‘She seemed to breathe the universe’: David Byrne, Flying Lotus and more on the greatness of Alice Coltrane | Alice Coltrane

IIt’s been 19 years since Alice Coltrane’s death and more than half a century since her most famous albums, but only now has her first autobiography, Andy Petta’s Cosmic Music, been published. The first major exhibition dedicated to it was held last year also in Los Angeles, and musicians from the mainstream to the left have supported it, so much so that there are now an abundance of cosmic jazz guitarists on festival lineups. “For a long time it seemed like her contributions had been overlooked,” says her grandson Steven Ellison, also known as hip-hop and psychedelic electronic musician Flying Lotus, who has worked with the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg, Thom Yorke and Herbie Hancock alongside his famous solo works. “When I was growing up, it seemed like everyone just wanted to ask her about John Coltrane.”

Of course John Coltrane was a musical giant. But, as Cosmic Music makes clear, Alice was integral to her husband’s late-game-changing radicalism from the masterpiece “Higher Love” onward. Not only did they create a sense of stability since 1963 in raising a family and marriage, after quitting heroin, but they were partners in spiritual and musical exploration. She was a great musician before she met him too. As pianist Alice McLeod, she was “known as a badass on the scene,” says Carlos Nino, California’s longtime Flying Lotus bandmate and most recently the producer of Andre 3000’s Alice-inspired album New Blue Sun; She honed her skills in gospel churches in Detroit and played Stravinsky and Rachmaninoff for fun in her mid-teens.

After her husband’s death at the age of 40 in 1967, her solo work expanded in all directions, integrating universal instrumentation and meditative Hindu discipline, but also bringing sumptuous orchestral arrangements and her newly adopted instrument, the harp, into an ambitious and vastly immersive sonic world. “With Alice Coltrane,” explains Welsh harpist Amanda Whiting, “the music, the strings, don’t move as much, there’s much more room for layering, they create soundscapes. The harp is used, in opera or films or anything else, for liminal moments – the point between waking and sleeping, life and death, the passage of time – and she made the most of that connection.” Or as American composer Adrian Young says: “Alice Coltrane took the harp, the instrument of angels and orchestra, and made it sound like the breathing of the universe.”

However, commentators, from Amiri Baraka to Robert Christgau, have dismissed it, often in terms of its weakening of the supposed purity of John’s noble vision. Phrases like “soft, incoherent rave” (Richard Cook’s Encyclopedia of Jazz) are quite ubiquitous in contemporary assessments, and gendered assumptions about smoothness and beauty are not even hidden. The (practically all-male) critical establishment would not allow her into the canon the way they did John’s peers such as Yusuf Latif and Pharaoh Sanders. When she separated herself from the music industry at the end of the 1970s to focus entirely on her Shanti Anantam ashram, and subsequently recorded only for cassettes circulating within that spiritual community (which were later released on David Byrne’s Luwaka Pop label), she seemed destined to be a footnote, as her influence in jazz remained almost entirely in the more spiritual, devotional, or neo-Age-adjacent margins.

For a long time, its most obvious heroes were completely out of this world. Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead covered it and Carlos Santana – then one of the biggest rock stars in the world – recorded an album with it. Bands like Sonic Youth embraced their experimentalism and Jonny Greenwood spoke of lifting specific recording techniques and string arrangements for Amnesia-era Radiohead tracks. By the 2000s, she was getting name checks on tracks as diverse as Paul Weller’s dreamy Alice and Sunn O))’s death drone Alice.

Nino finds it completely normal to be admired by rock stars and eccentrics. “Because it was so far removed from the genre or the style or anything else,” he says, “if you try to think of who was that bold, who expressed and expressed his feelings and spoke that way, it’s more like Jimi Hendrix — in the sense that you can’t wrap it up as one thing any more than you can wrap Jimi Hendrix into the blues.”

Herbie Hancock was one of jazz’s leading heroines, taking her vocal ambition to funk, electro and beyond. Her recordings were absorbed into DJ culture, reaching into hip-hop – even being sampled by Cypress Hill – hip-hop and broken beat. Drum’n’bass artist Adam F positively glows with enthusiasm about her “emotional and spiritual power…the way she blended jazz, dedication and total experience reverberates through many generations of musicians.”

XL Records Richard Russell credits its pivotal album Journey to Satchidananda with remaking his life – and thus the label – when he was in his early 30s, enduring a decade of raving, extravagance, traveling the world with his friends and prodigy. “It had a huge impact on me at that time as I experienced a personal change when a different point of view dawned on me,” he says. “This album is a convenient mind expander, a self-resetting tool. It can help reprogram thinking.”

By the time the new generation of 21st-century UK jazz musicians were learning their craft, Coltrane’s music had a kind of underground, ubiquitous presence that had trickled back into the academy. Sheila Morris-Gray, founder of the afrobeat jazz band Kokoroko, thought it was perfectly normal as a turn-of-the-millennium teenager in the Kentika Bloko youth program to learn about Blue Nile and Journey to Satchidananda — though she also remembers it as “very, very spiritual, and there’s an accessibility, as I heard it, about drawing on her feminine energy; a kind of comfort she wouldn’t find from other musicians of her generation.”

Even in her own kindling, Coltrane was sending ripples through popular culture—through people like her nephew and Nino who explicitly subscribed to her cosmic mission, but also in somewhat indirect ways. When asked to comment on their influence, David Byrne famously said: “Influence on the younger generation? Check out the cover of the Luaka Bop record. Can you spot a very young Doja Cat?” Yes, the pop star lived in a Santa Monica Mountains commune from the ages of 8 to 12 — and though she was deeply ambivalent about the ascetic environment itself, she credited the simple hymn music Coltrane was making at the time with influencing her performances and persona.

It’s not hard to see why such heightened interest in Alice Coltrane might occur now in a time of chaos. Expressions of “love that overcomes greed through the power of art… are more important today than ever before, for a culture seeking spiritual truths while too many world leaders are destroying our planet,” says Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. DJ, writer and broadcaster Zakiya Sewell sees in the music of Coltrane-indebted contemporary artists like Khruangbin and Alabaster Diplom something that “speaks to people’s appetite in a time of crisis for things that transcend popular structures, but that’s not just comfortable, it’s loud and wide and sprawling.”

This sense of scale and extremes is the real thing: the part that makes Coltrane’s music stick, drawn in by the dreamy atmosphere. Even at its most contemplative and simple, it is never washed out. Even her purest Hindu devotional anthems still carry deep, audible echoes of Detroit churches, the blues, and, more distantly, “being a badass on the scene” in smoke-filled bebop clubs and wild free jazz improvisation.

Her new autobiography charts a life of struggle – to be heard and understood, and to stand out even in the company of giants – as much as achievement and excellence. But the ever-spreading ripples of her work have been as fascinating and diverse as her life story, and it continues to grow. Or as Stephen Ellison sums up: “It was interesting and beautiful to see the new generation fall in love with Alice Coltrane.”

Cosmic Music, published by White Rabbit, is out now.