Alice Coltrane - Journey in Satchidananda

By 1971, Alice Coltrane had inherited John Coltrane's spiritual ambitions for jazz, and found her own language for them here. Named after her teacher, Swami Satchidananda, the album folds tanpura drones and Indian devotional music into Impulse!-era jazz, harp answering Pharoah Sanders' soprano sax rather than competing with it. It helped open American jazz to influences far beyond its borders and set a template ambient and spiritual jazz have returned to ever since. Rolling Stone later named it one of the 500 greatest albums ever made.

Alice Coltrane was a classically trained pianist and harpist who married John Coltrane in 1965 and played in his band during the last years of his life. After his death in 1967, grief and spiritual searching became inseparable from her music — she took up the harp, deepened her study of Indian philosophy, and began recording her own albums for Impulse!. Journey in Satchidananda, her fourth, sits at the point where all three of those threads meet. She later became a swami herself, running an ashram in California, and kept making music on her own terms until her death in 2007.