I picked up a copy of the Alice Coltrane book, “Monument Eternal,” at the show devoted to her at LA’s Hammer Museum. I read some of it while we out there and then some over the summer on our porch. It is a short book but I rarely plow straight through anything. Her son, saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, says Alice was “one of the first people to move outside the mainstream, one of the first female, Black, American jazz musicians to record her own music in her own studio and release it on her own terms.” Alice was from Detroit so I’m loving all the references to clubs in the city. She spent time playing with fellow Motor City musicians Donald Byrd and then Terry Gibbs. Here is a passage from page 127.
“She was particularly at home in minor keys, especially improvising on tunes with slow harmonic motion – much of the music she recorded during her career as a bandleader, such as “Ptah the El Daoud” or “Journey in Satchidanda” were tunes of this nature. On Gibbs “Jewish Melodies in Jazztime,” we can see that her improvisations were already headed in this direction. We can also begin to understand why John Coltrane may have been attracted to her playing. Gibbs recounted how Alice actually “stole the date” from him: She was starting to play runs she got from listening to John and all the musicians flipped out every time she played. She was making those Eastern-style runs on minor songs and they sounded very authentic. I was the Jew, and she was wiping me out. (2003)”
Leave a comment