![alice coltrane harp best songs alice coltrane harp best songs](https://www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/2021/10/28/PPAS/a90a3e04-93a5-4dc5-a4f2-ab3b5fe9b532-AliceColtrane.png)
![alice coltrane harp best songs alice coltrane harp best songs](https://render.fineartamerica.com/images/rendered/default/flat/beach-towel/images/artworkimages/medium/1/alice-coltrane-on-harp-lee-santa.jpg)
“ inspired me and helped me to feel a little more comfortable in my skin as a harpist.” “Growing up I was the only person of color in sight ,” she says. She was able to play this instrument on a spiritual level and speak to a sixteen year old kid.”Īs an undergraduate at the Hartt School of the University Of Hartford, Younger continued classical studies but sat in on jazz master classes during this time, she wrote fan letters to Coltrane that she never sent. She wasn’t worrying about what other musicians thought of her, what other harpists thought of her, other pianists or organists. “When I got that CD from my dad, I was like, oh, I wanna do what was able to do with the harp,” Younger recalls. Meanwhile, across the country, a teenager named Brandee Younger who’d been studying classical harp came across “Blue Nile” (from Coltrane’s 1970 LP Ptah, The El Daoud) on a jazz compilation given to her by her father. Then at a certain point I look over for the next chord and she looked at me and said, ‘Just play.’” Botofasina recalls. “She was calling out the chords - A flat, B flat, G flat - as it was going. “It’s like, on Mount Rushmore.”īotofasina recalls a service that took place in his early twenties when Coltrane indicated that he should accompany her during a devotional hymn. “The name Coltrane isn’t just a name in jazz music,” he says. Though it was easy to recognize her genius, Botofasina says he was in his teens before he felt the weight of Swamini’s importance outside the ashram. Though he did not study piano with Coltrane directly, she spent Sundays with the young adults in the ashram, illuminating the musical components associated with the Bhagavad Gita, which Botofasina was often asked to play for his peers. We do it from the heart, we do it with devotion, we do it with passion, and with joy.”īotofasina remembers pursuing music initially to make an impression on Coltrane (as well as his parents, who were also musicians), a “kind of innocent yearning for attention and approval,” he explains. So we pay homage, that’s the best we can do. That vast, endless amount of spirituality she infused into every note, you can’t fake that. “This wasn’t just some average musician sitting down this was a true master at the craft.
![alice coltrane harp best songs alice coltrane harp best songs](https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/phillytrib.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/f/5e/f5eaea93-f233-5d86-9cd5-ee7f0fb12b88/60ec893c05b83.image.jpg)
![alice coltrane harp best songs alice coltrane harp best songs](https://i.etsystatic.com/11016450/r/il/f1f4ab/2071244952/il_fullxfull.2071244952_rz2d.jpg)
“She left us this very clear roadmap of these recordings, preserved over time,” says Botofasina of the bhajans, originally released on private press cassette intended only for her ashram community. These are not solely Vedic chants Coltrane’s compositions weave complex jazz modes, her roots in Motor City gospel, and Egyptian mysticism into the mix as well.
#ALICE COLTRANE HARP BEST SONGS SERIES#
Raised on Coltrane’s Shanti Anantam Ashram, Botofasina followed in Coltrane’s musical footsteps by studying the piano, and is slated to lead the ashram singers in a series of bhajans collected on World Spirituality Classics 1 for the RBMA presentation at Knockdown Center in Queens. The music director of the first part of RBMA’s event, Surya Botofasina, refers to Alice Coltrane simply and respectfully as Swamini, his spiritual grandmother. With the recent release of World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music Of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, David Byrne’s world music imprint Luaka Bop seeks to illuminate that history - and a Red Bull Music Academy presentation of the work this weekend brings it to New York audiences. Seeking strength from esteemed guru Swami Satchidananda, she bore the Coltrane legacy as an incomparable harpist, pianist and composer across 13 transcendent solo releases, but it was another name she adopted - Turiyasangitananda, Sanskrit for “Highest Song Of God” – that would define her work more clearly as a spiritual pursuit, created away from secular life on an ashram she established in the Santa Monica Mountains. The two met in 1963 they had three children in rapid succession, John wrote his opus A Love Supreme in 1965, and by 1967, he had passed away due to liver cancer, leaving Alice to suffer insomnia, hallucinations, and rapid weight loss. Though she ultimately spent more time as his widow than as his wife, Alice McLeod’s marriage to John Coltrane was destined, as though by cosmic influence, to change both artists’ musical and spiritual paths.