Alice Coltrane Transfiguration Vinyl Me, Please Edition

Why you'll love it...
Recorded live at a UCLA concert hall in April 1978, Coltrane plays piano and organ accompanied by Roy Haynes on drums and Reggie Workman on bass. The trio conjures both a universe and a universal consciousness; Coltrane has no qualms with the commingling of exhilaration and asceticism it demands of listeners. In fact, she demands that you come closer, to its tone and to your natural self.

What this feels like in one aspect is Black music’s Bonnie and Clyde fantasy realized. What if we escape from mundane language and commune fully in these codes of light and frequency? It doesn’t have to be strange or timid. What if we pragmatically exceed ourselves and gather in silhouette as light bodies, here, on stage in plain sight?

Alice and John were both fugitives from received values and ideas that felt too limiting, and their shared refuge was this sound that can only culminate in the spirit displacing and becoming the body through a series of collective gestures made both into song and a live ritual as is this album. There are very few pieces in the so-called American Songbook with stakes this high and encompassing in their insistence on transformation. One is John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, another, Transfiguration.