The Carnegie Hall Concert

Around 23 minutes into “Africa,” the epic centerpiece of a newly issued 1971 Carnegie Hall concert, Alice Coltrane takes control. Prior to this moment, the performance has featured her exclusively on harp, but for “Africa”—a composition by her late husband John, first released a decade earlier—the bandleader switches to the piano. The rendition takes a winding path, moving through fervent tenor saxophone solos set against a salvo of double drums, a hypnotic percussion break, and two lengthy bass features. Then Alice returns as though banging a gavel, pounding out the bluesy vamp that forms the backbone of the piece and calling the proceedings back to order. Her left hand acts as a booming bass-register engine, while her right answers with meaty chords, echoing the grand big-band orchestration of the 1961 version that led off John’s Africa/Brass LP. As the horns and drums reenter, wailing and exploding around her, she answers with the occasional burst of clanging energy from the keyboard but mostly holds down the center of the music, conveying authority amid the bedlam.

There are a lot of reasons to be excited about The Carnegie Hall Concert. It’s only the second full live album in the official Alice Coltrane catalog (an incomplete version of this same Carnegie Hall concert was previously released as a bootleg), and it dates from her most celebrated period as a bandleader, recorded just one week after the release of her acknowledged masterpiece Journey in Satchidananda. It features generously roomy renditions—including versions of two key Journey tracks, each clocking in at more than double the length of the original—that readily transport and at times overwhelm despite the occasionally rough sonics of the source tape. (Sadly, the 4-track master tapes of the concert were lost over the years—“Don’t ask me how,” writes Coltrane’s frequent producer Ed Michel, who oversaw the original Carnegie Hall recording, with palpable frustration in his production notes—so the release is drawn from a 2-track reference mix.)

And the album’s supporting cast is extraordinary, bringing together musicians from Journey—Pharoah Sanders on tenor and soprano sax, flute and more, Cecil McBee on bass, and Tulsi Reynolds on tamboura—with bassist Jimmy Garrison, a previous sideman to both Alice and John; Archie Shepp, a collaborator of John’s and, like Sanders, a strongly established saxophonist-bandleader in his own right; dual drummers Ed Blackwell and Clifford Jarvis, the former of whom had joined John on 1960 sessions co-led by Don Cherry; and harmonium player Kumar Kramer.

But there’s another, perhaps even more valuable aspect to the album, exemplified by the “Africa” reentry described above: the way it helpfully complicates Coltrane’s rapidly crystallizing legacy. At this point, Coltrane’s overdue canonization has fully taken hold. During roughly the past decade, thanks to a series of illuminating reissues and tributes and a steady stream of namechecks (from tastemakers including Solange and André 3000), her work has been given its rightful due apart from the long-enshrined catalog of her iconic husband and collaborator, reaching a slew of new listeners in the process. But as her name has morphed into a kind of buzzword—often invoked in conjunction with the now-inescapable descriptor “spiritual jazz”—her image has at times been reduced to a near-caricature, that of the serene queen of the ashram, smiling benevolently from within her brilliant orange robes.

While there is of course some truth to that characterization, Alice Coltrane was not all prayer rugs and incense. As Flying Lotus—her grandnephew and frequent, outspoken champion—noted in a 2021 interview, Coltrane “was the matriarch of the family, but she was also the Godfather. She took care of everybody, but you couldn’t mess with Auntie.” In a starker way than any other prior Alice Coltrane release, The Carnegie Hall Concert allows us to glimpse these two incarnations side by side: Coltrane as both matriarch and Godfather; Coltrane as spiritual-jazz mystic and formidable heir to the harshly ecstatic fire music that her husband had spearheaded in the last few years of his life.

That juxtaposition seems almost intentional, as the concert is divided into two neat halves. First comes the Journey material, the title track and “Shiva-Loka,” as they’re sequenced on the album. In starting the show this way, Coltrane was both showcasing her new LP and honoring her guru. As Lauren Du Graf lays out in her helpful and detailed liner notes, the Carnegie Hall performance was actually part of an all-star benefit for the Integral Yoga Institute founded by Swami Satchidananda, Coltrane’s spiritual teacher at the time, her guide both out of grief, in the wake of her husband’s death, and on a transformative 1970 trip to India, and—as she’d cited in the Journey liner notes—a “direct inspiration” for the album.

Much like their studio counterparts, these live takes are beautifully chill and hypnotic in their simplicity. The main differences have to do with personnel and pacing. On “Journey in Satchidananda,” after a bit of introductory mood-setting, McBee and Garrison lock into the indelible 6/4 vamp that McBee played alone on the album, tolling like an eternal mantra. The tamboura and harmonium, elements inspired by Coltrane’s growing interest in Indian culture, are less present than on the studio version; here, Coltrane’s harp sets the mood, draping the whole performance in billowing, chiming splendor.

And whereas Sanders solos on soprano sax on the record, for this version, according to Michel’s notes, he plays flute, achieving a striking incantatory texture by vocalizing as he blows into the instrument, while Shepp plays soprano, bringing a bluesy pathos to the role. The longer running time gives both soloists plenty of room to explore the theme as it cycles into a pleasing quasi-infinity. On “Shiva-Loka,” another vamp-driven bliss-out, Sanders and Shepp both play soprano, the former dazzling with whirling sound shapes and the latter creating a lovely arc by starting out gentle and gradually turning up the grit. Blackwell and Jarvis, meanwhile, keep pace with a regal, laid-back pulse that harks back to John’s early-to-mid-’60s compatriot Elvin Jones.

Coltrane’s harp work on these first two tracks is flat-out gorgeous, but she seems content to play a mainly textural, supportive role. That changes dramatically on the final two pieces, 20-minute-plus renditions of two compositions by John, “Africa” and the minimal, staccato fanfare “Leo,” both featuring Alice on piano, the instrument she’d played in John’s band and worked at diligently in her earlier, largely undocumented musical apprenticeship in Detroit. These performances are as shatteringly intense as the first two were quietly meditative. The ensemble seems to be not just performing John Coltrane repertoire but consciously channeling the relentless rush of his most forbiddingly dense free-form work. “Africa” has a strong flavor of Trane circa the mid ’60s, when he beefed up his working band with extra drummers and saxophonists—with Shepp joining in occasionally and Sanders eventually signing on as a permanent addition—to create ever-escalating action paintings of sound.

As Alice switches instruments, so do Shepp and Sanders, picking up the tenors they proudly hoisted alongside Trane on 1965’s Ascension, and seeking out similarly furious peaks (Shepp’s roaring, ragged cries around the 5:00 mark are particularly arresting, as are Sanders’ multiphonic shrieks around 8:00). Alice also had plenty of experience playing alongside John in this mode—check out Live at the Village Vanguard Again! or Live in Japan, both recorded in ’66—but here, she’s even more commanding. During her solo, she establishes the firm bedrock of the piece while letting fly with swooping, swirling right-hand cascades. She often sounds here like either two or three pianists playing at once, nodding to the great McCoy Tyner, who was at the keyboard for John’s original version, while blasting off into her own distinct stratosphere.

More magic comes during her extended feature on “Leo,” a piece she had performed many times with John and would often reprise in later years. Starting around the 5:00 mark, she conjures a massive wall of rippling notes before launching into a series of breakneck dashes with the double-strength rhythm section, punctuated by prismatic storm clouds of sustain. You rarely hear Alice Coltrane mentioned in the company of the great power pianists of free jazz—Cecil Taylor, Don Pullen, Matthew Shipp, and others—but her staggering performances during this latter portion of the show confirm just how much she deserves to be regarded as a titan of that idiom.

The sound quality of the set is occasionally distracting, especially on “Shiva-Loka,” which contains some dropouts and intrusions of static. And there are moments when the mix feels disorienting—particularly when it comes to the contributions of the two drummers, which can be hard to parse as distinct musical statements—making you long, as Michel surely does, that this release could have been mixed from proper masters. But the recording has real presence and punch beyond its inarguable historical value; it sounds far better than posthumously unearthed John Coltrane recordings such as The Olatunji Concert.

Ultimately, the release of The Carnegie Hall Concert feels right on time, providing a welcome jolt of focus to a widespread impression of Alice Coltrane that’s started to seem just a tad vague. She’s here in full: the matriarch we now know well and duly appreciate; the Godfather we may not have ever properly reckoned with. The devotee of Satchidananda; the torchbearer for John. And the bandleader and instrumental powerhouse who marshaled formidable talents like Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp, and found space for them within her rapidly expanding musical vision. There were more Alice Coltranes still to come, as she moved into challenging orchestral music, mind-bending organ work, and, ultimately, decades filled with devotional song. As this set shows, she always contained multitudes.

Alice Coltrane: The Carnegie Hall Concert (Live)

$45 at Rough Trade

$40 at Amazon