Alice Coltrane’s Transcendent Journey into Late-Night Television

In the late fifties, Alice Coltrane made her name as a professional musician and spent a formative year in Paris. Eager to refine her craft in jazz piano, she studied under Bud Powell, a leading figure of the bebop era. But after a period playing intermission piano at the Blue Note in Paris, and a short-lived marriage to vocalist Kenny “Pancho” Hagood, she returned to Detroit a single mother, forced to fight for respect as a working musician in the city’s androcentric jazz scene. She formed her own groups, collaborating with musicians like Terry Pollard, another underrated female player who helped shape Detroit jazz in the forties and fifties. Then, while performing with vibraphonist Terry Gibbs at Birdland in New York City, Alice met John Coltrane, a fateful encounter that led to a life-changing romantic and creative partnership. Their union initiated a new era of experimentation for both artists, one in which they fused their evolving spiritual faiths with increasingly bold sounds. On the 1967 album Expression, recorded months before John’s death, Alice plays the piano and—together with Pharoah Sanders on reeds, Rashied Ali on drums, and Jimmy Garrison on bass—the couple explores the concept of transcendence beyond death.

Alice Coltrane became a widow a little over a month before her thirtieth birthday. She had four young children to raise, a mammoth estate to oversee, and little time to grieve. Shortly after her husband’s death, she received a gift—a Lyon & Healy harp that he had ordered, which had taken several months to build. He had envisioned having the instrument in their home to uncover new approaches to harmony and texture. After teaching herself how to play the harp, she would go on to use it to forge new paths in spiritual jazz.

Less than a year after John’s death, Alice recorded her first album as a leader, A Monastic Trio (1968), with Ali, Garrison, Sanders, and drummer Ben Riley. An underrated gem, it provides listeners a rare glimpse into her artistic process, from the virtuosic comping of her gospel-tinged piano to the wonder and unbridled joy she evokes with her harp glissandos. Between 1968 and 1977, she released over a dozen more full-length albums, including the classic Journey in Satchidananda (1971), which anchors the sound of her harp in blues tradition, and Kirtan: Turiya Sings (1981), on which she retraces her religious and spiritual journey through a cacophony of sounds that are somehow both eclectic and familiar. Grounded by her organ—a vestige of her churchgoing youth—she renders clarion chants of Indian ragas that are powerful and restorative.

These vital works paved the way for what happened to her in 1985. That year, Coltrane received a divine call to create a devotional music program, not unlike the celestial message that instructed fellow spiritual-jazz pioneer Sun Ra to use music to lift Black people out of oppression. Eternity’s Pillar was Coltrane’s response, and the show—in which she features as Turiya—consists of episodes that each run slightly under half an hour, giving viewers a unique opportunity to experience the healing powers of her music in action. Unfamiliar with the key aspects of producing a TV program, Turiya conducted research, found a local studio, and enlisted a skilled cinematographer for the new venture. Eternity’s Pillar was broadcast on Sundays after midnight. Though its format bears superficial resemblances to the many televangelist shows that inundated the airwaves at the time, it is a much deeper and more surreal experience—a continuation of the spiritual vision she had been building ever since she began collaborating with John Coltrane.