Who Was Alice Coltrane? A New Exhibition Honors an Icon

The breathtaking music of Alice Coltrane has the power to stop listeners in their tracks and guide them to another realm of consciousness as she masterfully traverses genres of jazz, gospel, bebop, and classical Indian music, collapsing them together in ethereal, harmonic compositions that can drift into a discordant cacophony of sound. Her embrace of the unpredictable and her refusal to limit her musical range has attracted reverence among free jazz aficionados (and ire from classical jazz purists.)

I don’t remember where I was the first time I heard Alice Coltrane (1937–2007); instead I remember how her music made me feel. With gentle plucks of a harpsichord, she whisks listeners away on a musical journey punctuated by the haunting key chords and deep bass notes of her Wurlitzer organ, as a steady accompaniment of strings and percussion flow in and out of her densely packed symphonic scores. It’s a sensation best described by her son Oran Coltrane: “When she put her hand on the keyboard it was like somebody shooting a beam of light through your chest.”

This month, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles debuts a survey of contemporary art inspired by the boundaryless musician and spiritual leader. “Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal,” curated by Erin Christovale, also explores the influences that shaped her unique sound and the artistic reverberations her life continues to stir.

Christovale recalls a sensation similar to mine when first listening to Alice Coltrane. “There was just something so deeply cellular in the way that her music resonated, and that’s a very rare experience. I felt I needed to know who this person was and know their story.” “Monument Eternal”combines ephemera, newly unearthed recordings, and commissioned works by 19 visual artists who call upon the memory and legacy of Alice Coltrane as a Black woman, composer, mother, wife, and guru. The exhibition revolves around the three themes of musical, spiritual, and architectural placemaking. “It’s very important to me that this show be understood as a show inspired by her,” Christovale says. “The core of the show is about her and the multivalent nature of who she was, and the 19 contemporary artists who have been deeply inspired by her at different points in their career.”

The exhibition title comes from the title of the musician’s spiritual memoir written in 1977, 10 years after the death of her husband, the legendary tenor saxophonist John Coltrane. “When I first read Monument Eternal, there was a very deep connection to that story that I found personally,” says Christovale. “That was a part of what I want everyone to know, particularly Black women.”

Alice Coltrane’s life was a journey of many paths, and all of them—the musical, spiritual, and cultural—intersect through her performances and recordings, which reveal her ecumenical influences from her early days playing piano in church to her intensely meditative monastic devotionals rooted in Vedic principles. While many of the works in the show are a nod to the range of musical traditions Coltrane evokes, within the exhibition they shape-shift. Consider Hornbeam Effigy (2022) by Houston artist Jamal Cyrus: The large sculpture, a totemic wooden railroad tie grounded in a bed of dirt and topped with an alto saxophone, is an homage to musicians from Texas including Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ornette Coleman, and Julius Hemphill and stands in honor of Charlie Parker. Yet it also registers as a phoenix, an apt visual metaphor for the Coltranes.

To appreciate the legacy of Alice Coltrane is to explore the ways she pushed beyond the confines of her widowhood, charting a liberatory path for herself through music and universalist theology.

Alice Lucille McLeod was born in Detroit and was a child prodigy, playing the organ and classical piano at her home church of Mt. Olive Baptist. When she was a teen, her half-brother Ernest Farrow, a popular bassist and saxophonist, introduced her to jazz, encouraging her to ride the wave of Detroit’s burgeoning bebop scene. After marrying her first husband, Alice moved to Paris and began playing gigs with Terry Gibbs and luminaries like Bud Powell.

Upon returning to the United States with her daughter while estranged from her husband, she continued to play the piano on tour with Gibbs; this is when she famously met John Coltrane at Birdland. The pair were kindred spirits; in their five short years together (they married in 1965) they had three sons and traveled the world, sharing a profound spiritual awakening that emanated from John’s affinity for Indian music and Eastern philosophy.

In the wake of John’s death, in 1967, Alice’s grief sent her into isolation and a deep, two-year depression before she turned to Vedism. Her bereavement was often life threatening; she lost considerable weight, experienced astral projections, and engaged in drastic forms of self-harm during ascetic purification rituals called tapas. As she once reflected in an interview with Essence magazine, “Just as it is fire’s nature to burn, it is meditation’s nature to heal, to bring peace and uplift you beyond your worldly environment and transport you to a higher plane.” She emerged from her mourning with a renewed musical and spiritual focus, becoming a devotee of Swami Satchidananda, whose ecumenical teachings aligned with Coltrane’s worldview.

Universalism also extended to her music. Sonically it is an amalgamation of genres including gospel, avant-garde jazz, and classical Indian ragas in compositions that blend chants with the rhythms of bebop and the improvisational elements of experimental jazz. She created a distinct category of music unto itself; her record label didn’t quite know what to do with it, due in part to the fact that these compositions were in service of her own healing in sonic communion with others.

In the mid-1970s, Coltrane relocated from her home on Long Island to Southern California, where she shuttled to and from San Francisco to open the Vedantic Center in 1975. In 1983 the center settled into the Santa Monica Mountains in Agoura Hills under the name of the Sai Anantam Ashram, and Coltrane adopted her monastic name, Swamini Turiyasangitananda, donning the orange robes that signified her role as a spiritual guru. The Ashram hosted Sunday services where Coltrane would lead devotionals and conduct improvisational music sessions called bhajans that were self-published and sold until her passing in 2007.

Cauleen Smith, a Los Angeles–based interdisciplinary artist, recorded rare footage at the ashram with Arthur Jaffa as part of her short film Pilgrim (2017). In the piece Smith explores utopian communities that became catalysts for spiritual and creative empowerment. “Alice Coltrane found a liberatory, loving, and very expansive, generous way of making a world that wasn’t just for herself, but for others,” she says. “We’re so lucky to have her as our soundtrack in that sense; it is for people coming together and using their voices together, expanding your sense of self beyond your own body. I think that’s so important right now and really needed.” The film focused on the ashram as a locus of spiritual energy and a new paradigm for creative placemaking. “I wanted her to be the conceptual frame through which to think about this idea that we can very intentionally build worlds for other people–they don’t have to last forever to have a real lasting impact. When one thing ends, it’s an invitation to try again.”

In 2018, one year after Pilgrim was made, Alice Coltrane’s ashram in the Santa Monica mountains was destroyed in the Woolsey Fire. Now, as Los Angeles and Altadena begin the arduous task of rebuilding in the wake of the Palisades, Hughes, and Eaton Fires, her music proffers a spiritual salve. The liner notes to her 1971 album, Journey in Satchidananda, highlights a particular passage: “Anyone listening to this selection should try to envision himself floating on an ocean of Satchidananda’s love, which is literally carrying countless devotees across the vicissitudes and stormy blasts of life to the other shore.”

In the Hammer exhibition there is a large cosmogram by Adee Roberson titled Tempo (2023). Made from semiprecious stone, it creates a communal space to invite energy for healing and renewal in this moment. It’s a piece that rests in a path blazed by Alice Coltrane, creating a fresh space to imagine new worlds and new possibilities.

“Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal,” at the Hammer Museum, is on view from February 9 through May 5, 2025. The show was organized in partnership with the John and Alice Coltrane Home as part of a yearlong initiative titled “The Year of Alice.”