Musical bliss: the London jazz festival pays tribute to Alice and John Coltrane

Ten years after her death, the LJF climaxed with concerts recreating the ecstatic, devotional music heard in Alice Coltrane’s ashram, and the cosmic free jazz of her saxophonist husband It seems astonishing now, but Alice Coltrane’s music was not always taken seriously. Jazz histories didn’t mention her, and the gatekeepers of the jazz canon would often sneer at what they regarded as her patchouli-scented, orientalist exotica; her soft-headed dabbling in Indian and African them