Alice Coltrane was a pianist first, which matters because a lot of people know her mainly for the harp. But she came up as a classical pianist with real chops, and she brought that precision and discipline to everything she did later. In the early 1960s she was working as a session musician, playing behind singers and in orchestras, which was solid work but not where her head was. Then she married John Coltrane, and everything shifted. She stopped being a sideline presence and started making records that were unmistakably hers—albums that sounded like nothing else coming out at the time.

What she figured out, starting with records like Journey in Satchidananda (1971), was how to blend jazz improvisation with the sound world of Indian classical music and her own deep spirituality. The harp was key to this. It gave her a different vocabulary than the piano—more open, more resonant, less tempered. You'd have her playing these long, shimmering passages on harp while other instruments wove in and out, sometimes Pharoah Sanders on saxophone, sometimes just strings. It doesn't sound like chaos or self-indulgence, though. It sounds purposeful, like she knew exactly where the music needed to go.

Here's the thing: she wasn't trying to be experimental for the sake of it. She was genuinely interested in using music as a spiritual practice. You can hear that intention in every record. It's meditative without being boring, searching without being pretentious. The songs don't build toward climaxes or resolve neatly. They open up and expand, and you're supposed to sit with that feeling. It's closer to devotional music than to standard jazz, but it's still jazz in its bones—the improvisation, the interaction between players, the willingness to let things breathe and change.

She recorded a run of albums for Impulse! in the late 1960s and early 1970s that people still haven't fully caught up with. After that period she stepped back from the public eye, focusing on spiritual work and teaching. That retreat has made her easy to underestimate or dismiss—she's not one of those artists who kept pushing, kept innovating, kept releasing records. But those albums she did make stand completely on their own. If you want to hear what happens when someone takes jazz seriously as a spiritual practice, not just as entertainment or intellectual exercise, this is where to start.