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Frieze Week Los Angeles 2025

Three Takes on Alice Coltrane

As her life is celebrated at the Hammer Museum, a musician, a poet and an artist discuss Alice Coltrane’s creative influence 

in Frieze Los Angeles , Frieze Week Magazine | 10 FEB 25

Warren Ellis, musician 

No other artist has had a greater impact on my creative or personal life than Alice Coltrane. For as long as I can remember, I always wanted to believe in God or a greater power. Music was the portal that enabled me to focus those energies toward some divine energy.

I was 18 when I discovered Alice Coltrane – in 1983, to be precise. In those days, I could only buy records from the bargain bin and, rooting around one day, I came across a vinyl gatefold copy of her album World Galaxy (1972). I figured she must be related to John Coltrane. It was at the same time that I collided with Igor Stravinsky. Up until then, I was a violin player of rudimentary skills who had been immersed in David Bowie, the Sex Pistols and AC/DC.

Hearing that album changed my life. I became a disciple of Alice Coltrane and will remain one until I am dust: her ability to stay on a groove; to create string arrangements that sound like she has upturned a piano and written out the notes; those slashing stabs of synthesizer; her harp-playing; her singing; those beautiful pop songs of devotion to Krishna; her effortless spirituality; and her ability to be so free and so grounded – something most of her contemporaries could never achieve. 

I will remain a disciple of Alice Coltrane until I am dust. Warren Ellis

I believe her final ashram recordings, collected on The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda (2017), show an artist at the peak of her creative powers. Just the wildest music I have ever heard. Each time I go into the studio, I try to honour her in some way and, when I am stuck, I ask myself, ‘What would Alice Coltrane do?’ She always helps me find a way forward. 

I saw her play at Cité de la Musique in Paris in 2005. My life would never be the same after that. She arrived on stage with her grandchildren and they sat on the organ bench with her while she played. For the encore she said, ‘This is a song John left for us to learn.’ And she launched into ‘A Love Supreme’.

People have said to me that there should be a church built in her honor. But whenever we listen to her music we congregate in her church. She opens our hearts. What purer definition of the word ‘church’ can there be? 

Warren Ellis is a musician, composer and the author of Nina Simone’s Gum (2022). He lives in Paris, France.

Alice Coltrane c.1970. Photo: Chuck Stewart, courtesy: The Hammer Museum
Alice Coltrane, 1970. Photo: Chuck Stewart. © Chuck Stewart Photography, LLC / Fireball Entertainment Group 

Suné Woods, artist 

My son/sun Ayler, named after musician Albert Ayler, a contemporary of Alice and John Coltrane, was with me on my second visit to the Vedantic Center Sai Anantam Ashram, the ‘ashram without walls’, in November 2023. Dressed in his chic white pants (found in a thrift store) and a matching shirt (found in his father’s closet), he nestled into the couch and received the medicine of Alice Coltrane Swamini Turiyasangitananda through her eternal spirit and the music of her devotees and guests. The energies in the room were palpable, a wave of bhajan chants and tones that poured into me. It gave me a sense of what it must have been like there up in the Agoura Hills, in the Santa Monica Mountains, during the years when families raised their children together in the dove-colored ashram and Swamini Turiyasangitananda would hold her Sunday discourses. 

Swamini’s recorded teachings and sounds inform my two-channel video installation for the Hammer Museum’s upcoming exhibition ‘Monument Eternal’. In them, her voice urges those present in the Sai Anantam Ashram to consider the concerns of the soul. ‘The soul requires worship of God in the same way that the physical form requires food and water,’ writes Shankari C. Adams on the benefits of chanting in her 2018 biography of Alice Coltrane, Portrait of Devotion

I am deeply grateful for the life and legacy of such a profoundly elevated spirit. Suné Woods

For me, soul-growing is a spiritual journey: learning to live on earth while being in service to divine love. My new work is also informed by conversations I have had with Swamini’s devotees and folks in my community about spiri­tuality and spiritual practice. Purusha Hickson, a yogi trained by Swamini, said that the path she showed him was that of meditation and devotion. Also, that purifying the mind and attuning to spirit will create the appropriate instrument for higher forces to use.

In my work, I am contending with what it means to be on this planet, in this incarnation of a human vessel, to be present with the infiniteness of energies, to create utterances of the heart, to evolve. In doing this, I am deeply grateful for the life and legacy of such a profoundly elevated spirit as Alice Coltrane Swamini Turiyasangitananda.

Suné Woods is an artist. She lives in Los Angeles, USA.

Alice and John Coltrane at the 1966 Newport Jazz Festival. Photo: Hozumi Nakadaira. Courtesy: The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Alice and John Coltrane at the Newport Jazz Festival, 1966. Courtesy of Yasuhiro Fujioka collection. Photo: Hozumi Nakadaira

Harmony Holiday, writer

Her smile begins in the eyes which swell and surrender a melancholic mirth, the downcast joviality of a woman who has known her true counterpart and the pain of his departure. ‘There’s nothing like the beauty of a girl in love’ – a lyric from a song my father, Jimmy Holiday, wrote – is embodied in an image of John and Alice Coltrane side by side in a club in Los Angeles in October 1964. His arm around her, he wears the subtle, important grin of a kid at a carnival who’s just won a prize: his girl.

Alice and John Coltrane is one of the only love stories I really believe in. Harmony Holiday

Three years later, he would gift her a harp and disappear. Inextinguishable, burning still, the soul of John Coltrane endured in Alice and their children and in her music and his. And incapable of dimming or trivializing her light, their souls became one in a manner so matter-of-fact it’s uncanny. Her eyes were illuminated by the distant and distinctly personal worlds he’d entered and her music channeled and resurrected his spirit – urgently, insistently reinstating their shared devotion to transcendence. Theirs is one of the only love stories I really believe in. In the same way I believe in the blatant, unimpeachable accuracy of ancient myths and their archetypes, I believe that true love existed once upon a time in the long, neverending history of Black music and that it was immortalized in the tones and frequencies Alice and John Coltrane attained together in exile and reunion with one another. 

Alice Coltrane, ca. 1978. Courtesy of the John & Alice Coltrane Home
Alice Coltrane, c.1978. Courtesy of the John & Alice Coltrane Home 

Because it could not be possessed, or contained in the physical world, their love demonstrates the electrified and transient nature of the real, the same way their compositions do, blending sensibilities across landscapes from Alice’s natal Detroit to John’s North Carolina, to the ashes of an ashram in Malibu, to what the title of a 1968 song by Alice calls the ‘Lovely Sky Boat’ they might occupy now. Sometimes I lament – I mean really mourn with my body – how afflicted the legacy of Black music is, both privately and publicly, riddled with examples of dysfunction between men and women who really imagined they were living a great and glamorous romance. Great pretenders trapped in glamour’s pretenses. I grieve the commodification of these pathetic fairy tales, where the prince is a megalomaniac who hates himself and uses women as props in his material ascension (think of Ike and Tina Turner, or Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone’s husbands). The vision of Alice Coltrane with John Coltrane after the rain, after he was gone, a conjurer, invoking and recalling him on her instrument, soothes me past cynicism and renews my faith in the good of Black music when it’s not sabotaging its destiny with greed, lust or envy. The gratitude and modesty on Alice’s face when she is smiling is an invitation to join her divine understanding of the fact that you’ll never be lured into complicity with false idols or loveless love if you wait in another eternity far away from all that. 

Harmony Holiday is a poet, critic and multidisciplinary artist. She lives in Los Angeles, USA.

‘Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal’ is on view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles until 4 May 2025. The exhibition is part of the nationwide initiative ‘The Year of Alice’ realized by the John & Alice Coltrane Home and numerous partners.

Further Information

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Main image: Alice Coltrane, c.1982. Courtesy of the John & Alice Coltrane Home

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