ALICE COLTRANE — Transcendence (review)

ALICE COLTRANE — Transcendence album cover Album · 1977 · Avant-Garde Jazz Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Sean Trane
After a three-years silence (if you’ll except the Carlos Santana collaboration), Alice came back with a trio (quartet?) of albums in a rather short lapse of time (two years). I believe than she didn’t keep inactive at all, but was busy sorting out her late husband musical legacy, and issuing many posthumous releases. Most likely she got back tio her own career after setting a plan for a flood of Trane posthumous releases that would finally slow down at the turn of the decade. Anyway, the present is her second or third (second I believe) from that era, and you shouldn’t expect any of the usual suspects that were around for the early-70’s albums. Indeed, unlike the previous Eternity album, not even Charlie Haden is around, and the cast is completely different as well. Indeed Transcendence is recorded in May 77, with a slew of musicians from around the planet.

If the opening Radhe-Shyam returns to the older Alice music scheme (Indian-based) and the following Sanchara is a solo (well almost) harp piece, and the title track is again in the usual (well sort of, it is somewhat modified) Alice terrain, you’d guess that the album is a sort of business-as-usual release. But the flipside is drastically different, oblique-ing into African-soul-type music terrain, with many chants that come from the (then-) third world, none of which is my cup of tea, so I can’t possibly comment much on that side of the vinyl.

As with her other later-70’s album released on the Warner Bros label, it’s better not to expect anything resembling her tremendous earlier works. As long as you’re aware of that, you’ll be able to enjoy the present and others for what they are, and for this one in particular, a world/ethnic fusion music, mostly concentrating on Africana. Not exactly what I expect from Alice, though.

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