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California Festival Excursions: Alice Coltrane with Strings The California Festival launches this month with more than two weeks of concerts from 95 arts organizations across the state that spotlight the Golden State as a home of new and trailblazing creativity. Online, California Festival Excursions collects writings and audio features from a range of celebrated authors that explore stories of that creative history—from avant-garde composer Henry Cowell to the early days of the San Francisco Tape Music Center to electroacoustic pioneer Maggi Payne. Andy Beta explores a pivotal moment in Alice Coltrane’s career that happened shortly after she moved to California. To read the full story, listen to examples, and explore more features, visit cafestival.org/excursions. When Alice Coltrane relocated Beverly Hills and the Pacific from Dix Hills to California in Ocean, The Village had served the early 1970s, her solo work as a Masonic temple for decades was transformed. In her mind’s before it was taken over, first by eye, Coltrane knew just how the a Bible Institute, and then later music should sound: a blend of by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. incandescent jazz and whirling The Maharishi transformed it into strings that–when their tonalities the West Coast nerve center for all came together–would suggest Transcendental Meditation, and the divine. But she couldn’t figure it’s said that the Beatles used to out just where to make the cut meditate in the large auditorium on the studio tape. And neither on the first floor. Now it was a could her producer, Ed Michel. It proper recording studio, which was early July 1972 and Coltrane would serve as the birthplace for had recently moved her family everything from Steely Dan’s Aja from Dix Hills on Long Island to Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk. to California, first to Encino before settling in “THE LORD TOLD MOTHER HE Woodland Hills.
I regarded myself as the Charlie Parker of the razor blade; I could do impossible edits. But I just broke my back on that one and couldn’t make it work,” Ed Michel told Down Beat.
“I’ll go home and meditate on it,” Coltrane told her longtime producer, and left for the day. When she arrived at the studio the next morning, the solution was in hand, as Michel recalled, recounting Coltrane’s own words: “I meditated on it, and I got some help from Bach and The Father”– which is how she always referred to her husband John after his passing– WOULD MEET HER IN CALIFORNIA.” “and Mr. Stravinsky. Mr. Stravinsky said, And now Alice was in —Sita Michelle Coltrane ‘Cut it here.’” Michel a Los Angeles studio, Alice was in the studio with her remembered the astonishing trying to achieve this holy sound. trio (bassist Charlie Haden and result: “I said, it’s impossible. It She was booked for the entire drummer Ben Riley) and a platoon will never work. But I cut it there week at The Village Recorder, of strings: twelve violinists, six and it worked perfectly.” With a most auspicious studio space, violists, and seven cellists. They the ghosts of Bach, Coltrane, putting together the album that had just recorded her version and Stravinsky guiding her, Alice would be a watermark of spiritual of Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird, Coltrane attained the sound she jazz, Lord of Lords. It would be a ballet he had first written in had long been seeking. Coltrane’s seventh solo album in 1910 and that she presented as as many years. And it would be the Find out what happens next at a compact six-minute dervish of last album she would record for cafestival.org/excursions. sound and vertiginous strings. Impulse Records. And yet, the marriage between California Festival Excursions is Built by Freemasons in 1922 on jazz trio and orchestral strings presented as part of the LA Phil Santa Monica Boulevard, almost still sounded off. “There was an Insight initiative, which is generously smack-dab in the middle between edit that needed to be made, and supported by Linda and David Shaheen. PERFORMANCES MAGAZINE 17
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