ALICE COLTRANE — Eternity (review)

Album · 1976 · Avant-Garde Jazz

3/5 · 2011-06-17
Sean Trane

Despite Alice’s supposedly transcendent album titles, her music is taking a rather stale or immobile direction, as she tends to repeat her formula endlessly over the course of the present and Transcendence. While I am all for freedom of expression and beliefs, one can’t help but be a tad annoyed by her “spiritual/philosophical proselytism”, especially in the repeated splattering over the course of her career. Indeed the extravagant and fantasy liner notes of the album can even add much cheesiness to the almost Taliban-like faith of hers. Don’t get me wrong, I still have major respect to the artiste, and she most certainly wasn’t alone in jazz & jazz-rock circles to preach her beliefs though her music. Recorded in autumn 75 after a lengthy silent period (except her Illuminations collaboration with Carlos Santana), she’s returned with a bunch of unusual collabs, and you’d have a hard time making comparisons with her earlier albums, since the only usual suspect is Charlie Haden. Among the bigger names present as well is Armando Peraza, but the others are (yet) unknown to me. Note also that she’s not on the Impulse! Label anymore but on the WEA subsidiary label Warner Bros for the next four albums.

In Eternity you’ll still find the usual Alice musical tics, such as the harp (sometimes solo as in Wisdom Eye), heavy-handed string arrangement (due to her classical formation), and her (fairly annoying) fixation over the Wurlitzer organ as well. Yup, you’ve understood that this writer doesn’t really appreciate the aggravation of seeing plastered all over a record the un-harmonious sound of that particular kind of organ. Well in some tracks that sound can be a bit more appropriate like the 11-mins Los Caballos, where the percussions lighten up the atmosphere and counterbalance the un-subtle sound of the Wurlitzer.

The flipside opens on the 9-mins+ Om Supreme suite, which could’ve been successful (she opts for the Rhodes) if she didn’t have the idea to have some senseless semi-incantations vocals, but avoid reading her liner-notes, where she mixes everything up and shows just how many light-years she still has to go to reach enlightenment. Actually, once the music segues into the incantations, it stops being interesting as well, but at least there is no Wurl. Morning Worship returns to a more familiar ground (Journey days), and the Wurl is not too intrusive. I was never impressed by jazzer’s attempt at revisiting classical masters’ works, and Stravinsky Rite Of Spring was certainly not the ideal piece for this album, as they inevitably went dissonant, which ruins the cohesion of the album.

Still an enjoyable album, if you can make abstraction of Alice’s religious mumbo-jumbo. And as an atheist, I can assure that appreciating the music on Eternity will not make you join a sect or find an implausible god. Either way, an Alice album can simply not be bad or poor, and there is plenty to enjoy if you know how to extract the good and “abstract” the less-good.