LOS ANGELES, USA, January 14, 2007: Alice Coltrane, the jazz performer and composer who was inextricably linked with the adventurous musical improvisations of her late husband, saxophonist John Coltrane, has died. She was 69. Coltrane died Friday at West Hills Hospital and Medical Center, according to an announcement from the family’s publicist. She had been in frail health for some time and died of respiratory failure. Though known to many for her contributions to jazz and early New Age music, Coltrane, a convert to Hinduism, was also a significant spiritual leader and founded the Vedantic Center, a spiritual commune now located in Agoura Hills. A guru of growing repute, she also served as the swami of the San Fernando Valley’s first Hindu temple, in Chatsworth. For much of the last nearly 40 years, she was also the keeper of her husband’s musical legacy, managing his archive and estate. Her husband, one of the pivotal figures in the history of jazz, died of liver disease July 17, 1967, at the age of 40.
She was born Alice McLeod in Detroit on Aug. 27, 1937, into a family with deep musical roots. Anna, her mother, sang and played piano in the Baptist church choir. Alice began her musical education at age 7, learning classical piano. Her early musical career included performances in church groups as well as in top-flight ensembles. Early albums under her name, including “A Monastic Trio,” and “Ptah the El Daoud,” were greeted with critical praise for her compositions and playing.
Through the 1970s, she continued to explore Eastern religions, traveling to India to study with Swami Satchindananda, the founder of the Integral Yoga Institute. Upon her return she started a store-front ashram in San Francisco but soon moved it to Woodland Hills in 1975. Located in the Santa Monica Mountains since the early 1980s, the ashram is a 48-acre compound where devotees concentrate on prayer and meditation. Known within her religious community by her Sanskrit name, Turiyasangitananda, Coltrane focused for much of the last 25 years on composing and recording devotional music such as Hindu chants, hymns and melodies for meditation. She also wrote books, including “Monumental Eternal,” a kind of spiritual biography, and “Endless Wisdom,” which she once told a Times reporter contained hundreds of scriptures divinely revealed to her.