This bold confidence impressed Bennie Maupin -a bass clarinetist who was mentored by Alice and later played on Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew album - after she returned to Detroit. And she spent much of her time studying with the seminal bebop pianist Bud Powell, who became a pronounced influence on her phrasing and approach while also emboldening her to take chances in the music. She divorced Hagood, Miki’s father, who was besieged by a drug habit. She became pregnant with her first child, Michelle, now known as Miki Coltrane. Their time in Europe was brief - less than a year - but consequential. In 1960 when she was 23, Alice married Kenneth “Pancho” Hagood, a renowned bebop scat singer eleven years her senior, before the couple relocated to Paris. At high school there was Marvin Gaye and the Gordy kids - the Gordy family had a store like a 7/11 down the block.” She used to earn a few dollars playing it and give it to my grandma, Annie McLeod. “There’s a picture of my mom in church next to this huge organ when she couldn’t have been more than 10 or 11 years old. “She was proud to say she was from Detroit,” says Alice’s eldest child and only daughter, Miki Coltrane. She played percussion in her high school marching band, self-taught the sidemen in her own jazz trio, and, whenever possible, tagged along with Farrow to hang out with national-caliber talents such as pianist Barry Harris, bassist Cecil McBee and saxophonist Joe Henderson.Īlice’s first working band was called The Premiers, who performed a blend of gospel, jazz and rhythm & blues and included trombonist George Bohanon, bassist Anthony Jackson and drummer Oliver Jackson, who would each go on to appear on dozens of records. Through her older half-brother Ernest Farrow, an in-demand saxophonist and later bassist, Alice learned the rhythm & blues spin Detroit’s musicians put on the modern language of bop. It was during these postwar years of her teens and early twenties that Detroit became the “motor city,” an industrial boomtown, ushering in what was referred to as a golden era in both gospel and bebop jazz. Alice described this service, and others like it, as “the gospel experience, musically, of my life!” Berkman, Alice was playing and vocalizing with the Lemon Gospel Singers in a church one day when “The Lord just completely swept through.” She describes worshipers falling out from the visitation, some being attended to by nurses while others were carried downstairs. According to a story she related to her biographer, Franya J. Her performances on piano and organ inspired the congregation to sponsor her music education at a community school.īy her mid-teens she was a prodigy, in demand to perform at other churches, including those that practiced the hand-clapping, foot-stomping call-and-response services more common in the south. At her request, Alice began receiving private piano lessons from a neighbor when she was seven. Olive Baptist Church in Detroit at a time when the city was an industrial hub first for the machinery of World War II and later as a car manufacturer during the economic boom of the postwar era. Her parents directed, played and sang in the choirs at Mt. And although it became a singular and generally underappreciated journey, there is some wonderful symmetry in her taking what had been a shared vision with John Coltrane further than anybody would have imagined.Īlice McLeod began absorbing a broad and vivid swath of music and religion at an early age. The most striking aspect of her biography is that she became a master musician and a spiritual guru in the same way, by carrying forth all her accumulated wisdom in a welcoming synthesis, rather than shedding, judging and discriminating her way to “growth” and “maturity.”Īlong this path, Coltrane transformed clichés like “generosity of spirit” and “universal consciousness” into practical implements and palpable goals through the evidence of her music and the abiding example of her devotion. John Coltrane, after all, was the most venerated and influential tenor saxophonist in the history of jazz music.īut the closer one examines the genuinely phenomenal life, music and spirit of Alice Coltrane, the more inevitable it seems that she will also someday receive her proper due. It was inevitable that the legacy of Alice Coltrane would long be obscured in the massive shadow cast by her husband.