ELATION--ELEGANCE--EXALTATION:

Alice Coltrane, Jazz Artist and Spiritual Leader, Dies at 69 (BEN RATLIFF, 1/15/07, NY Times)

Ms. Coltrane lived in the Woodland Hills section of Los Angeles near the Sai Anantam ashram in Agoura Hills, which she had founded in 1983. Known as Swami Turiyasangitananda, Sanskrit for "the highest song of God," she was the guiding presence of the 48-acre ashram, set among the Santa Monica mountains, where 25 to 30 full-time residents study the Vedic scriptures of ancient India, as well as Buddhist and Islamic texts. [...]

As a pianist, her playing was dense with arpeggios that suggested the harp; the instrument had an important place in her life. One of her childhood heroes was the Detroit-based jazz harpist Dorothy Ashby, and she was later motivated to study that instrument by Coltrane, who loved its sound.

Raised in a musical family in Detroit, Ms. Coltrane played piano and organ for church choirs and Sunday school from age 7. As a young musician in Detroit, she was studying classical music and playing piano in jazz clubs, in a group including her half-brother, the bassist Ernie Farrow, and the trombonist George Bohannon.

In her early 20s she lived briefly in Paris, where she studied informally with the pianist Bud Powell, and was briefly married to the singer Kenny (Pancho) Hagood, with whom she had a daughter, Michelle. She returned to Detroit, playing in a band with her brother, and then moved to New York in 1962. A year later she met John Coltrane.

She was playing vibraphone and Powell-inspired bebop piano in a group led by the drummer Terry Gibbs at Birdland, on a double-bill with Coltrane's quartet. Coltrane was well established by the beginning of the 1960s, though she hadn't known about him for long before moving to New York; the first time she ever heard him, she said, was on the 1961 album "Africa/Brass."

They connected instantly; she moved in with him and traveled with the Coltrane band. By the summer of 1964 they had relocated from New York City to a house in Dix Hills, on Long Island. They married in 1965 in Juárez, Mexico, coinciding with Coltrane's divorce from his first wife, Naima Grubbs. By that time she and Coltrane had already had two of their three children together -- John Jr., who died in 1982, and Ravi, who by his 30s had become an acclaimed jazz saxophonist.