The Palm Springs Women’s Jazz Festival honored composer, pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane (1937-2007) with its 2021 Jazz Master Award, presented to Michelle Coltrane, daughter of Alice and John Coltrane.

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 “The breathtaking music of Alice Coltrane has the power to stop listeners in their tracks and guide them to another realm of consciousness. With gentle plucks of a harpsichord, she whisks listeners away on a musical journey punctuated by the haunting key chords and deep bass notes of her Wurlitzer organ, as a steady accompaniment of strings and percussion flow in and out of her densely packed symphonic scores.”  Colony Little, Artnews, 2/7/2025

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Serene and soft-spoken, the late Alice Coltrane carried a regal disposition—a sphingine, ethereal air that infused her music and foreshadowed her repute as a true spiritual leader. Widowed in 1967 at the age of 29, she emerged from the shadow of one of jazz’s greatest impresarios to forge her own formidable legacies in music and devout practice. She didn’t achieve the dazzling celebrity that her husband did, but it didn’t matter. For her, there was a far more important calling than fame.

 

Jazz musician, composer, devotional leader, and muse to her husband, John Coltrane—one of the greatest musicians in American history—Alice Coltrane is once again being drawn into the light, this time in Alice Coltrane: Monument Eternal, a new exhibition at The Hammer Museum at UCLA that aims to both spotlight and contextualize a woman who, through very different tools—the piano, the harp, and meditation—melded the melodious and the mystic.

 

“I think of her as one of the spearheads of when we think of free jazz, or spiritual jazz,” says Erin Christovale, the cofounder of the global experimental film program Black Radical Imagination, who curated the show with the blessing of the Coltrane estate. “She really is just such a unique figure in that world. And she’s a woman, and a Black woman. So all of those things felt really important to me.”

 

The best part of the exhibition is undoubtedly Coltrane’s music. As you wander through the galleries, it follows you everywhere. Her jazzy bhajans, transcendental hymns, and Sanskrit mantras dive-bomb in and out of one another, a playful game of musical tag. The exhibition has an almost bespoke feel, rousing a quiet elegance that evokes a sacred space. While it aims to allow us to know Coltrane better, she clearly had other ideas, wanting the focus to be on our own communions—with music, with nature, with god, and with each other. Even in a showcase like this, she remains a slightly distant and enigmatic cipher, her music a mix of urgent, soothing, intersecting rhythms that asks us to draw our own conclusions, make our own judgments. Which is, of course, how it should be. After all, isn’t that what great jazz does?

 wmagazine,by Michael Callahan, Feb. 12, 2025

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Alice Coltrane: Monument Eternal                                                                                         
On view Feb. 9, 2025 through May 4, 2025. The Hammer Museum,
10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles; 310-443-7000, 
https://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/2025/alice-coltrane-monument-eternal

 

Who Was Alice Coltrane? A New Exhibition Honors an Icon 
https://www.artnews.com/art-news/artists/who-was-alice-coltrane-jazz-musician-why-so-important-1234731847/

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The John & Alice Coltrane Home                                                  
https://thecoltranehome.org/alice-coltrane/                                
https://thecoltranehome.org/alice-coltrane-documentary/

 

Composer: Alice Coltrane (1937-2007) 
https://www.musicbywomen.org/composer/alice-coltrane/

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5 Mnutes That Will Make You Love Alice Coltrane 
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/07/arts/music/alice-coltrane-jazz-music.html

 

Universal Consciousness: The Spiritual Awakening of Alice Coltrane 
https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2016/05/universal-consciousness

 

On Alice Coltrane                                                                                             
https://granta.com/on-alice-coltrane/

 

Alice Coltrane: Artist Muse and Sonic Healer     
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/arts/design/alice-coltrane-hammer-museum.html

Her last studio album  Petite Afrique (Sony 2017) was written as a song cycle about the African immigrant experience in the midst of Harlem’s gentrification in New York City and won the 2018 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Jazz Album. Petite Afrique is the highly anticipated follow-up to Somi's major label debut The Lagos Music Salon (Sony 2014) which was inspired by an 18-month creative sabbatical in Lagos, Nigeria and features special guests Angelique Kidjo and Common landed at #1 on US Jazz charts.  Both albums were nominated for ECHO Awards in Germany for Best International Jazz Vocalist.  

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Closely mentored by the legendary trumpet player Hugh Masekela, Somi’s live performance was described by JazzTimes magazine as “the earthy gutsiness of Nina Simone blended with the vocal beauty of Dianne Reeves,” while Billboard exclaims that she’s “all elegance and awe… utterly captivating.” 

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Recently venturing into theater, Somi was named a 2019 

Sundance Theater Fellow for her original musical about the great South African singer and activist Miriam Makeba.  The premiere production was shut down days before opening due to COVID-19.

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Somi is a Soros Equality Fellow, a USA Doris Duke Fellow, a TED Senior Fellow, an inaugural Association of Performing Arts Presenters Fellow, a former Artist-in-Residence at Park Avenue Armory, UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance, The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and Baryshnikov Arts Center.  She is also the founder of Salon Africana, a boutique arts agency and record label that celebrates the very best of contemporary African artists working in the music and literary arts. Also celebrated for her activism, Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon asked Somi to perform at the United Nations’ General Assembly in commemoration of the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.  She was also invited to perform at Carnegie Hall alongside Hugh Masekela, Dave Matthews, and Vusi Mahlesela in celebration of South African democracy. 

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Somi and her band continue to perform at international venues and stages  around the world.  In her heart of hearts, she is an East African Midwestern girl who loves family, poetry, and freedom.

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www.somimusic.com