Santanu Majumder: Devghali Beach, India

Jagadishwar / Alice Coltrane / Translinear Light Album (2004)

The above photo mixed with the above music.

From the award-winning photographer: “The Devghali Beach in Maharashtra, India, is a secluded beach, not visited by too many tourists and definitely not at night. I spent a whole night waiting for the Milky Way to come into position towards early morning. There is a cave on the cliff face accessible only during low tide, which was lit using an artificial light.”

From the writer: The music of Alice Coltrane’s final album before she passed away in 2007 is heard above in the 2004 Translinear Light album. Her best album in my mind. Perhaps appropriate for the final musical creation in her life. A summation of the years since her husband John Coltrane died in 1967. Since his death, she lived in the northern part of LA on an Ashram.

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The 1990s saw renewed interest in her work, which led to the release of the compilation Astral Meditations, and in 2004 she released her comeback album Translinear Light. Following a 25-year break from major public performances, she returned to the stage for three U.S. appearances in the fall of 2006, including a concert at Ann Arbor’s Hill Auditorium presented by University Musical Society of the University of Michigan on September 23, which would have been John Coltrane’s 80th birthday, and culminating on November 4 with a concert for the San Francisco Jazz Festival with her son Ravi, drummer Roy Haynes and bassist Roy Haynes and bassist Charlie Haden. 

Alice Coltrane died of resperatory heart failure at West Hills Hospital and Medical Center in suburban Los Angeles in 2007, aged 69.  She is buried alongside her husband John Coltrane in Pinelawn Memorial Park, Farmingdale, Suffolk County, New York.

The below is from her album created in 1965 and 1966 by Alice Coltrane released as Infinity.

Reviews

Stewart Smith wrote “By pairing her own music with her husband’s, Alice announced her intention to continue on the visionary path they had mapped out together…The results are fascinating and rather gorgeous, offering a glimpse where John might have gone next had he lived.” All Music reviewer Brian Olewnick wrote: “the ultimate result is an unusual and oddly attractive work. The juxtaposition of the fiery, very free playing of late Coltrane against the dreamy, consonant strings is seductively appealing and one might even make the argument that, given the increasing mystical proclivities of his later years and the presence of Eastern instruments in his ensemble, he may well have approved … Whatever problems the Coltrane ideologue may have with his wife’s embroideries, Infinity still deserves a place in his/her collection.”

And, listen to the below rendition of “Joy” from the Infinity album. One of my favorites. The beginning sounds of a Pied Piper, perhaps appropriately.