Music has always been one of the most powerful and immediate means of expressing, exploring and connecting with the profundity of feeling and meaning that emerge from love and loss, suffering and transcendence, experiences that for most of us can be incredibly hard to put into words. It was at this moment in 1970 that St Clair Bourne, one of several pioneering Black American documentary filmmakers of the era, visited her at home in Long Island for a segment of Black Journal, a radically novel public television news programme ‘about Blacks and for Blacks’, produced by another pioneer, William Greaves. ![]() But five years before moving to California – and three years after the death of her husband, the saxophonist John Coltrane – she was still a professional jazz musician, a mother of four young children and a seeker who, like her husband, found meaning in an array of spiritual traditions without adherence to any single religion. And from 1975 to her death in 2007, she was the spiritual director of an ashram she founded in California, a period in which she created inventive, Vedic-inspired compositions. Born Alice McLeod in 1937 in Detroit, her musical education as a child was in her local church. ![]() Devotional song – that merging of music with spiritual praise and prayer – was always part of Alice Coltrane’s life.
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