Turiyasangitananda (Alice Coltrane) :: The Spiritual Director of the Vedantic Center
-"The Transcendental Lord's Highest Song of Bliss."
Her music is a sacred shadow bending under sand and stone, its hands bound with rope made of rain and decorated with frozen fruits reflective like mirrors and handcrafted blades of teleportation craftsmanship. Her music is a revolution in esoteric exercise, lysergic laughter in holy hallways occupied by barefooted visionaries and students of the rhythm of death. Coltrane explored one of the most influential paths in music and has since left behind a sincerely gorgeous body of work. I’m extremely familiar with her more classic titles such as “Journey In Satchidananda" and “Ptah - The El Daodu”, both featuring the iconic Pharaoh Sanders, but the work she did after establishing the Vedantic Center in 1975 and the Shanti Anantam Ashram in California in 1983 I found to be very fascinating to say the least. A musician of this caliber was now in an even more rarer form of individualism and pure strength as she stunningly advanced forward along her well mastered craft by becoming something entirely different than a musician. A student in religion. Introduced to Swami Satchidananda, her guru, by a former colleague following the death of her late husband, she began to experience an inner turmoil that manifested in dramatic loss of weight, a lack of sleep and radical hallucinations that she would later go on to describe as her formal undergoing of “Tapas”, (a word in Sanskrit for austere spiritual practices).
After progressive travels and mystic pilgrimages through ancient winds, Coltrane would eventually meet the great Bhaktivedanta Swami towards the end of the 1970s after he commended her for her chanting. Though she always found herself more centered in God, she was able to coexist with various tiers of enlightenment that came from the many different cultures, studies, ideologies and realms of spiritualism she found most compelling. A giant galactic Rubik’s Cube made of organic language firmly gripped by some deity on its hands and knees, its skin weathered with fast metabolizing energy as a new decade approached the artist. Establishing her very own private publishing company, the Avatar Book Institute, she would go on to release a series of cassettes from ‘82-’90: “Turiya Sings”, “Divine Songs” and “Infinite Chants” that carefully rerouted her music into this gorgeous matrix of planetary soup and revolutionary soundscapes before soon reuniting with her fallen angel of past, present and future, John Coltrane.
Turiyasangitananda has become herself an institution, a school, a church and a temple for people all over the world as her wisdom and music lives on as we advance into some avatar filled heaven someplace far from here.
