Andy Beta on the Transcendence of Alice Coltrane
Music journalist Andy Beta presents his biography Cosmic Music, repositioning Alice Coltrane not as John Coltrane's widow but as a visionary musical genius of the 20th century.
Why we picked this
Alice Coltrane influenced electronic composers, jazz musicians, and devotional artists across fifty years—but she's still primarily known as someone's widow. Beta's biography fixes that.
For decades, Alice Coltrane’s legacy was mediated through her husband’s—she was the widow of John Coltrane, the keeper of his archive, the custodian. Andy Beta’s biography Cosmic Music makes the case, exhaustively and convincingly, that she was one of the great musical visionaries of the twentieth century in her own right: a harpist, pianist, composer, and spiritual teacher whose influence stretched from avant-garde jazz to Afrobeat to contemporary electronic music.
Beta is an award-winning music journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Pitchfork, and NPR. His research draws on interviews and archival materials to reconstruct an artistic life that has been systematically undervalued. Ayana Contreras, cultural historian, radio DJ, and archivist who hosts Soulful Strut on KUVO Jazz, joins him in conversation.
Part of the Chicago Humanities Festival’s Bridgeport festival day. At Co-Prosperity, a South Side cultural space that takes this event seriously.