“Oh Allah” accentuates the interaction between Alice’s Wurlitzer and the violins, conveying a preternatural sense of drift. Relatively than the 4 violinists coming into en masse, there’s a pure fraying to this in any other case elegant sound. The strings change between a monolithic mass of sound and a tactile messiness that imparts a visceral, live-wire power. You’ll by no means mistake these strings as an try at Western classical, a buttoned-up Third Stream experiment, or the sort of subtle swinging fare of Charlie Parker With Strings.
The affect of Coltrane’s travels in India turns into most obvious on the second facet of the album. “Sita Ram,” based mostly on a bhajan chant she heard whereas there, featured Tulsi’s tamboura, with Alice layering little plucked higher register harp filigrees and her incantatory organ atop it. The music appears to breathe, rising and falling in unmetered style, an approximation of the amoebic alap part in Indian classical music, with Clifford Jarvis’ intermittent snares, bells, and shakers replicating the supple rhythms of the tabla. It might stay in Alice’s repertoire, carried out in live performance and even showing in a brand new rendition on her 2004 comeback album, Translinear Mild.
By early 1971, “Hare Krishna” was nonetheless hardly ever heard exterior of Tompkins Sq. Park or on the Haight. And whilst you might recite that chant atop the slow-moving melody when Alice’s organ enters, the piece quickly soars off right into a rarefied air. The violins convey the disembodied sensation of your physique cresting over a financial institution of clouds, with Tulsi’s tamboura, Jimmy Garrison’s bowed bass, and Alice’s organ supporting such flight, making for a chic eight minutes of untethered sound. Skilled in the precise mind set, it’s a downright transformative piece of music, as breathtaking as something Alice ever set to tape.
Over 50 years later, Common Consciousness stays an audacious assertion, as white-knuckled on the hundredth pay attention or your first. There’s nothing prefer it in jazz or classical music, an assured amalgam of the 2 that’s indebted to neither. Alice by no means settles or falls again right into a earlier sample or musical idea. She’s stressed as a seasoned mountain climber, revealing attractive new vistas but waiting for the subsequent peak. Common Consciousness could be the final album recorded on the Coltrane residence studio. Quickly, Alice would obtain a directive from the Supreme Lord to maneuver to California and set up an ashram there. The music itself grew to become a beacon to these attuned to its message.
Just a few years after its launch, a younger non secular seeker named Purusha Hickson was volunteering on the One Thoughts Temple, a non-denominational church in San Francisco impressed by John Coltrane’s music. In the future, whereas cleansing tables after a free meal service, an album enjoying within the background on the temple rose to the forefront of his thoughts. In his e-book Journey to Turiya, he described the feeling of listening to Common Consciousness for the primary time: “It was otherworldly. Ethereal. Cosmic…Pulsating celestial music flowed from the audio system.” As he gazed upon the picture of Alice Coltrane contained in the gatefold, he had a divine realization: He knew that she knew. She was an enlightened being. Inside just a few months, Hickson would turn out to be Coltrane’s first pupil at her ashram. Her time as a jazz musician and well-known widow was drawing down as Coltrane pivoted to her new position as a guru. In Common Consciousness, there’s area for all of those lives to co-exist.
