ALICE COLTRANE — World Galaxy (review)

ALICE COLTRANE — World Galaxy album cover Album · 1972 · Avant-Garde Jazz Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
Sean Trane
Definitely one of Alice’s albums that defined and epitomize her sound better, World Galaxy is the first or second timeless oeuvre driven by her unstoppable search for spirituality, and at times, we can believe that she indeed reaches it on the present album.

Opening on the historical standard of her husband My Favourite Things giving one of the most original versions ever recorded of that timeless classic, is already stepping one foot in the intergalactic spaceship. Indeed armed with an organ, her harp and her future-signature string arrangements, Alice explodes her talents over the whole universe, not just the galaxy. The rest of the tracks on WG are all galaxies of their own, until the album closes on a spoken or recited homage to Trane’s most major oeuvre ALS, but this fan could’ve done without this.

Oludumare is an appreciable piece that tends to let Alice’s strings arrangements overtake everything and even saturate the eardrums, but the spell is strong enough to keep your ears riveted to your speakers. Turiyat is even more grandiose (read grandiloquent, as well) in the strings and only her harp seems to rival them. On the flipside, the 11-mins Satchidananda (see the album Journey To…) is more of the same as Turiyat, but segues into the ALS’s homage, with the afore-mentioned recited poem, before heading into a wild but tamed improv that should bring you home safely, but maybe not sanely. ERxcellent stuff.

Be warned that if you don’t like over-present strings, a signature of Alice, you should stay away from the present album, but also a big part of her discography of the 70’s. Actually the gatefold psychedelic album cover (courtesy of Peter Max) with the mention “With strings” up front. So if you’re in the mood for some far-out intergalactic symphonic travelling, this is the perfect album get started and escape from the solar system’s attraction. Be careful not to lose sight of our Milky Way though, because the music can bring you into unsuspected distant reaches of the universe without a guarantee to find your way home
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