Alice described this service, and others like it, as “the gospel experience, musically, of my life!” Berkman, Alice was playing and vocalizing with the Lemon Gospel Singers in a church one day when “The Lord just completely swept through.” She describes worshipers falling out from the visitation, some being attended to by nurses while others were carried downstairs. According to a story she related to her biographer, Franya J. Her performances on piano and organ inspired the congregation to sponsor her music education at a community school.īy her mid-teens she was a prodigy, in demand to perform at other churches, including those that practiced the hand-clapping, foot-stomping call-and-response services more common in the south.
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At her request, Alice began receiving private piano lessons from a neighbor when she was seven. Olive Baptist Church in Detroit at a time when the city was an industrial hub first for the machinery of World War II and later as a car manufacturer during the economic boom of the postwar era. Her parents directed, played and sang in the choirs at Mt. And although it became a singular and generally underappreciated journey, there is some wonderful symmetry in her taking what had been a shared vision with John Coltrane further than anybody would have imagined.Īlice McLeod began absorbing a broad and vivid swath of music and religion at an early age. The most striking aspect of her biography is that she became a master musician and a spiritual guru in the same way, by carrying forth all her accumulated wisdom in a welcoming synthesis, rather than shedding, judging and discriminating her way to “growth” and “maturity.”Īlong this path, Coltrane transformed clichés like “generosity of spirit” and “universal consciousness” into practical implements and palpable goals through the evidence of her music and the abiding example of her devotion. John Coltrane, after all, was the most venerated and influential tenor saxophonist in the history of jazz music.īut the closer one examines the genuinely phenomenal life, music and spirit of Alice Coltrane, the more inevitable it seems that she will also someday receive her proper due. It was inevitable that the legacy of Alice Coltrane would long be obscured in the massive shadow cast by her husband.