Alice Coltrane – The Carnegie Corridor Live performance
(Impulse!. Album evaluate by Phil Johnson)

Recorded in 1971 at a profit for the Integral Yoga Institute and now launched in full for the primary time, The Carnegie Corridor Live performance is each an traditionally necessary doc and an eminently listenable recording stuffed with insistent grooves, remarkably highly effective enjoying and intense compositional depth. In brief, it’s in all probability important for anybody wishing to grasp the place jazz was then and the place it’s got to now. It inaugurates what’s billed as a yr devoted to Alice Coltrane by the label, in partnership with The John and Alice Coltrane House.

The discharge additionally comes at a second when Alice Coltrane (born Alice Lucille McLeod in Detroit in 1937, died Los Angeles, 2007) appears extra prescient than ever. The transcendent-sublime mode she pioneered, along with the late experiments of her husband John Coltrane and their colleague Pharaoh Sanders (who seems within the ensemble right here), have influenced everybody from Floating Factors to Matthew Halsall to even Paul Weller together with all the legacy of religious jazz, in addition to inspiring – together with the nice Dorothy Ashby – each jazz harp participant going. However the harp is barely half the story, if that, as Alice Coltrane was a pianist first, and her first concert-size harp a present from John Coltrane that was not delivered till shortly after his loss of life.

For the Carnegie Corridor live performance, which incorporates 4 compositions, she performed harp for the primary two numbers, each written by herself, and piano for the final two, each written by John Coltrane. The distinction between them is appreciable, with the ultimate two numbers, an epic ‘Africa’ that clocks in at nearly half-hour and ‘Leo’, the ultimate encore that adopted, producing essentially the most spirited free enjoying, with Alice pummelling the keyboard in a way someplace between McCoy Tyner (whom she changed within the John Coltrane Quartet) and Cecil Taylor.

The band is a narrative in itself, with two bassists (Jimmy Garrison and Cecil McBee), two drummers (Ed Blackwell and Clifford Jarvis, the latter a resident in Hackney earlier than his loss of life in 1999) and two saxophonists, the aforementioned Sanders and Archie Shepp, plus for the primary two compositions Kumar Kramer on harmonium and Tulsi Reynolds on tamboura. ‘Journey to Satchidananda’ – maybe her most celebrated tune, and the title monitor of what was on the time her newest album – opens the live performance and begins with a sort of double bass prologue, one plucked, one bowed, earlier than the acquainted loping riff kicks in, towards a delicate splash of cymbals and tamboura drone. It’s added to by a fantastically poised and gentle-sounding harp solo that might nearly be categorised as ambient, seconded by tootling flute and soprano sax from Sanders and Shepp. Principally, it’s heaven. ‘Shiva-Loka’, which follows, and which Impulse! have made accessible prematurely of the discharge, continues the eastern-sounding ambient mode, with Alice on harp enjoying these trademark swirling, rippling-water motifs that, whether or not orchestrated for strings or heard on harp alone, have turn into maybe her most recognisable sonic identification.

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After this, it’s time for the heavy mob, with ‘Africa’ and ‘Leo’ cueing in some extremely intense improvisations that includes full-on squawking and over-blowing from the horns. There are additionally prolonged drum and bass solos all through, that whereas all the time attention-grabbing, could be the motive why the live performance was not seen as a industrial sufficient product to launch prior to now. Higher late than by no means would appear to be the decision. You in all probability want The Carnegie Corridor Live performance.

The Carnegie Corridor Live performance, not beforehand accessible commercially, is launched on 22 March – ORDER HERE