Latest news with #AliceColtrane
Los Angeles Times
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
By deifying Alice Coltrane, we're missing out on the actual idiosyncratic person she was
In 1971, Alvin Ailey choreographed 'Cry!' as a birthday gift for his mother. Alongside music by Laura Nyro, Alice Coltrane's elegiac 'There's Something About John Coltrane' anchors the choreography, which features a Black female solo dancer, costumed in regal all-white, who moves from pantomimes of brutal labor under captivity to ecstatic but brooding liberation silhouettes that wheel and wallow in the restoration of her sovereign identity. Her body maps the path and rites of passage of Black womanhood so eloquently that the stamina the dance requires is hardly perceptible to the spectator, which itself speaks to the conditions of Black femininity: Make harrowing exertion appear effortless, gorgeous, all by yourself, and don't act isolated, be your own accompaniment. Judith Jamison was the first to interpret 'Cry!' It's remained in the company's repertoire for decades, and the use of Coltrane's elegy for the love of her life has made that music into two dirges, one for husband John Coltrane and another for the woman on the invisible mourner's bench honoring and channeling him for the rest of her days. The cry here is not one of vulnerability or angst but the unruly register of creative freedom, of calling your power back. Alice Coltrane's life and legacy is a series of those callings. She was a natural mystic who spoke in a lilting near-whisper sometimes, with the measured timbre that makes you lean in closer and yearn for her words until you come into their chorus, delicate but fierce in intellect. 'Cry' and cries aside, her work is in and out of revival, while John Coltrane's is a cultural metronome such that even his inaccessible-for-some late-period recordings and live performances — during which he squealed and screamed his way toward another realm of psalm — are embraced by critics and jazz fans who dismiss the jazz avant-garde, his free playing their only exemption. He pleases even stalwarts who treat jazz as a series of trivia questions about who played on what LP, and who was in what band and when. Meanwhile, Alice Coltrane, despite having been one of John's pianists, is maneuvered into the margins by subgenre euphemisms like 'spiritual jazz,' by which many mean, music for hippies and poets, while mainstream jazz is for men who read Esquire and smoke performative cigars on business trips. The sensuality of Alice's compositions is an imposition on those who were seduced into loving Miles' impervious cool or Art Blakey's hard bop sound. And yet when people need a portal into or proxy for spiritual awakening, Alice Coltrane's music often becomes integral, a newfound household name, because her staggered textures are gracious enough to accommodate both the ascetic and the philistine. Hers is the sound of belonging in and transcending any instant you find yourself in. Because of this, along with her uncanny ability to be both accessible and impossible to contain, her sound and style often become stand-ins for life's pivots to desolation and blank slates, as if we were constantly using her as our master of ceremonies for a homegoing service and entreating: Pray for us, while we pray to you. The deification of our jazz dead is stunning to behold that way. We can't help it. They become archetypes in the Black American mythmaking tradition and arbiters of our constantly shifting Black myth. In the case of Alice Coltrane, the myth of the pious Black saint only she can inspire makes us feel enveloped in the holiness we project onto her until an abyss of good distorts the actual idiosyncratic person she was and we get a pin-up Alice, a good, clean symbol. Alice Coltrane's nephew, musician Steven Ellison, stage name Flying Lotus, played a gorgeous DJ set on the opening night of 'Monument Eternal,' on Feb. 8, at the Hammer Museum's ongoing exhibition devoted to Alice Coltrane's life and work. This is a group show curated by Erin Christovale, with archival contributions from Alice and John's children Michelle and Ravi Coltrane, the Coltrane Estate and many of the members of the ashram community that Alice created in L.A.'s Agoura Hills neighborhood from the 1970s onward. Every Sunday, in a concert series curated by Christovale and Ross Chait, a close associate of the Coltrane family, there's a live concert within the exhibition, set on a stage built by GeoVanna Gonzalez. This series began with harpist Brandee Younger and includes Michelle Coltrane, Jeff Parker, Mary Lattimore, Jasper Marsalis and Radha Botofasina, among many others, through the end of April. 'It has a groove, it has freedom, it's a beginning for some who can't just dive right into experimental improvisational music, to start there,' Michelle Coltrane tells me in our conversation about the show. The rebirth is necessary, an unburdening and a kind of justice for her and her family. The exhibition itself is a tension between the deeply private spiritual leader Turiya — the Sanskirt name Alice assumed after John died at 39 — and the public-facing brand that is Alice Coltrane, the widow of John Coltrane, turned by some into a relic and representative of a member of the royal court of jazz's bittersweet golden era. This music doesn't just evoke nostalgia, it invents the sonic texture of nostalgia and gives us excuses to covet the frequencies of the past as if they could save us from a bleak and dire series of unknowns ahead. John purchased the harp that Alice would learn to play before he died, and it arrived at the family home after he was gone. Her evolution into Turiya occurred alongside him that way; she carried him with her. He was the harp strings made of guts of animals sacrificed for music; her hands bled into them as communion. He was what she embraced in his absence as ether, as resonance. Michelle tells me in an interview that one day a plane landed in the backyard of their home outside of Philadelphia, and Alice took it as a sign to pick up and move West with their four children. Her song 'Om Supreme' describes the sense of being ordained to reunite in California, as if this would be the site of their shared reincarnation. She wasn't so much superstitious as obedient, devoted to making the ineffable routine and mysticism accessible even to the uninitiated. 'Monument Eternal' deftly repurposes archival materials, such as programs from ashram services and vintage concert bills, alongside dreamy images of Turiya that exude divine consciousness, the way a church might display saints or priests. But access alone cannot translate the depth of a spirit that wants to exist on her own terms. The walls of these rooms accomplish a kind of muting of her aura, a place where veneration feels austere or regimented by bureaucracy. I get an uneasy feeling, searching for her echo in these galleries, like she doesn't want to be found there. The light is too harshly angled and full of diodes, too precise, too careful and still somehow not careful enough, not surreal, sepia and tender enough. Perhaps it is simply too literal to have her things on display. The dynamic in the exhibition is redeemed by the live events within it and their play against the archive, which feel earned but also alienated from the original artworks. We gather now to let her be real. At home, it's Alice Coltrane's laughter that could break this spell or stupor or almost hagiography. When I speak with Michelle Coltrane about her mother, her expression carves out the space where grief and awe meet, a burnt auburn aura of the sacral orange they wear in ceremony, and she recalls a woman from Detroit by way of the bandstand by way of Philly by way of California, a traveler with a steady hand who invented the road as she walked it; and she walked alone as well as in the company of her children and many apprentices. Michelle Coltrane, now the matriarch of the family, and Ravi Coltrane, his father's near-twin and torch bearer, inheritor of his skill on the horn, harbor so much reverence for the family legacy it covers them like a penance. For years now I've been interviewing the Coltrane family, beginning in 2021 with an oral history of the ashram performed live at L.A.'s 2220 Arts, and most recently on assignment in Detroit, covering the jazz festival there and a performance of Alice's compositions. Once in a while, Michelle texts me about a show of her own or one of Ravi's, or sends me a photo from that first event in 2021. I get the clear sense that she was raised to allow people in but also keeps a safe psychic distance, a spiritual boundary that, when respected, falls away. I learn things in our conversations, like how Alice Coltrane condemned vanity but not at the expense of grooming, how she rebuked the cult of fame and celebrity but never abandoned legacy — her husband's, the creators or her own. Alice Coltrane, though not militant, upheld the tenets of co-terminal groups like the Black Panthers in forming a self-governing collective, though hers was not overtly racialized; it was radical in the sense that it broke with dead roots to plant new ones that endure until now. The ashram she built in the Santa Monica mountains was as subversive as any free school or fringe arts cohort, just without the shrillness of dogma. The household was vegetarian before this was trendy or socially acceptable, and yet not in an uppity way. Michelle recalls her and her siblings riding bikes with the Jackson family children in some idyllic nondenominational order of Black music. Ravi bears an eerie resemblance to John on the day of the Super Bowl, when we gather at Michelle's Topanga home for an ashram service for which Alice's voice is the master of ceremonies. She laughs into the room, about vanity again, against it, about the soul. We sing Sanskrit bhajans as an ensemble and break to watch Kendrick's halftime show. Black music is so relentlessly true to itself when you look away from the trappings of industry, it's the closest estimation we have of utopia. Ravi circles the room with a camera the way his father did to capture footage of family road trips from the early 1960s. It's not luck that sustains this closeness but dedication, to the spirit of Alice and that of John, so that the now-decadent obsession with them is both warranted and a threat to all this depth and private beauty. Commercialized saint-making is dehumanizing, and bypasses genuine mourning by reducing people to idols. The unsuspecting saints may be gone by the time they realize that the pedestal to which we annexed them was a cliff or tripwire trapping them in the theater of an idea of themselves. Then their effigies become our pedestals, which we stand on to feel whole (they have no say in the matter). I don't see a way out for Alice Coltrane other than through the extractive and back into the quiet. Maybe a museum retrospective offers just that, and the ability to pose these ideas. In the galleries, Coltrane is divinity itself, the muse, where a muse is someone who remains silent so that you can speak for her as you wish. But it's not possible to use her in this way undetected. What we ultimately witness is the feeling of the Hammer itself praying on her altar, which is what's brilliant about the curatorial work of the project: Its limitations become the artistic statement.
CBS News
17-02-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
Alice Coltrane tribute tour comes to UC Theatre in Berkeley
The brainchild of noted hip-hop and soul producers Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge, Jazz Is Dead presents a special tribute to spiritual jazz giant Alice Coltrane featuring her son Ravi Coltrane at the UC Theatre Saturday night. While they both had long successful careers prior to collaborating -- Muhammad as a member of iconic hip-hop act A Tribe Called Quest and super group Lucy Pearl, and multi-instrumentalist Younge for his production skills and film work -- the pair began a fruitful partnership that has included acclaimed soundtrack work for the Netflix show Luke Cage and recordings with their group the Midnight Hour for Younge's Linear Labs imprint. More recently, the pair launched its ambitious Jazz Is Dead project. Initially focusing on live concerts with such heavily-sampled luminaries as Roy Ayers and Lonnie Liston Smith, Jazz Is Dead has also brought some of those '70s jazz influences and inspirations into the studio to record full albums, including such giants as Black Jazz recording artists Doug and Jean Carn, saxophonist Gary Bartz, longtime Gil Scott-Heron collaborator Brian Jackson and Brazilian masters Azymuth, Marco Valle and João Donato as well as like-minded younger musicians like Los Angeles group Katalyst. In addition to the collective's popular ongoing concert series in Los Angeles, last summer they launched "Jazz Is Dead: The Tour" which played dates across the country with '70s jazz greats Jackson, Carn and Henry Franklin. While some earlier tours had a collaborative approach teaming seasoned jazz legends with a house ensemble, as well as tours with Brazilian legends Hermeto Pascoal, Arthur Verocai and Milton Nascimento and French jazz group Cortex among others. Jazz Is Dead brings this traveling tribute to spiritual jazz icon Alice Coltrane to the UC Theatre, one of three West Coast dates that the show is playing in February and March. Groundbreaking saxophonist John Coltrane -- who grew from playing with fellow trailblazers Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk to leading his legendary quartet featuring volcanic drummer Elvin Jones and innovative pianist McCoy Tyner before embarking on more exploratory experiments like his spiritual hymn A Love Supreme and the collective improvisational opus Ascension -- had brought his wife Alice into his group in early 1966 to replace the departing Tyner. After John's untimely death the following year from liver cancer at age 40, Alice became not only the steward to her husband's recorded legacy, but established herself as visionary artist in her own right. Adding harp to her arsenal of instruments, the musician's 1968 debut A Monastic Trio paid tribute to her husband while mining similar spiritually minded territory. The musician would release a string of cosmic jazz recordings with members of his band including saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders, drummer Rasheid Ali and bassist Jimmy Garrison as well as other jazz luminaries like bassists Ron Carter and Charlie Haden and saxophonist Joe Henderson. Beginning with her groundbreaking 1970 album Journey to Satchidananda, Coltrane introduced Indian instrumentation and influences that would mark her music for the rest of her career. Coltrane shifted to organ as one of her main instruments on Universal Consciousness the following year while embracing increasingly complex orchestral arrangements. She would later collaborate with John Coltrane devotee Carlos Santana and record a trio of records for Warner Bros. before moving away from secular life and becoming the spiritual director for a Vedantic ashram in Southern California. However, she continued to record hypnotic spiritual music built around chanting, percussion, organ and synthesizer through the 1980s and '90s that were sold on cassette at the ashram. Coltrane returned to recording jazz and performing live in the early 2000s. She recorded and released Translinear Light with Ravi (who also produced the album) and his brother Oran in 2004, her first commercial release in over a quarter century. Two years later, she played a trio of concerts to mark what would have been her husband's 80th birthday, including one for the SF Jazz Festival with Ravi, Haden and drummer Roy Haynes. Sadly in the midst of renewed interest in her music, Alice Coltrane died of respiratory failure the following year at age 69. Some of her religious recordings would eventually be compiled and released by the Luaka Bop label in 2017. The material featured on World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda would expand the audience for some of her underappreciated later work. Recent years have seen a surge of interest in both John and Alice Coltrane between the 2017 documentary film Chasing Trane and a string of new, previously unreleased material: the studio recordings Blue World and Both Directions at Once for John Coltrane, as well as a lost live recording of "A Love Supreme" featuring his classic quartet augmented by Sanders, second bassist Donald Garrett and alto saxophonist Carlos Ward that was issued in 2021. Kirtan: Turiya Sings added to Alice Coltrane's legacy with it's solo voice and organ recordings from the early 1980s. Most of her discography from the '70s has been repressed on vinyl with Impulse recently releasing a stunning previously unheard live recording from a 1971 Carnegie Hall concert that includes Sanders, fellow sax icon Archie Shepp and dueling drummers drummers Ed Blackwell and Clifford Jarvis. For his part, Ravi Coltrane studied music at the California Institute of the Arts before embarking on a lengthy career as a sideman, touring with his father's drummer Elvin Jones in his group and playing with trumpeter Wallace Roney before an extended stint with alto saxophonist and M-Base Collective founder Steve Coleman. He also played with a wide range of luminaries including keyboard giants Geri Allen, Kenny Barron, McCoy Tyner, Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock, Bay Area Latin guitar hero Carlos Santana, bassist Stanley Clarke, and sax greats Sanders and Branford Marsalis. He wouldn't issue his first album as a leader until the release of Moving Pictures in 1997. In 2004, Ravi and his He has also worked in the studio with another family member, and experimental music producer Steven Ellison, aka Flying Lotus Ravi Coltrane has paid tribute to his parents' music in the past, playing residencies at the SFJAZZ Center that included a performance of A Love Supreme on the album's 50th anniversary and revisiting their classic catalogs with a variety of collaborators. For this Jazz Is Dead tribute tour that stops at the UC Theatre on Saturday, Coltrane is joined by rising young harp player Brandee Younger -- who has earned acclaim with her modern take on the jazz harp styles of Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby, who Younger paid tribute to with her 2023 album Brand New Life -- Tel Aviv-born piano prodigy Gadi Lehavi and Bay Area drummer Elé Howell (both regular Ravi Coltrane collaborators), bassist Rashaan Carter and a special guest.
Los Angeles Times
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Alice Coltrane's ashram — and her ‘Black radical imagination' — lives on at the Hammer Museum
In 1972, Alice Coltrane moved her family from New Jersey to California with the goal of building an ashram. Settling in Agoura Hills, the jazz virtuoso and Hindu spiritual leader led a faith-based community for more than three decades. Coltrane died in 2007. In 2017, the secluded place of worship closed, only to be destroyed a year later in the Woolsey fire. The Hammer Museum brings Coltrane's ashram back to Los Angeles with its 'largest' exhibition of the season, 'Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal.' Curated by Erin Christovale, it's the first exhibition to examine Coltrane's life and legacy through art. Alongside a mix of ephemera and archival footage, the show features the works of 19 contemporary Black artists. From deconstructed pianos to sensory deprivation rooms that play her sermons to colorful laser projections, Coltrane's legacy is in the hands of these American artists. Some were asked to create pieces that directly respond to her archives while others shared preexisting works that connect with Coltrane's ethos. 'She's a Black woman who found ways to liberate and emancipate herself in this society, in this world, on her own terms, and that's what I take away from her legacy,' said Christovale. 'She is a prime example of someone who exercised her Black radical imagination. She was generous enough to do that collectively with the people around her and to leave us with clues as to how to do that for ourselves. We absolutely need that type of thinking and imagination in the current state of the world.' The show is divided into three themes: sonic innovation, spiritual transcendence and architectural intimacy. First, visitors are introduced to Coltrane, the musical virtuoso. Raised in Detroit, she began playing the organ for her church's congregation at age 9. She also picked up the piano and the harp. By the early '60s, she was a part of multiple traveling jazz groups. While playing with the Terry Gibbs Quartet in New York, she met famed saxophonist John Coltrane and got married in 1965. Later in life, she became a pioneer of spiritual jazz — where she blended unrehearsed rhythms with the sounds of her faith. Marked by musically charged sculptures, such as Gozié Ojini's disassembled piano keys and Jamal Cyrus' saxophone — with ropes spewing out of its tone holes — the room explores Coltrane, the lifelong musician. Images of her and her husband touring and performing in Japan and pages from her family's photo album fill the glass cases as Jasper Marsalis' abstract paintings of musical performances hang on the neighboring wall. Ojini, who was born in L.A., considers his participation in the show to be a homecoming, as he once worked the Hammer's front desk while attending UCLA. His two pieces, '44.6 lbs' and '4.5 lbs,' debuted at his first solo show, 'Passages,' in New York last spring. He said he relates to Coltrane because he grew up in a musical family and looks to music for inspiration. 'I'm in this mode of returning back to something that I couldn't claim as mine,' Ojini said of his sprawled-out, destroyed piano structure. 'There's been a piano in my house for as long as I can remember. And I always felt estranged from music as a kid. So it's been nice to finally kind of come back and be accepted into this global community.' Last weekend, the Hammer celebrated the opening with a full-fledged party. As the night's DJs controlled the dance floor and museum-goers wandered through the galleries, Hari Williams and Malik Vitthal were transported to a vital part of their childhood. The two friends grew up on Coltrane's ashram — Williams lived there until he was 11 and Vitthal moved there when he was 8. Walking through the exhibit, Vitthal said he experienced the feeling 'you get when you get out of church. It's a lot to absorb.' 'I remember after the [2018] fires and remember after the land changed ownership, we were talking about whether the ashram existed as it did in the physical realm — especially with not being able to go there and conduct services like we were accustomed to,' said Williams. 'But its spirit is something that we carry and embody wherever we go. So to be in a space where there's a collection of so many things that feel familiar is really beautiful.' Surrounded by decals of Coltrane's albums, Williams and Vitthal stood in front of an installation that allows individuals to sit and listen to each of her projects. The pair walked over to the album cover of 'The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda,' a compilation album released in 2017. They recognized familiar faces from the group photo and pointed to a little girl in a pink dress, who now goes by the stage name Doja Cat. Reflecting on the creative lineage of artists like Doja Cat, who grew up on the ashram, and Coltrane's grandnephew Steve Ellison, a.k.a. producer and DJ Flying Lotus, Williams and Vitthal said many of their peers have gone on to excel in their respective fields because of the environment they were raised in. After the passing of John Coltrane, Alice turned to African and Eastern religions, specifically Hinduism, and took on the Sanskrit name Swamini Turiyasangitananda. The spiritual transcendence portion of the exhibit is marked by multiple television sets that play Coltrane's show 'Eternity's Pillar,' in which she shared her teachings. Other works like Shala Miller's 'Heavenly Father' photo series, portraying a visitation dream from her deceased father, and Coltrane's framed depictions of 'Krishna' and 'Rama,' fill the gallery. Star Feliz, a New York artist now based in L.A., was exploring the connection between civilian oracles and artificial technologies in their art when they were approached to make a new piece for the show. A longtime fan of Coltrane, they turned specifically to Coltrane's book 'Turiya Speaks, Divine Discourses Volume I' for inspiration. The multimedia artist created an earth-toned concrete sculpture with a small screen and ethernet cables reaching toward the ceiling, called 'Siren of Oblivion.' 'I really felt like this was an opportunity to strip down a lot and honor the connection to the heart and to spirit that is so present in [Coltrane's] work,' Feliz said of how Coltrane influenced their creative process. 'In my practice, spirit has always been there, but there's always been this tinge of trauma and violence because of my ancestral history.' The final section of the exhibit focuses on Coltrane's ability to build worlds, like in her ashram and in her family home. Featuring a meditation hub and an installation that plays frequencies to align chakras, visitors exit the exhibition in a meditative state. 'One thing I can say without a doubt is that her music is healing. It's cathartic. From a very young age, she understood the power of pairing the sonic realm with the spiritual realm. Her legacy has been about how to bring those two worlds together and what that can do for people,' said Christovale. 'Now more than ever, we need that sort of sonic balm that her music provides.'
Los Angeles Times
07-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Lakers' free exhibition showcasing artists of color, and more L.A. arts and culture this weekend
Attention, fellow Los Angeles Lakers fans: While we're all understandably focused on the huge news of the team's latest addition, let's also celebrate the local artists who are taking part in the Lakers' fourth 'In the Paint' exhibition. The exhibition includes 36 new works — unified by the theme 'How Expression Produces Triumph' — by 10 artists of color from all over the L.A. area. It's free and open to the public from Saturday through March 8 (11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays) at Band of Vices (1700 S. Santa Fe Ave., Suite 371, Arts District). The 10 featured artists are Abby Aceves, Estefania Ajcip, Jessica Taylor Bellamy, Daryll Cumbie, Derick Edwards, Megan Gabrielle Harris, Marlon Ivory, Larry Li, Ann Phong and Michael The Khoi Tran. Each artist will receive a $10,000 grant from the Lakers Youth Foundation and will be celebrated at Monday's home game versus the Utah Jazz at Arena. That's just some of the latest from around the L.A. arts scene. I'm Times staff writer Ashley Lee, here with my colleague Jessica Gelt with more Essential Arts news and to-do's: Alice Coltrane celebrationsThe Hammer Museum is opening 'Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal,' the first museum exhibition inspired by the life and legacy of the jazz musician and devotional leader. Curated by Erin Christovale, the exhibition explores themes of Coltrane's cultural output and practice like spiritual transcendence, sonic innovation and architectural intimacy, and features archival ephemera from her archive — handwritten correspondence, unreleased audio recordings and video footage, much of which has never before been shared with the public. Also on view: sculptures, installations, paintings and photography by 19 contemporary artists, including Star Feliz, Rashid Johnson, Jasper Marsalis, Cauleen Smith and Martine Syms. The exhibition — which debuts Saturday night with a free opening night party, complete with a DJ set by Flying Lotus (Coltrane's grandnephew, Steven Ellison) — is on view from Sunday through May 4. Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood. And in Orange County, Alonzo King Lines Ballet is celebrating Coltrane's numerous artistries and disciplines — as spiritual leader, composer, pianist and harpist. Also part of the Bay Area-based contemporary ballet company's program that evening: a tribute to the storytelling of Maurice Ravel in 'Ma mère l'Oye (Mother Goose).' 7:30 p.m. Friday, Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 'Buried Child'Interact Theatre Company is launching a new season of free staged readings at the Studio City Branch Library, beginning with Sam Shepard's Pulitzer-winning drama, directed by Rob Brownstein. And mark your calendars for the second Saturday of each month for 'God of Carnage' by Yasmina Reza, translated by Christopher Hampton (March 8), 'Rabbit Hole' by David Lindsay-Abaire (April 12), 'Fences' by August Wilson (May 10) and 'Wit' by Margaret Edson (June 14). 2 p.m. Saturday. 12511 Moorpark St., Studio City. 'Stephen Sondheim's Old Friends'After a London run, this celebration of composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim comes to Los Angeles with Tony winners Bernadette Peters, Lea Salonga and Beth Leavel in tow. Directed by Matthew Bourne, the revue features beloved numbers from Sondheim shows like 'Into the Woods,' 'Gypsy,' 'Follies,' 'Company,' 'West Side Story,' 'Sunday in the Park With George' and 'Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.' This pre-Broadway production begins performances Saturday and runs through March 9. Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown. — Ashley Lee FRIDAYDavid Lynch The American Cinematheque and Vidiots continue their respective tribute series to the late filmmaker.'Eraserhead,' 7 p.m. Sunday (with 'Short Films by David Lynch') and 10:30 p.m. Friday; 'Lost Highway,' 7 p.m. Friday, Egyptian Theatre, 6712 Hollywood Blvd.; 'Mulholland Drive,' 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Eagle Theatre, 4884 Eagle Rock Blvd. Whiplash A live-to-film screening of the 2014 film features an 18-piece jazz band conducted by Academy Award-winning composer Justin Hurwitz.8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 3 p.m. Saturday (doors open two hours earlier). Saban Theatre, 8440 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills. SATURDAYThe Gift: An Immersive Experience In a music-filled room, read an illustrated storybook (available in English, Spanish, French, simplified Chinese and Korean) about the fates of two stars; preceded by a conversation with LeVar Burton and project co-creators Janani Balasubramanian, Natalie Gosnell and Andrew Kircher.4:30-6:30 p.m. conversation; 6:30-9:30 p.m. The Experience, please allow approximately 30 minutes. Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. Colectivo Cherani A political and artistic initiative whose work includes paintings, murals, graffiti, photography, installation and hand-embellished objects that reflect the customs and traditions of the Purépecha people of Aug. 31, closed Mondays. UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood. Ant Hampton / Time Based Editions A photobook (included in the price of the ticket) springs to life in 'Borderline Visible,' an audiovisual performance blending narration and soundscape on a journey through history along the eastern edge of Europe.1, 4 and 8 p.m. UCLA Nimoy Theater, 1262 Westwood Blvd. Romance Reimagined Contemporary paintings and sculptures collected through the Autry's 'Masters of the American West' annual art exhibition and sale explore emotion, imagination and immersion in March 23, closed Mondays. The Autry, Griffith Park, 4700 Western Heritage Way. SUNDAYCamerata Pacifica The group performs 'high definition chamber music' with selections from Morciano, Gershwin, Weill, Debussy and Schoenberg.3 p.m. Sunday. Performing Arts Center, 2100 E. Thousand Oaks Blvd., Thousand Oaks; 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. The Huntington, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino; 8 p.m. Thursday. Thayer Hall, Colburn School, 200 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. LA Voices: Black History Celebration Guest vocalists join the Inner-City Youth Orchestra of L.A., the largest predominantly Black orchestra in the U.S., for this free concert.4 p.m. The Ebell, 4401 W. 8th St. Macbeth Kamal Bolden plays the title role in director Andi Chapman's staging of Shakespeare's tragedy, reset in early 20th century New March 9. A Noise Within, 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., Pasadena. Rodolfo Leone and Quartet Integra The ensemble performs piano quintets by Schumann and Brahms.3 p.m. Thayer Hall, Colburn School, 200 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. (also livestreamed). Long Beach Opera is taking the radical — and exciting — step of devoting an entire season to pioneering electronic music composer, feminist and accordionist Pauline Oliveros. LBO's slogan, interim managing director Marjorie Beale told Times classical music critic Mark Swed, is 'We're not the Met.' And it's a good thing too, writes Swed in a column examining how LBO, 'America's oldest purveyor of consistently progressive opera is about to embark on the most uncompromising season of any company of its size or supposed mission anywhere. Ever.' South Coast Repertory said a partial roof collapse of a production building where painted scenes, more than 100,000 costumes and an abundance of archival items are stored may have resulted in serious loss. The collapse happened during a storm that brought wind and rain, and officials say they are still examining the site to assess the damage. In January, the Norton Simon Museum kicked off its 50th anniversary by launching a $14-million construction and conservation initiative called the Exterior Improvement Project. The project will make the garden and landscaping more sustainable. It will also include conservation of the 115,000 Heath ceramic tiles on the building's exterior. The goal is for the whole endeavor to be done by early fall. L.A. is getting a new gallery devoted to contemporary South Asian art. Rajiv Menon Contemporary aims to be a place for collaboration and communication among culture lovers on the West Coast and those in India. The gallery has a South Asian-influenced private garden and courtyard. It plans to open Feb. 17 and will donate a portion of the proceeds from its inaugural exhibition to fire relief through SevaSphere and the California Community Foundation. If you've been following the online drama about the original Van Gogh that was allegedly found at a Minnesota yard sale in 2016, you'll want to know that the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has weighed in. Late last month, the museum said the piece, which was purchased by a New York-based art authentication company called LMI in 2019, was not created by Van Gogh. LMI pushed back, saying: 'Even the museum is fallible.' Hyperallergic has the full story. — Jessica Gelt Still thinking about impressionist painter Edgar Degas at the 2025 Grammys via Chappell Roan.
New York Times
07-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Alice Coltrane: Artist's Muse and Sonic Healer
After Alice Coltrane's death in January 2007, the many who mourned her passing and celebrated her influence — from the jazz world, Hindu and new-age communities, and beyond — did so with a shared sadness and fervor, but for different reasons. They even called her by different names. To musicians she was first and foremost Alice Coltrane, the Detroit-raised pianist who met John Coltrane in New York City in 1963, married him and joined his band in its late, avant-garde phase before his death in 1967. She went on to release important albums herself, playing piano and harp, accompanied by some of his main musical acolytes. To spiritual seekers, however, she was Turiyasangitananda — Turiya for short, or simply Swamini, the Hindu term for a female religious teacher. After John's death, she traversed an intense period of meditation, physical trials and revelations. In 1972, she moved from their house on Long Island to California; a few years later, obeying what she experienced as a divine command, she founded an ashram near Los Angeles. There, the music was devotional, laced with Sanskrit mantras, part of a community life focused on study and worship. Her impact in her lifetime was significant but segmented. At a memorial gathering at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in May 2007, the program was so rich with jazz greats that it merited a music review in The New York Times. It also featured members of yogic groups whose chants, the critic Nate Chinen wrote, 'nodded promisingly toward polyphony but ultimately faltered into vagueness.' Over time, however, the memory of Alice Coltrane — by any name — has overflowed these niches and seeped into broader culture. A musical biography by the scholar Franya J. Berkman, published in 2010, was the first to treat her oeuvre in full, from Detroit gospel roots through Hindu bhajans. Recent reissues of obscure or rediscovered albums have widened the critical attention. Last year, the harpist Brandee Younger led tribute concerts in several cities, while the Indian American vocalist Ganavya released a critically praised album rich with Alice Coltrane covers and references. At the pop-culture extreme is a bumper sticker that popped up a few years ago: 'Keep Honking! I'm Listening to Alice Coltranes 1971 Meteoric Sensation 'Universal Consciousness.'' It almost feels, said the producer and composer Flying Lotus, who is Alice Coltrane's grandnephew, as if she now has the greater cachet. 'I hear more people talk about my Aunt Alice than about John Coltrane, which is fascinating,' he said. Now, an exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles is breaking new ground by examining Alice Coltrane's influence in a field that she did not practice herself but where her life story has resonated and her ideas have found purchase: contemporary visual art. The show, 'Alice Coltrane, Monument Eternal' — the title comes from a short text by Coltrane about her spiritual journey that is being reissued this month after years circulating as a cult item — mixes previous and newly commissioned work by 19 fine artists, some prominent, like Martine Syms, Rashid Johnson and Cauleen Smith, and others less known or just emerging. Roughly half work or have roots in Southern California, anchoring the project in the region. Organized by the Hammer curator Erin Christovale, with the curatorial assistant Nyah Ginwright, the exhibition proposes several ways to explore Coltrane's influence. Some works offer direct references, like Smith's film 'Pilgrim,' which she partly filmed at the ashram shortly before the property was sold in 2017, or Ephraim Asili's film 'Isis & Osiris,' which features Younger playing Coltrane's restored harp. In others — like an installation of industrial light fixtures by Devin T. Mays — the connections are more abstract. Undergirding the show are materials from Coltrane's archive that, in many cases, have never before circulated outside her family and ashram circles. Christovale consulted closely with the family and devotees; for some of the show's new commissions, artists found inspiration in the documents they shared. For Christovale, who nurtured this project for years, the chance to focus a contemporary art exhibition on Alice Coltrane went beyond stoking her own avowed fandom. Coltrane, she said, constantly recurred in conversations with artists — mentioned as an inspiration, her music playing in their studios, with the sense, notably but not solely among Black female artists, that her example radiates richly. 'She is someone who is part of their artistic experience,' Christovale said. 'I would say that it goes beyond music. It's like a sonic healing that inspires creatives writ large.' 'The Air Got Thinner and Purer' The ashram, in its day, was a simple building set on 48 acres in Agoura Hills, in the Santa Monica Mountains. The edifice no longer stands: It burned in 2018, after the property's sale, in the massive Woolsey wildfire. The spiritual community has dispersed to a degree, but many devotees stay in touch and gather at different homes or online for worship. There is also a small diaspora of young people who grew up at the ashram, including the rapper and singer Doja Cat. Michelle Coltrane, Alice's oldest daughter and a singer herself, still lives where the family settled in the late 1970s, on a quiet block in Woodland Hills, in the San Fernando Valley. One afternoon in December, over tea and snacks in her living room, several of the ashram's elder devotees shared how their path led to Alice Coltrane — or Swamini, as they preferred to call her — decades ago. Shankari Adams had traveled to California from the East Coast in the early 1970s on an undirected quest. 'I was searching for churches, paths, anything,' she said. In San Francisco, she found the One Mind Temple, which was devoted to John Coltrane. But it was a concert by Alice Coltrane, in Berkeley, that blew her mind. In line to meet Alice after the show, she felt a force, she said: 'As I got closer the air got thinner and purer, like when you go up in an airplane.' As for Purusha Hickson, he had come up in Black radical politics, as a teenager in Westchester County, N.Y., and as a student at SUNY Albany. 'But I had a lot of questions,' he said. 'It looked like sometimes some of the activities that we were doing in the movement were creating more chaos than harmony and liberation.' He hitchhiked and rode Greyhound to San Francisco, then stayed in California. He received Vedantic initiation in 1975, then joined Alice Coltrane's community. He continues to teach hatha yoga today. In the ashram's heyday, services mixed regulars and drop-ins, with an open-door policy. Swamini played organ and sermonized on life, devotion and divinity. She followed Swami Satchidananda, then Sathya Sai Baba, and traveled to India, but studied all religions and developed a message of universal human understanding. In audio excerpts she varies cadence and tone, in the manner of Black church preaching. 'She was raised in Detroit,' Christovale said. 'Don't get it twisted.' Coltrane was only 69 when she died, though she believed she had experienced many past incarnations. She was familiar with untimely death — John Coltrane died at 40; one of their three sons, John Jr., died in a car crash at 17. Either way, she was prepared. 'She was always very frank with us,' Michelle Coltrane said. ''I'm not always going to be here.'' In her capacity as a primary steward of the legacy of both John and Alice Coltrane, Michelle (who also uses the Hindu name Sita) regularly fields requests of many kinds, but 'nothing like this one,' she said of Christovale's exhibition concept. Gathering the archive and oral histories for the show, she said, only deepened her awe at how much her mother — a widow with four young children in 1967 — achieved. Over the years, Michelle has observed her mother's cultural prominence grow, she said, noting the circulation of bootlegged records and her own encounters with music students versed in the obscure works. 'It's shorthand for cool' to know about Alice Coltrane, she said. In her view, the coronavirus pandemic may also have drawn people to Alice's work. 'Maybe people were searching for something else, something to feel,' she added. Sensory Experiences In conversations with several artists in the exhibition, the shared pattern was a prior awareness of Alice Coltrane that has focused and sharpened, sometimes prompting specific artworks, but even more so serving as a kind of compass for their life and practice. Adee Roberson, who has made a platform sculpture that visitors can step onto and hear a sound work composed with the musician Nailah Hunter play from directional speakers, first heard Alice Coltrane's music some 20 years ago. A punk-rock kid with Jamaican roots, she respected Coltrane's place in jazz. As an adult, personal setbacks helped her appreciate Coltrane's trials, while Roberson's spiritual and healing work — she is trained in several massage and body work practices — unlocked the music's force. 'When I think of her, I think of how sound really does heal you physically and emotionally and psychically,' Roberson said in her bungalow home-studio in South Los Angeles. Her sculpture is made of selenite — the most cleansing stone, she said. It is shaped like a disc and marked in quadrants after the Kongo cosmogram, which represents the cyclical relationship of material and ancestral worlds. For the artist Suné Woods, who works in video and collage, the show provided an opportunity to interview a range of people — ashram members, her own family and others — about their spiritual lives. She wove some of these reflections into the soundtrack for her two-channel installation, 'On this day in meditation,' which includes original and found footage of Los Angeles-area landscapes made with a thermal camera. While completing the work, Woods meditated every morning at 4 a.m. The piece is a sensory experience that aims to reflect 'what comes through when I meditate,' she said, sitting on the narrow deck of her very small house — a kind of aerie — perched on a steep hillside in the Echo Park neighborhood. 'It's a work where I want you to feel.' Nicole Miller, a filmmaker in Los Angeles who has lately been working with an early form of laser animation, drew on Alice Coltrane's Vedic star chart, which was preserved in the archive, to write short phrases that light up in her installation 'For Turiya' when sounds run through a synthesizer. The references to the chart are kept oblique, Miller said, out of respect. 'I wanted to figure out a way to honor her instead of mining from her,' she said. An architectural piece by the sculptor GeoVanna Gonzalez, who lives in Miami, involves an aluminum platform structure along with stained glass and a woven rug. Its inspiration is the home that Alice and John Coltrane shared all too briefly in the Dix Hills section of Long Island, which the couple had carefully decorated with furnishings chosen for their spiritual associations. (The home is now a registered historic site and is being restored.) Gonzalez's work will function as a stage for performances during the show's run. For some artists, Alice Coltrane's life yields prompts of a kind. Bethany Collins, for instance, who lives in Chicago, learned that 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' was a favorite of Coltrane from her Detroit church music days. Collins is known for works on paper that blur or alter scores of musical pieces that recur in different times and social contexts. Her series in the show is based on that hymn and on the Largo from Antonin Dvorák's 'New World Symphony' — itself drawn from Negro spirituals, and which Coltrane adapted on one of her albums. As for Mays, a sculptor and performance-based artist who grew up in Detroit and lives in Galveston, Texas, his installation of light fixtures collected by a particular rule — they must be used, and not discarded or scavenged, but given to him — may seem abstract, yet draws on his understanding of Coltrane's example. Alice Coltrane modeled a discipline and dedication that he seeks to emulate as an artist, Mays said. From her, he added, 'I could make sense of how one finds a way to stay in practice and to continue to practice all the time.' 'Monument Eternal' isn't so much an exhibition on Coltrane than it is a show that thinks with Coltrane through a gamut of methods that, in a sense, she makes possible. It arrives in a hard time, not least for artists in Los Angeles grappling with last month's fires. (The family of Syms, who grew up in Altadena, lost their multigeneration home.) That the ashram building itself was destroyed by fire is an echo that resonates with Christovale, though everything is too raw just now to digest further. Perhaps, Christovale said by phone recently, the exhibition can be a salutary gathering space. 'Her whole expression is rooted in a sense of healing and connecting to a divine power,' she said of Coltrane. 'You feel it at a cellular level when you listen to her music. I hope that if anything, a show like this, in a moment like this in this city, can be a space for people to let their shoulders drop.'
