NYtimes Review of American Vedic Jazz Tour

October 28, 2006

Communing With the Astral, Spiritual and Tuneful

By BEN RATLIFF

Published: October 24, 2006

NEWARK, Oct. 22 — The pianist Alice Coltrane, the widow of John Coltrane, continued to play after making her run of jazz-related albums in the 1970’s, but with different intentions. She played for religious purposes. In 1983 she established the Sai Anantam ashram in Agoura, Calif., where she is known as Swamini A. C. Turiyasangitananda. The Vedic scriptures of ancient India are studied there, as well as scriptures from the Bible, and Buddhist and Islamic texts.

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Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Alice Coltrane on piano, with her son, Ravi, on saxophone on Sunday.

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You might not think all this relevant enough for the first paragraph of a review, but her Sunday night concert here at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center made it so. Ms. Coltrane has performed a few times in recent years with her son, the saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, in New York: once at Town Hall in 1998, and again at Joe’s Pub in 2002. (Both times, she was on his bandstand, and just for a few songs.) In 2004 Ms. Coltrane made her first jazzish record in 26 years, “Translinear Light,” produced by Ravi Coltrane. This year he encouraged his mother to undertake a three-stop tour with him and a few other first-rate jazz musicians; Sunday’s show connected her new work to her old work, and to her husband’s and her son’s as well.

The word before the curtain rose was that she would perform in a quartet with Mr. Coltrane, the bassist Charlie Haden and the drummer Jack DeJohnette. That sounded promising, musically. But the evening was managed so that the audience would think of Ms. Coltrane as more than a musician. Susan Taylor, the editorial director of Essence magazine, introduced the concert’s first half. She described visiting Ms. Coltrane at the ashram, or religious community, and declared that she had “really created the next world,” and more, that “it is the world that our children are praying for.”

On musical grounds alone, the first set went high and low. Mr. Haden had fallen ill, and so Drew Gress — part of Ravi Coltrane’s working group — filled in on bass. This quartet started with “Sita Ram,” a traditional raga; Ms. Coltrane turned on an electronic tamboura to establish a drone, and played wavelike arpeggios on Wurlitzer organ, a keyboard with a hard, buzzing tone that, not coincidentally, recalls John Coltrane’s focused saxophone sound. Mr. DeJohnette played electronic tablas; Mr. Coltrane shook a tambourine, then played soprano saxophone over the mode. Rhythmically, they fell in and out of synch.

Things improved with “Translinear Light,” from the recent album. Ms. Coltrane switched to piano, and Mr. Coltrane, eventually, to tenor saxophone. It became modal after the theme, redolent of John Coltrane’s late period, and she introduced it with more harplike arpeggios; her son worked up to long, fast, bubbling lines.

The set dipped again with her piece “Jagadishwar,” an original hymn for which Ms. Coltrane played synthesizer in a synthetic orchestral preset. The music restored itself again with a roaring version of John Coltrane’s “Africa.” Reggie Workman, who played on the original recording of the piece, came onstage as a second bassist, playing bowed lines over Mr. Gress’s plucked ones.

The second half went beyond music into aesthetically dicier territory. Ms. Coltrane performed two pieces from her forthcoming, much less jazz-related CD, “Sacred Language of Ascension,” a collaboration with J. J. Hurtak, who has variously been described as a social scientist, futurist, anthropologist, archaeologist and expert in Hebrew mysticism. Mr. Hurtak appeared first to introduce the music. Ms. Coltrane, he said, “expresses planetary humanity in its oneness”; the second half would feature “music for the emergent spirituality of the 21st century.”

With an orchestra of around 20 pieces, a 17-member choir and a tabla player, as well as the full band (minus Mr. Coltrane), the music amounted to fairly simple gospel-soul, agreeably modulating upward in whole steps; the religious lyrics were in Hebrew, Sanskrit and Aramaic.

For the second piece, a screen came down, and the audience was shown an accompanying film — first of computer-enhanced pictures of the planets and the cosmos, then real clips of violence and atrocities, followed by scenes of war relief, peacemakers and religious devotees. This music was conceived with high aims — not just spiritual and cosmic, but as a kind of therapy — and presented in a secular concert hall rather than in a place of worship, it quickly diffused.

Mr. Coltrane returned for the finale and apex: “Acknowledgement,” the first part of John Coltrane’s “Love Supreme” suite. He played as if he had been grown tired of waiting. His improvisation came out in long, speedy, syncopated bursts; for a stretch, the music narrowed down to a long passage with Mr. DeJohnette alone. This didn’t at all mimic the groove of his father’s band; there were more sharp edges and funk in the gnashing duet.

When the band came back in, Ms. Coltrane joined the momentum, pushing her arpeggiated phrases more emphatically. It was just music, but here the crowd cheered hardest.

The final stop of Alice Coltrane’s tour, featuring Ravi Coltrane, Charlie Haden and Roy Haynes, is the Nob Hill Masonic Center in San Francisco on Nov. 4; sfjazz.org.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/24/arts/music/24alic.html?ref=arts

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