Hard Cover Edition. Alice Coltrane (1937–2007) was a composer, master of various musical instruments, improviser, spiritual leader, and wife of John Coltrane. Throughout her adult life, she worked within and combined a broad range of musical genres, including gospel, R&B, bebop, free jazz, Indian devotional song, and Western art music. She recorded more than twenty full-length albums for Impulse and Warner Bros. Her music speaks to her experiences as a child playing for church congregations in Detroit; the transcendent and mind-bending avant-garde improvisations she performed with her husband John Coltrane; and her religious pilgrimages to India.
When Monument Eternal was originally published in 1977, Alice Coltrane was living in Southern California and had recently become a swami, building and nurturing an alternative spiritual community. In these pages, she says that the book is “based upon the soul’s realizations in Absolute Consciousness and its spiritual relationships with the Supreme One.” Monument Eternal offers deep insight into Coltrane’s tremendous musical output, and shines a light on her transformation from Alice McLeod, Detroit church organist and bebopper, to sage thought leader Swami Turiyasangitananda. It also reflects the extraordinary fluidity of American religious customs in the mid and late-twentieth century.
Akashic’s long-awaited reissue of Monument Eternal includes a new foreword by Ashley Kahn.
“In her book, Alice Coltrane’s personal path—from darkness to light, from sacrifice to physical and spiritual well-being—is what matters most. That, and an abiding sense of discovery, divine bliss, and individual purpose: the idea of fitting into the matrix, of being part of the plan . . . Monument Eternal also brings to mind another John Coltrane parallel that deserves to be emphasized. As a universalist who—like Alice—grew up in the Black church, the saxophonist espoused more of a philosophy than a specific path on the 1964 spiritual self-declaration A Love Supreme.”
—Ashley Kahn, from the Foreword to the New Edition
“This slender volume—an archetypal account of wrestling with cosmic forces first published in 1977 and now reissued with a foreword by music journalist Ashley Kahn—offers an essential key to Coltrane’s often overlooked yet profound and fascinating life and work.”
—Booklist
“Monument Eternal is a singularly honest, insightful portrayal of a spiritual awakening. Alice Coltrane’s courage is not only evident in her life story but also here, in her choice to share her search for transcendence with the world.”
—Brandee Younger
“Monument Eternal relates, in meditation, the sacred dialogue between Mother Turiya and the Supreme Lord. It is a profound insight into her journey through severe austerities to divine enlightenment.”
—Sita Michelle Coltrane
“Great music lifts us off this plane of existence to a higher level of transcendence and love. Alice Coltrane is a sonic guru who here uses prose to help us understand her journey and show a path to join her there.”
—Nelson George, author of Where Did Our Love Go?: The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound
“In the past two decades, Alice Coltrane’s significance has been rightly elevated into the highest echelons of the jazz pantheon, where her influence is now often mentioned in the same breath as her husband’s.”
—Quietus
”In the ten years that followed [John Coltrane’s death], Alice Coltrane released about a dozen albums . . . many of them masterpieces that imagine a meeting point between jazz and psychedelic rock, gospel traditions and Indian devotional music . . .”
—New Yorker
