Mystery-Saint Goes Thru the Looking Glass with Alice C.

Last night I bought another Alice Coltrane album. One of the online reviewers of it called it a piece of crap made by somone living off their famous husband's name. The album is actually amazing so either the opinion held by that reviewer about Alice is so strong it has stopped them from really being able to HEAR that album or their sense of taste is off and they actually think their ears would prefer that Katy Perry style canned sexy robot music everyone is making now. SYNTH POP IS DEAD!

 I have noticed this phenomenon before; the inability to hear Cosmic Music and believe you me, Alice's is Cosmic Music. It contains dissonance and polyrythmic elements and it resolves between tension and release, it beautifully reflects what Heraclitus called the Hidden Harmony, which as we know is always better than the obvious.If listeners are still putting Alice in a kind of Yoko Ono box now (and I love Yoko Ono) imagine what it was like for her in the male-dominated jazz world right after her insanely talented husband had passed away...

I can understand what puts people off, Journey to Satchidananda, while her best album, does with it's cover of Alice in Sanyassin orange robes and liner notes (Satchidananda was her guru at the time) seem to paint her in a vaguely "guru-obsessed" and flakey light, but those ideas are squashed by the music. This is music from a gentle and spiritual but powerful soul, a soul of deep grooves and radiant sensuality, a soul searching who is not afraid to be gentle and expressive and bitter and sweet all at once... JUST LIKE LIFE IN THIS COSMOS.

The album Universal Consciousness is like a shell of dissonance protecting a photon of light of indescribable beauty. Ptah the El Daod contains more traditional jazz like elements but twists them into that unique spiritual drone groove that only Alice can create. The way she arranges the strings and other elements of the music is like nothing I have heard before. More like a painter than a normal composer.

On the album Transcendence Alice actually sings while accomanying herself with organ, creating a strange hybrid of hynotic spiritual chant and Cosmic Free Jazz.

On Transfiguration Alice's piano and organ solo's are like the speed of light peregrinations of the God particle...

 "Whenever a particle is confined to a small region of space it reacts to this confinement by moving around, and the smaller the confinement is, the faster the particle moves around in it"

So what was with our auditory-challenged reviewer? Today's canned music is killing the ability to HEAR. Just another someone listening for something that would comfort them and help them remain in their Matrix-slumber? Most music today is so limited in it's harmonic structure, so produced and Auto-tuned to within an inch of it's life, so bereft of adventureous melody or unique chord structure and so cribbed from the hits of the past that it is barely music. It's like the Cliff Notes of music. It's air tight, it's hermetically sealed, there is no way for SPIRIT to move. Alice's music can help with that, she can stretch those ears right open, she can help you learn to live with the Hidden Harmony...

Here is a quote from Cosmic Music expert Dane Rudhyar that fits Alice Coltrane's music the best:
"sequences of musical statements, each of which has a quasi-organic quality of it's own, a translucent seed of meaning. The plant is evoked by the seed, when the seed is seen by the eye of understanding - the symbolic organ of perception for the mind of wholeness."