She was not just a woman

My passion for the music of Alice Coltrane is shared by a number of prominent musicians.  This passion was reawakened recently by listening to albums such as Journey in Satchidananda, Illuminations and above all World Galaxy when travelling in Kerala down in the south of India. That header photo shows Swamini Turiyasangitananda - aka Alice Coltrane - at the Sai Anantam Ashram which she founded in 1983 in the Santa Monica Mountains, California. In 2018 the Ashram, which had been closed for a year, was destroyed in the Woolsey wildfire; a demise which neatly symbolises society's progression from the the metaphysical to the material. 

Alice Coltrane is one of those great women musicians who are still overlooked because they do not fit into the rigid pigeonholes defined by today's virtue signalling culture. (Another great but totally overlooked woman musician has sold millions of albums and influenced, among others, Bob Dylan and Robert Plant - take a bow Om Kalthoum.) 

The transcendent importance of Alice Coltrane was very well argued by the jazz writer and historian Ashley Kahn in an interview : Alice Coltrane was not just a woman, [she was] a jazz artist, an African American, a spiritual leader, an explorer. All of these things are so far out of the mainstream each on their own but combine them all together—she's not just a person who was ahead of her time, she was someone who was out of time. She was someone who had transcended that and found a way of thinking about the big questions in such a way that all these temporal concerns and focus just didn't matter to her nearly as much as it did to many other people. So when I say, “out of time," I mean someone who had disengaged from not just the rat race, not just the day to day stuff, but the whole idea of where do I fit in, and where is my music, can it make sense within this lineage? She had disengaged from that and it's very clear with the devotional music that she was doing in the eighties and into the nineties that this was her priority.

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