Luaka Bop will release a collection of recording made by Alice Coltrane during the 1980s, having established a 48-acre spiritual retreat outside of Los Angeles called Sai Anantam Ashram. You can listen to one of the tracks featured on the compilation, called ‘Om Shanti’ above.
Having set up the retreat, she quietly set out recording music there for a number of years after, releasing it within the community in the form of private press cassette tapes. This compilation, entitled World Spirituality Classics, Volume 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, marks the first release of that music outside of those original pressing and it will arrive on May 5.
The collection of work includes the first recordings of Alice singing on her own music, in a catalogue that had begun around two decades before she set out work on these recordings. The tracks featured on this release were all recorded between 1982 and 1995, and are lifted from four different casssettes.
The release comes after Luaka Bop teamed up with Alice’s children to find the original master tapes in the Coltrane archive. They were re-mastered by engineer Baker Bigsby, who oversaw the original recording sessions. The record will also come accompanied with a number of interviews with those who knew Alice best, and it comes in a year that would have been Alice’s 80th birthday.
