Alice Coltrane - S/D

oh cool, thanks for sharing. sleeve, do you still have those FLACs ?

xp don't know what Dimeadozen is but the cassette "series" definitely strikes me as faux-boutique cassettes-are-cool-now nonsense (i.e. i'm certain those recordings had previously been shared on nerd blogs), even so i was pointed in the direction of certain things i hadn't heard so

this berkeley concert is blowing my mind

previously been shared on nerd blogs

this, pretty much, Dimeadozen is a well known torrent site for ROIOs

Berkeley concert is unbelievable, agreed - there's a reason it made the Wire's year-end list

those cassettes DO look cool though!!!

here's the audio for the warsaw concert: https://we.tl/t-YHsfVrLIBY
deeply offended by the "nerd blog" comment

thanks tylerw !!

There's a 2CD set coming out on Friday, Spiritual Eternal: The Complete Warner Bros. Studio Recordings, which includes three albums, Eternity, Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana, and Transcendence.

― grawlix (unperson), Monday, September 3, 2018 8:19 AM (one year ago)
Legit-wise, this is quite the gateway, or a gateway, though not as outward bound as some, but in terms of (for instance) Cali focus and range, musical per se and evocation: on headphones, especially, I'm climbing with her through the canyons, skies, chimes, ashram. This and the Luaka Bop are what I have.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7Hm0keXTeY the keyboard on this is incredible, although I can't say I like the vocals much

^one of the best songs ever

And yes the Rhodes on it is sublime, but I love the vocals too--they have a similar sedated, cultish choral vibe to the vocals on David Axelrod's Earth Rot.

I love the way the rhodes is recorded, it's so room-filling, larger than life

my favourite alice jam

I'm really enjoying _My East is Your West_ by Sarathy Korwar, which has two Coltrane songs on it: "Journey in Satchidanada" and "Earth" (from the record _The Elements_ that she did with Joe Henderson)

Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure _The Elements_ IS my most played Coltrane album; either that or _Universal Consciousness_.
Haven't listened to her in years though, which proves I'm a damn fool.

i love things about almost all her records, but i generally find Huntington Ashram Monastery and Journey in Satchidananda to be the most appropriate for the most listening situations (work music, cleaning, dinner party, etc). when it's a listening context where things can get more far out without disrupting my work or other people in the room, World Galaxy blows my mind

haha, yeah there are certain AC records that maybe aren't quite right for social situations.

thanks for the Sarathy Korwar tip, hadn't heard of it ...

Is jazz the music that changes the most when someone else enters the room in which you're listening?

And I'm sure the Korwar was discussed somewhere relatively recently. Anyway, this is a banger:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Z_3t5un6sI

you mean the music itself is liable to change, or that the listener's subjective experience of it changes when someone else is present?

xp

because yeah, it's a little of both!

i can't have late 60's/70s sun ra on when someone else is present, because even if it's a calm and relatively melodic section, who knows what is going to happen at any moment. it can totally change character at any moment (which is part of the appeal!)

but also, i can listen to a pretty standard "jazz" album and think it's peaceful and non-distracting, but if someone else walks in they might fixate on all that ring-ting-tingling on the cymbal and want to change it immediately

Dave Alvin (yes, the Blasters/X/Flesh Eaters dude) has a new band called The Third Mind with ex-members of Cracker and Camper Van Beethoven, and the first track on their self-titled album is a fairly Dick Dale-ish version of "Journey In Satchidananda":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C6iXB911F4

Yes to all of that, Karl Malone! There's something about tuning into jazz that gets disrupted when another consciousness enters the room - it can go from something edgeless and erotic to all hips and elbows and tripping over one's own toes in seconds.

all that ring-ting-tingling on the cymbal

btw, that was a reference to a classic ilm thread that i can never seem to find, but i finally remembered!

What's with that constant cymbal tapping in jazz drumming?

for those who haven't read it, it starts with this classic pair of posts

This is one of the things I find annoying in the sound of a lot of jazz. Why did this become so common? Does anyone else find it annoying?
― Rockist Scientist, Wednesday, December 25, 2002 3:46 PM (seventeen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

aaarrggghhh, yes, that endless ride cymbal tapping, it drives me NUTS. one of the biggest reasons that i hate jazz. oh, what, apart from it being crap and all. argh, the treble overpower of it all...

idk about all this -- i am going through the jazz unit in my music appreciation class rn and with this new online teaching situation, i don't get the chance to listen to jazz WITH my students and it is really bumming me tf out. my class is at least 40% less enjoyable for me and for them because we don't have the communal listening experience.

i used to play "journey..." as entry/class starting music all the time :( :( :(
i loved it when they would walk in and be like...what IS this?

oh yeah! journey is also my go-to jazz record to play for people who i suspect haven't heard it before - it never fails!

La Lachera, my music appreciation club has had a couple of online meetings using a combination of Zoom and an app called Jqbx that works with spotify. The drawback is that all users have to have spotify premium. It's worked pretty well so far though.

Ugh, La Lechera, apologies for spelling.

my go-to jazz record to play for people who i suspect haven't heard it before

who haven't heard jazz before ?

haha, no, i mean people i know who haven't heard alice coltrane before.

i guess that kind of sounds stupid and needs some unpacking! i think Journey is a really rare combination of strange, accessible, and good, so much so that if someone who likes music hasn't heard it i assume they'll love it. and they almost always do, it seems! it's like the undefeated champion

Thanks for the tip! Wish I could use it but my students aren’t all Spotify subscribers and this is a college class. I can’t ask them to do anything extra at this point :(

Also lots of people haven’t ever really heard jazz before — it’s not absurd!

I think lots of people have heard jazz but haven't listened to jazz, which is a different thing altogether.

Wow! Thanks for the Sarathy Korwar heads up.

Here's another version by Matthew Halsall & The Gondwana Orchestra

https://matthewhalsall.bandcamp.com/track/journey-in-satchidananda

yeah that one is great ... !

xp @ KM yeah i figured, was just being silly, sorry.

a really rare combination of strange, accessible, and good

i agree !

beautiful 15 minute documentary from 1970

Alice Coltrane Black Journal segment

"The 16mm color film print is a short documentary made for a segment of National Education Television's Black Journal television program. The segment focuses on the life of Alice Coltrane and her children in the wake of the death of her husband, famed jazz magician John Coltrane. This film was shot sometime during 1970; three years after the death of John Coltrane."

yo, thanks for this!

this is incredible

it really is. amazing, thanks for sharing. that shot at the end of her waving goodbye in the yard with her kids, so beautiful.

does anyone know what she's referring to at the very end of the interview, about being within an inch of her death?

yessssss, goddamn, this should be a two-hour doc!

xp she is probably referring to this period:

In quick succession, Alice suffered the loss of both her husband and her half brother Ernest. Her account of her spiritual awakening between 1968 and 1970 in her self-published tract, Monument Eternal, is harrowing: her weight plunged from 118 to 95 pounds, and her family worried for her well-being. In her telling, her weight loss was not the result of grief and depression but due to extreme austerities undertaken for spiritual advancement. It leads to detached remembrances, like: “During an excruciating test to withstand heat, my right hand succumbed to a third-degree burn. After watching the flesh fall away and the nails turn black, it was all I could do to wrap the remaining flesh in a linen cloth.”

The rainbow-covered booklet makes no mention of her jazz music career, her husband, or her travels to India. Instead, she matter-of-factly details making a doctor recoil in horror at the sight of her blackened flesh, what occurs when one experiences supreme consciousness, the nuances of various astral planes, her ability to hear trees sing, and scaring the family dog with her astral projections. Amid this, her family feared for her sanity: “My relatives became extremely worried about my mental and physical health. Therefore they arranged for my return to their home for ‘care and rest.’” Later she adds: “Communicating with people was found to be like suffering judgment. In fact, it was almost impossible for me to dwell upon earthly matters, and equally impossible for me to bring the mind down to mundane thoughts and general conversations.”

(from https://pitchfork.com/features/from-the-pitchfork-review/10009-transfiguration-and-transcendence-the-music-of-alice-coltrane/)

alice was WAAAAAAAAY out there

xp thanks tyler!

love the faces on the kids when pharoah is going wild

i wonder if there's a full concert tape somewhere

man if they had footage of that entire show, it'd be on the level of Aretha's Amazing Grace concert doc ...

so great, thanks

SOOOOO GOOD!

Great taste in cars too.

Amazing. I met Rashied Ali a couple of times in the ‘90s and he *looks exactly the same in the film*!

Bless the Coltranes.