded it, the sonic equivalent of a bored TV viewer unable to put the remote down and settle on a satisfying channel. And the beats sounded strangely familiar… many came from Flying Lotus’s Obama-years albums. The ride ended with an excerpt from an interview with Alice Coltrane as the epilogue. Her comments about “spirit” and “legacy” were too echoey to parse clearly.

I wish we could’ve heard spontaneous interaction between the DJ and live instruments instead of an unsettled micro-set that leaned on previous work.

Astral Symphony Explorations

With an orchestra now filling the empty back half of the stage behind the septet, the 2nd half proved the richest and most complex portion of the evening. The strings and winds played slow, drawn-out themes in unison, reminding me of Chinese music written to describe grand mountain ranges and vast natural landscapes. Then the core jazz combo would respond with a soulful sax or piano solo over a free jazz polyrhythmic backup. Panning from orchestra to jazz septet felt like transitioning from the voiceover narration to dialog and action scenes in a film. 

But as the set progressed, the two ensembles merged into one fusion symphony. At times, the strings carried the melody, with harp, sax, and trumpets responding with countermelodies over a walking bass line and swing beat. Sometimes the violins held a tremolo as if the music were flickering on the brink, before the whole group descended into a cacophonous swirl that recalled the climax of The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life.”

As the maelstrom gradually subsided, the harp tiptoed back out over a thundering tympani mantra. A sauntering reprise of the night’s opening piece “Journey in Satchidananda,” played by echoing strings, tapered off the third quarter.

The Sai Anantam Devotional Ensemble Brings It All Back Om

A colorfully shawled choir, the Sai Anantam Devotional Ensemble, settled themselves on stage for the performance’s 4th quarter, fronted by Alice and John’s daughter Michelle Coltrane. Michelle invited the whole crowd to warm up together with a round of “Om”s, before leading some solo chants. 

Despite growing up in new-agey southern Oregon, I cringed instinctively at hearing Sanskrit words sung in an inconcealable American accent with a hint of r&b stylization. The chanting became more compelling after the rest of the choir and orchestra joined. The calls of “Jai Rama” and “Jai Krishna” crystallized into a singalong as ecstatic yelps of “yes!” bubbled out of the enraptured audience.

Cosmic Coda

The final number brought all the previous groups together (minus Flying Lotus), with harp, strings, and keys giving the auditorium a final purifying sound bath under a slow saxophone psalm.

It’s a testament to Alice Coltrane’s fusion legacy and far-reaching influence that it takes so many kinds of ensembles and instruments to pay one person tribute. In an era where so many rapid-consumption songs dwell on the mundane, this evening was a reminder that music can also transport us beyond this distracting and divisive world when we devote our full attention.