In the late Sixties, the jazz pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane underwent a period of extreme physical and psychological suffering. Her husband, John Coltrane, had died of liver cancer in 1967, leaving her widowed at the age of twenty-nine. As Andy Beta writes in his new biography, Cosmic Music: The Life, Art, and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane, “to the outside observer—to her friends, neighbors, family members, and others—the perception was that Alice Coltrane experienced a total nervous breakdown.” She slept little and grew extremely thin. She had visions of demons. Once, she tried to jump out of a second-story window. What some might have diagnosed as severe depression or psychosis, Alice herself referred to as tapasya: a Sanskrit term denoting a form of penance undertaken for the sake of “illumination and spiritual re-awakening,” as she put it. 

In the August issue, the critic Ian Penman reviews Beta’s biography, considering how her musical achievements—and her legacy—were shaped by this “dark night of the soul.” “Difficult as it is to accept the thought, Alice’s grueling course of tapasya seems in some way to have been the making of her,” he writes. “Or, to put it differently: without traversing this darkness, there might have been none of the light she later radiated.” I wrote to Penman recently to ask about the temptation to view Alice as a kind of mystic or saint; the enduring pleasures of her music; and the near-psychedelic effects of listening to spiritual jazz for hours on end.

Charlie Lee: In your review, you mention that, as a youngster in the United Kingdom, you were part of a subculture that obsessed over spiritual jazz—a generation of “wide boys” that “grew up bathed in the dawn glow of Egyptian mythology, Afrofuturism, and Sufi allegory.” How did you first come upon Alice Coltrane’s music?

Ian Penman: 

In my teens, I started out as a soul-music obsessive and then discovered other adjacent musical tributaries and streams. This has long been the experience of a lot of people in the UK: from Sixties mods to jazz-funk aficionados in the Seventies and Eighties to an outfit like Massive Attack, which sampled jazz-fusion tracks by the likes of Billy Cobham and Pieces of A Dream. Many official histories slot things into neat, stylistic boxes, when in reality it’s seldom that clear-cut. In any healthy culture, things mingle and cross-pollinate.

I’ve only ever DJed three times in my life, and one of them was for an early New Order gig, February 1981, at the Manchester Polytechnic student union. It now all seems like some crazy dream. I remember very little of the night in question, but I do know two of the records I played: Rock Creek Park  by The Blackbyrds (named for the trumpeter Donald Byrd) and New York City by Miroslav Vitouš. It’s difficult to give such music a definite name. It has elements of jazz, funk, disco, and electronica. 

In answer to your question, the first time I remember hearing Alice Coltrane was in the early Nineties, when my then next-door neighbor made me a “spiritual jazz” C90 mixtape. The interesting thing here is that said neighbor was not at all a jazzer, but far more into dance culture. (Some of Alice Coltrane’s work was a perfect fit for early-morning, post-E chill-out sessions.) 

Alice is one of those figures whose music you can play to someone who knows nothing about her and has no special interest in jazz and they are instantly smitten. This was something I also found with Erik Satie. And it’s not just that people find the music, you know, “interesting”; it’s also that they react in a surprisingly emotional way to the person they perceive behind the music.

Lee: By your own account, many of the books you review are about “self-mangled men: libidinal scavengers, frail melancholics, bullying sneaks.” Beta’s biography of Alice, on the other hand, explores “a good life lived by a decent person.” Is that part of what drew you to the subject?

Penman: Very much so. As I said, people seem to intuit that something is “good” about Alice before they even know anything about her. This is in notable contrast to all the jeers and condescension Alice got from contemporaneous jazz critics. A certain kind of man reacted badly to Alice, and it seemed to involve what she played as much as who she was: a woman of color, a mother, an explicitly spiritual person. I think these critics had an idea of jazz that was quite masculine, insular, armored, and she threw the assumptions underlying their modernist paradigm all into disarray. 

So much of our culture maintains an easy obsession with “darkness,” but finds it difficult to sensitively explore matters relating to goodness, faith, fidelity, sacrifice, happiness, commitment. You see it on television streaming platforms, with the complete overload of shows about serial killers and frauds and abusers and cult leaders of every stripe. I think as regards men and their emotional lives, this obsession with the dark side and generally being “cool”—in two or three senses of the word—can end up being a dreadful cul-de-sac, with severely diminishing returns as you grow older.

Lee: Your favorite record in Alice’s discography is Huntington Ashram Monastery, which you describe as “solar-plexus music that is also quietly psychedelic.” You say that listening to it while working on this piece had an almost physical effect on you—freaky dreams, a sense that you were “breathing from a different place.” What is it about that album that brought it on? More generally, I’m curious what role this kind of embodied experience of music plays in your listening life and in your approach to writing criticism.

Penman: I realized recently that most of the music that has put me into some kind of altered state involves drone and repetition and extended duration. The only difference with Alice Coltrane is that I get the same transporting effect from relatively brief bursts. Her music can be softly immersive—by its very nature the harp seems to evoke some ethereal realm—but it can also be quite visceral and abrasive and intense.

I think it is telling that, in the dream, I mention that I found myself inside the pyramid: I wasn’t outside, looking at it as a more or less familiar monument. I was taken inside the symbol to discover what it felt like. This was before I’d even reached the section in Beta’s book where Alice relates an epiphanic vision she herself had which takes place … inside a pyramid. Which is, you have to say, just a tiny bit spooky. 

Lee: You write that Beta’s biography could have been “more attentive to the histories that underlay Alice’s own,” and specifically that it could have dwelled more on her relationship to a black political (and spiritual) tradition. Could you say more about how politics shaped her work and worldview?

Penman: To be fair: in just the opening chapters of Cosmic Music, Beta has to deal with the American education system, black homeownership, questions of who owns record labels and clubs and rehearsal spaces—and then at the core of everything, the place of the church in the black community and how that has always fed into a wider realm of culture and protest and politics. These are all huge subjects, each on their own, and any writer would struggle to bring them all together, never mind alongside the rich detail of Alice Coltrane’s life. I wouldn’t know where to begin to write about gospel music, say, for all kinds of reasons and not only the obvious ones. 

At one point in my piece there’s a passing mention of Sun Ra and George Clinton that I hoped might spark further thoughts about how art and the life of the spirit and grounding in the community and politics in the widest sense can sometimes be impossible to disentangle. A lot of these things are about a “we” pulling together rather than an “I” lighting out on its own.

And for your homework, class, three books that Cosmic Music sent me scurrying off to consult for further illumination on such topics: A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion by Catherine L. Albanese; Sacred Drift by Peter Lamborn Wilson; and As Serious As Your Life by Val Wilmer. 

Lee: There are aspects of Beta’s book that read like hagiography, you note. Book reviewers usually use that term in a pejorative sense, but you write that it’s “not necessarily a bad thing: it is a precise idiom with its own rules and purpose.” What are the benefits of a hagiographical approach to writing about Alice? What are the drawbacks?

Penman: On the face of it, to enshrine or sanctify someone feels very much against the spirit of jazz, which can be such a collective endeavor. On the other hand, I do understand the need to feel there is still the possibility of saints or near saints or something akin to saintliness. This relates a bit to the previous question about a “good life lived by a decent person.” Alice might be considered saintly in some respects but she also feels very human, not to mention the admirable record of her involvement in charitable works and helping the local community. 

In our post-Freudian, postmodern, post-truth era, the idea of hagiography might seem preposterous, but I think the time may be ripe for anything that provides an inspiring example of the forgotten virtues of sacrifice, duty, love, care. (There’s a very good book on this by Terry Eagleton called Radical Sacrifice.) 

I would say there’s a fine line between being inspired by saintly exemplars and being made to feel your own life is irretrievably tawdry, your own straitened circumstances nearly impossible to overturn or transform. But hagiographies can be helpfully allegorical or even subtly political by suggesting older models, different choices, other ways of looking at things.

Lee: Since his death, John Coltrane has been elevated into “a kind of sainthood,” as you point out, and his 1965 suite A Love Supreme is often regarded as “something akin to a holy object.” This kind of posthumous veneration isn’t uncommon for legendary musicians, but it seems particularly intense, and particularly religious, for John Coltrane. Why do you think that is? Does this veneration illuminate or obscure anything about his music?

Penman: When I first heard A Love Supreme in my mid-teens I can only say I felt a kind of mild disappointment; maybe because I’d previously heard it spoken of in such hosanna-on-the-mountain-top terms. I doubt I could have told you why I was disappointed; I do think it’s very personal, what clicks for us and what doesn’t. We each build our own secret canons. 

I remember a time when everyone around me seemed to be rhapsodizing about the later, more “out-there” Coltrane, and I felt I couldn’t speak up and admit that what I most loved was his softer, more delicate and tuneful side: his albums with Duke Ellington, Johnny Hartman, Milt Jackson. There is a live version of A Love Supreme now available that I do find a bit more persuasive, but if I had to be extra extra heretical, I’d also add that I’m not a big fan of Elvin Jones’s apocalyptic drumming, and often find McCoy Tyner’s piano a bit underwhelming. 

If I’m honest, a lot of jazz initially disappointed me. My teenage self was expecting “O wow!” moments galore, and it’s probably only in the last twenty years that I’ve learned to appreciate different, more enduring qualities and certain less flashy virtues: patience, care with form, submerging the ego. This is as much a life lesson as it is solely a question of aesthetics. So, I do now get those “O wow!” moments, but from a completely different vantage. Discovering the solo work of the pianist Bill Evans was a key factor for me in this shift. 

Lee: Got a favorite Alice Coltrane track?

Penman: Can I cheat here and go for a representative trinity rather than an all encompassing One?

“Huntington Ashram Monastery” (from Huntington Ashram Monastery), “Turiya and Ramakrishna” (from Ptah, the El Daoud), and “Galaxy in Turiya” (from World Galaxy).