Thirty-three year-old Alice Coltrane met her late husband in 1963. They were married shortly thereafter and, in late 1966, she replaced McCoy Tyner on the piano in the John Coltrane Quartet. From the time of Alice's addition until the time of John's death in the late summer of 1967. Coltrane's recording activity was at a minimum; there was one live recording (Live at the Village Vanguard Again) in May. 1966, and two studio sessions (Expression and Cosmic Music) in early 1967. (In 1965 alone he had recorded seven albums.)

Those "non-productive" 18 months or so preceding John Coltrane's death were spent in an intense period of probing the various possibilities of musical expression; his house on Long Island had become a semi-arcanum of flutes, bells, gongs, saxophones and tape recorders. Given the fact that Alice was around him a lot of the time as an emotional and musical companion it's most highly probable that she knew more than anyone did or ever will know in which direction Coltrane's head was wafting during his last year. And in both word and music she's dedicated herself to the furtherance of his music.

Which, as we can tell by his last recorded legacies, was heading by leaps and bounds toward a more and more non-Western modus, a direction hinted at by him as far back as the early Sixties when he began his maffic voyages on the soprano sax and subsequent poco a poco slackening (along with many of his more avant-gardy cronies) fidelity to the diatonic scale. Which isn't to say that if John Coltrane were alive today his music would drift along these courses but, rather, that Alice Coltrane, as a composer/leader, has sprouted from one of the most intense, fertile x-ys imaginable.

And on Journey In Satchidananda she shows herself to be a far abler voyager than she's seemed on her two previous LPs. Pharoah Sanders, whose musical luminations are often of a (shall we say) half-baked nature (yes we shall) shows himself at his Tauhid/Meditations here on soprano; an executioner of fine taste and course, Sanders seems to fly over ever so lightly the webs and rivers of Alice's harp (and she's only been playing harp for five years) and piano at exactly the right moments and to exit again at exactly the right moments. And when Sanders is at the fore, as in "Isis and Osiris," Alice Coltrane's expressionistic keyboard sweeps and tonal cluster-bangs show she's no one to hide her head when up against someone operating outside of the realm of tempered pitch a tent here and get some sleep and tomorrow we'll head back. (RS 90)

NICK TOSCHES