John Coltrane/ Alice Coltrane: Cosmic Music.

Cosmic Music is an album that is seriously overlooked in the Coltrane catalog, mainly because of the Alice Coltrane and John Coltrane divide of the album.

After all, we are talking about just over 20 minutes of John, and the other 14 minutes or so, his wife Alice's first 2 recordings laid to tape at Impulse.

I can't find anything wrong with the 2 Alice tracks, "Lord Help Me Be" and "The Sun" these tracks were issued as bonus tracks for her Impulse album Monastic Trio reissue.

 The 2 longer John Coltrane tracks are "Reverend King" and "Manifestation".

 These tracks were recorded right after the departure of McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, and have the freer style. Drummer Rashied Ali is an all together different drummer than Elvin Jones, Ali's not as powerful, but he shades and accents in different ways, he is more subtle than Jones.

Alice is an underrated player, very bluesy, and I am talking about a stripped down Otis Spann piano Blues. Tyner was a Bud Powell disciple, I don't hear an ounce of Bud Powell in Alice's playing.

Sometimes I feel Jazz, and John Coltrane fans in particular have a Yoko Ono complex about Alice, (As if Alice broke up the classic quartet or something?)

 Many denigrate her work with Impulse and Warner Brothers, this is unfortunate of course, as every damn one of her impulses, and most of the other Warner Brothers albums are not only worth a listen, a few are stone classics....see Ptah The El Daoud and Joe Henderson's The Elements for proof. She basically invented the sub-genre of astral jazz.

Alice's brand of astral jazz, or space jazz if you will, is a unique sound, that combines many

Eastern styles along with blues and African music. The 2 John Coltrane tracks are a real forerunner to that style, a looser free jazz style with a Modal back drop.

The music is both relaxing and stirring at the same time. For me, that is a hallmark of the so called space/astral jazz.

 Tenor man Pharoah Sanders has made a living out of this style of music, Sanders also plays on Cosmic Music, He also delivers his first recorded piccolo solo on "Manifestation".

There has been plenty of confusion with the John Coltrane tracks on Cosmic Music: Rumors have persisted that these are abbreviated performance, and 15 to 20 minutes could be out there somewhere?

 I have a vinyl copy (pictured), and the entire length is only about 34 minutes, finally a new reissue is available with a tad cleaner sound, especially on bass, it's less muddy now.