Alice Coltrane – Reflection on Creation and Space album art
Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda is the most famous musician you’ve never heard of. She was an extraordinarily gifted composer, arranger, producer, and musician. Classically trained as a pianist since the age of 7, she was a multi-instrumentalist who played the harp, organ, marimba, and synthesizer in addition to the piano.
She had an extensive, almost encyclopedic knowledge of music and theory; in a 1981 radio interview with Marian McPartland, A.C.T. instantly recognizes Chopin’s “Prelude No. 20” after hearing only two notes of it, then commences to play it in full from memory. She was a band leader and well-known recording artist central to “The New Thing” (or free jazz) movement at a time when women were rarely included as members of a band, let alone leaders of a band.
Her list of achievements goes on: her recording career, both commercial and independent, was prolific and spanned decades; she founded her own record label under which she both produced and released posthumous recordings of her late husband, John Coltrane; she wrote four books; and later in life, she was the swamini (or spiritual leader) of an ashram.
Reflection on Creation and Space (a Five Year View) is a compilation album released on Impulse! in 1973.
