Andy Beta kept waiting for a full biography on Alice Coltrane to come out. He waited for months, then years, for it to materialize, but that moment never arrived. Eventually, he realized that if no one else would pen Coltrane’s biography, maybe he could be the one to do it. Having written about her in various capacities (including an obituary for a Detroit outlet), Beta seemed like a great candidate, though he was reluctant to admit that at first. He initially proposed a book about the intersection of music and spirituality, but it was going nowhere. At the suggestion of his editor, he modified the book into a proper biography on Coltrane, who, along with her husband John, was one of the focal points of his book proposal’s sample chapters.
But, similar to how Coltrane herself transcended the physical plane through astral projection and dayslong meditation, Beta’s book transcends biography as a form. Cosmic Music: The Life, Art, and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane presents the jazz musician in her variegated totality. He traces the trajectory of the young girl from Detroit who won the local spelling bee; the woman who mastered the piano and became enmeshed in the bebop jazz scene; the bandleader and virtuosic harpist who performed at Carnegie Hall less than a year after picking up the instrument; and the spiritual soul who would learn the tenets of Hinduism and adopt the name Turiyasangitananda (the Transcendental Lord’s Highest Song of Bliss). Part non-fiction romance, part jazz history, part biography, and part religious studies text, Beta’s book is a highly detailed, comprehensive look into the life of one of jazz’s most important figures.
I’ve written about her a bunch over the years. I did a Pitchfork review for the print version. I think that was 2015. It was weird because I actually realized I wrote an obituary for her in 2007 for the Detroit weekly. I didn’t even know I had done that, which was bizarre.
It’s hard to remember a time when you were busy enough and had enough work in alt-weeklies and print magazines and websites. I’ve done this for a while, so there’s an act of forgetting all the stuff you’ve done and all the records you reviewed, But I’d written this article in 2015, and at the time, I was just like, “Man, I cannot wait for a full biography on her to come out,” because there was only one book, and it was really good, but it was short and meager, and I felt like there was so much more. I’m still in a little bit of disbelief, to be like, “Wow, I wrote that book,” like it’s kind of a weird fulfillment. I was very hesitant. I had pitched, actually, a book earlier about music and spirituality. I wrote the proposal, wrote sample chapters, and it was really going nowhere. I had a chapter on John and Alice, and one of the editors that said no was like, “Would you consider writing a biography on her?” My response was, “No, I don’t think I’m the person to do that.”
Six to eight months later, I came to terms with it. I knew some of the people at the ashram, and had relationships with them, and talking to people and other writers, I was like, “Maybe there is a way to tell this story.” It really started in earnest in 2023, and I did about two years of research on it. Right around the same time, I lost my day job. [I was] researching and floundering in unemployment and trying to find work. I got to a point where I was like, “I think I just need to start writing. I’ve done as much research as I can.” I just bore down and started writing it in September 2024 and turned in the book in March 2025.
Wow, that’s a pretty quick turnaround. Did you just wake up every morning, write all day, and then go to bed?
It was very much, you know, you wake up, you get your kid to school, and you distract yourself. And then I would get to the writing of it, and then at 3:30 I’d have to stop and go walk to pick up my daughter from school. When I was writing, it was very productive. I try to tell other writers that it’ll probably never be that easy again. But I put all the notes together, and I was just waiting. I had done all the research, and I was culling everything, and I kept holding out hope that I would get some support from the family, or they would help with some stuff, or certain interviews would come through. I hit a point where I was like, “I’m not just going to be waiting. I’d rather be moving toward this goal.” It was really intense. When I turned it in, my editor and my agent were like, “You know, you’re not supposed to hit the deadline. The whole point is you kick it six months down the road. Dude, you hit the deadline; we weren’t expecting that.”
Tell me a little bit more about how you got into Alice’s music itself. Where do you remember first encountering her work?
I was working at a health food store, and I had a co-worker who was in vitamins and supplements. I must have said something about John Coltrane, because at that point I knew his work a little bit. And then he was like, “Oh, you’ve got to check out Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananda.” This would have been when it came out on CD, so 1997. My first thought was, “Wow, what a talented music family, like even his sister made jazz music.” And then I was like, “Oh, I guess it’s his wife.” I still own the CD, so it’s made it through how many moves and boxes. It was just really strange, because the kind of jazz that I was into was very noisy jazz, very free, very atonal and loud. I’m really struck by the idea that this guy was like, “You should check this out. It’s really beautiful.” I don’t think I was looking for beautiful music at the time. I didn’t understand what it was, but it planted a seed. That was also at a time where you didn’t really see her records. I don’t think most of the other stuff had been reissued. I think it was years later before I even realized that she’d made another album. I feel the same way about Pharoah Sanders. You see Karma, and then it was years later before I’m like, “Oh, he made, like, 15 records.” It’s not like you went to Tower Records and there are 12 Alice Coltrane CDs sitting there. They weren’t even reissued.
The research you’re pulling from was probably hard to find online, the web archive being what it is. How did you find all the newspaper clippings and details about her life that seemed to be pretty difficult to pin down? I’m guessing you spent a lot of time at libraries.
When I started, that was really daunting. There’s really not a lot out there. I did research at Rutgers Jazz Studies. I did research at the Schomburg in Harlem and the New York Public Library Performing Arts Library. I would get through it in an afternoon. It would be like a very slim folder of stuff. Originally the thought was like despairing, like, “Oh god, there’s nothing here.” But then I was like, “It’s also finite, and I can find everything there is because it’s not reams and reams and reams of stuff.” There was just not a lot out there. I was awestruck by newspapers.com and being able to go into the Black newspapers of Detroit and find all this stuff. I’m just astonished at the amount of stuff I could find that way and being able to go back 80 years in time. The community newspaper was able to tell me that she won a spelling bee at her school, and this is the word that she won with, and it’s an article in the newspaper. She has her picture in the Detroit Tribune. This big U.S. city is also small enough that you get some of these details.
Another one is I can see this recital she performed at the church, and here’s a list of the songs that she played. It was just like, “Wow, I can trace the songs that she learned in the classical canon and these obscure 19th-century pieces, and she could play them on piano.” That was foundational. One of the things I needed to do with the book was establish and counteract the prevailing narrative that she was just this woman who married the right man. In my research, I found a lot of those reviews of just like, “She doesn’t know what she’s doing; she can’t swing; she can’t play; she doesn’t have talent; she just married John Coltrane, and that’s how she got to where she is.” On the contrary, [the research shows that] she’s playing gospel and playing church music in Detroit during the Golden Age of Gospel. She can play bebop. There’s not a lot of hacks who can play bebop piano. You really have to know what you’re doing to play with these people. So it was really important to me to find all this evidence for her as a skilled gospel pianist. She also knows classical music.
She seemed like a very diligent and disciplined musician, given your stories of her practicing pretty much all day at the piano, and then her approaching the harp the same way, and then to see those dismissive reviews is pretty jarring.
It was really fascinating to think about. John passed away in 1967. This harp shows up. She’s never really played harp before. And then by Easter 1968, she’s playing harp at Carnegie Hall. That was less than eight months of studying harp.
She seemed to master things very quickly.
She did, and I started getting these stories about all these other things that she was mastering, like writing orchestral arrangements in a six-month period, or learning Sanskrit, or singing a song in ancient Egyptian. And no one even knows what she’s singing. How did she learn ancient Egyptian? I think there’s a story of her at the ashram, and she figures out how to build this bridge over this stream that’s on the land. This idea that she, in her spiritual practice and her meditation, can tap into this like greater knowledge… it’s hard to explain. Even in piecing the stories together, it’s almost bewildering to believe. But then you look at the body of work and you’re like, “She had something.” I don’t know what I can learn in six months. I don’t know what you can learn in six months. But to learn that dead language, to design a bridge, to write an orchestral arrangement, I don’t think there’s any amount of watching YouTube that will get me there in six months.
It seems like she applied that diligence to other aspects of her life, too, like spirituality and fasting. Where do you see her spirituality praxis and her music intersecting?
It is the centerpiece. There was a certain point in writing the book, probably about two-thirds of the way in, and I sort of hit a spot where I’m like, “This is no longer a music biography.” It kind of falls away. She stopped recording for a label in the late ‘70s, and then from that point on, I felt like the book really sort of changed. I’m stuck having to use the musical biography framing because that’s what got me to this point. But then there’s really a certain point where I’m like, “This isn’t going to quite capture what’s going on from here on out because she’s transcending this, and she’s in this other realm in her life.”
But at the same time, for me, it’s also a full-circle moment: She started off playing organ in the church in Paradise Valley, Detroit. If she had been a generation before, that would have been her whole life, right? She would have just always been the organist in the church. She would have never been able to get out of that and do all the things that she got to do if she was born in the early 20th century. That would have been her lot. She traveled the world, she played music all over the world, and then she comes back, and the last decades of her life are spent every Sunday playing music in the church, except it’s her church.
I kind of made that observation, like the music biography almost transitions into this religious studies text, and that’s because she ends up devoting her entire being to her spirituality. Do you feel like your initial pitch on making a book about music and spirituality guided your research for the final third of the book?
It made writing the book really interesting, because it’s split into four parts and each part ends up being a very different kind of story. So it has a jazz history/civil rights aspect in the first part, and then it’s a love story. And then it’s one woman’s triumph, and then it’s almost a story of a saint or a story of a holy figure. That was the challenge throughout: recognizing when everything is shifting in the book and making sure to adjust to it accordingly.
Why do you think she was so drawn to the spiritual realm?
I mean, she grew up on it. When you read these stories of saints and they have these visions as a child or they hear God’s voice, that’s the defining characteristic of them, right? In 100 years, it will maybe even just be a footnote that she made music along the way. Because she’s this religious figure, I think about Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, the Ethiopian nun who made these records in 1970 but then, for the next 50 years of her life, she’s just a nun at a monastery. The footnote’s amazing, that music’s amazing, but at the same time, it becomes really secondary to the spiritual life of this person. In the book, [Coltrane’s] experiencing astral projection as a child, or she falls off a car and feels this hand guide her down, or stuff like that. This could just be a story of a religious figure, not so much a musical figure.
But it’s also where those two things inform each other. Now that you’ve written this book, how do you hear her music differently?
It is very different. I was out somewhere the other day, andJourney in Satchidananda came on, and I’m almost grabbing something because I’m so overcome by it. I can feel so much in it now that it’s all-consuming and so powerful that it just can’t stay in the background in that way. I’ve been thinking about it now, because I’m trying to put together a listening event for it. I find that, when I play her music, it’s really hard to transition into something else, because the spiritual presence of it is so profound. It’s so clear to me that everything is a dramatic step down from that. I almost have to wait five or ten minutes to feel like, “OK, now I can maybe go into something else.” When it ends, I just have to be in silence for a while because I can’t just go, “Oh, now I want to listen to this CD,” or, “Let me check out this new song on Bandcamp.” It’s so jarring, like when you leave church and you can’t immediately go to the mall or what have you. You have to resettle yourself. I can’t really go out of the church and then go to a video game arcade.
That’s how I feel at certain points when the credits roll on a movie that really affected me. Or, if I listen to an album or read a book that really moves me. You have to sit with it for a second.
It is important to let it be. Journey in Satchidananda is just so moving, and there’s so much depth to it that I really am overcome when I hear it. Yet, at the same time, I also feel like it doesn’t wear itself out. I wrote about Universal Consciousness recently. I’ve listened to it 1,000 times. If I put it on, it’s brand-new. It’s like I’ve never heard it. It’s so intense. It doesn’t really lend itself to familiarity. There’s always something else to it when you go back to it.
Until relatively recently, and you talk about this a bit in the book too, Alice Coltrane was not really part of the “canon.” Now that she has been canonized, do you see her influence or her legacy reflected in today’s culture? Where do you see her impact the most?
I feel like that’s really still evolving and developing, and I think the end of the book is really the beginning of it. Listening to music in the 2000s, I think a lot of that even helped me to contextualize it, like hearing Björk and Radiohead and these artists who were already coming to a better understanding of what she was doing, using classical elements, using electronics, using these aspects to make this music that’s not beholden to any one thing. I like these reverential aspects to it, in a way. But I also like thinking about artists who aren’t fully beholden to what she’s doing but just taking her trailblazing spirit and being like, “OK, now I know I can be fearless and make this thing that maybe people aren’t going to understand right now, but I know at some future point it’s going to make sense for them.”
Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, NME, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City.
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