“Oh Allah” accentuates the interaction between Alice’s Wurlitzer and the violins, conveying a preternatural sense of drift. Moderately than the 4 violinists getting into en masse, there’s a pure fraying to this in any other case elegant sound. The strings swap between a monolithic mass of sound and a tactile messiness that imparts a visceral, live-wire power. You’ll by no means mistake these strings as an try at Western classical, a buttoned-up Third Stream experiment, or the sort of subtle swinging fare of Charlie Parker With Strings.
The affect of Coltrane’s travels in India turns into most obvious on the second aspect of the album. “Sita Ram,” based mostly on a bhajan chant she heard whereas there, featured Tulsi’s tamboura, with Alice layering little plucked higher register harp filigrees and her incantatory organ atop it. The music appears to breathe, rising and falling in unmetered vogue, an approximation of the amoebic alap part in Indian classical music, with Clifford Jarvis’ intermittent snares, bells, and shakers replicating the supple rhythms of the tabla. It might stay in Alice’s repertoire, carried out in live performance and even showing in a brand new rendition on her 2004 comeback album, Translinear Mild.
By early 1971, “Hare Krishna” was nonetheless hardly ever heard outdoors of Tompkins Sq. Park or on the Haight. And when you might recite that chant atop the slow-moving melody when Alice’s organ enters, the piece quickly soars off right into a rarefied air. The violins convey the disembodied sensation of your physique cresting over a financial institution of clouds, with Tulsi’s tamboura, Jimmy Garrison’s bowed bass, and Alice’s organ supporting such flight, making for a elegant eight minutes of untethered sound. Skilled in the fitting way of thinking, it’s a downright transformative piece of music, as breathtaking as something Alice ever set to tape.
Over 50 years later, Common Consciousness stays an audacious assertion, as white-knuckled on the hundredth hear or your first. There’s nothing prefer it in jazz or classical music, an assured amalgam of the 2 that’s indebted to neither. Alice by no means settles or falls again right into a earlier sample or musical idea. She’s stressed as a seasoned mountain climber, revealing beautiful new vistas but looking forward to the subsequent peak. Common Consciousness could be the final album recorded on the Coltrane dwelling studio. Quickly, Alice would obtain a directive from the Supreme Lord to maneuver to California and set up an ashram there. The music itself turned a beacon to these attuned to its message.
A number of years after its launch, a younger religious seeker named Purusha Hickson was volunteering on the One Thoughts Temple, a non-denominational church in San Francisco impressed by John Coltrane’s music. In the future, whereas cleansing tables after a free meal service, an album enjoying within the background on the temple rose to the forefront of his thoughts. In his e-book Journey to Turiya, he described the feeling of listening to Common Consciousness for the primary time: “It was otherworldly. Ethereal. Cosmic…Pulsating celestial music flowed from the audio system.” As he gazed upon the photograph of Alice Coltrane contained in the gatefold, he had a divine realization: He knew that she knew. She was an enlightened being. Inside just a few months, Hickson would change into Coltrane’s first pupil at her ashram. Her time as a jazz musician and well-known widow was drawing down as Coltrane pivoted to her new function as a guru. In Common Consciousness, there’s area for all of those lives to co-exist.