Alice Coltrane’s ashram tapes, which nobody could buy

In the early 1980s, north of Los Angeles, Alice Coltrane founded the Sai Anantam Ashram and stepped away from concert halls. She did not step away from music. She recorded four tapes there — “Turiya Sings”, “Divine Songs”, “Infinite Chants” and “Glorious Chants” — and none of them reached a shop. They were handed to members of the community; the fourth appeared on CD.

Calling them home recordings would miss the point. There are synthesisers on these tapes, and organs, and the ashram choir. The chants arrive from two directions at once, gospel on one side and Indian tradition on the other, with the freedom of her avant-garde years sitting over the top of both.

The music has reached the world twice before, and cautiously both times. In 2018 Luaka Bop assembled the compilation “The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda”. In 2021 Impulse! released “Kirtan” — the first tape, “Turiya Sings”, with the synthesiser parts taken out. Voice and organ, nothing else.

That absence is what makes the new announcement interesting. For years the only official “Turiya Sings” was the one somebody had subtracted from. Matador now says it will restore her full mixes, artwork and running orders exactly as she left them. This is not an engineering footnote: the synthesisers were her decision, not a technician’s.

Her daughter Michelle Coltrane puts it plainly: “Artists never stop creating.” The tapes are promised on vinyl, CD, cassette and digital, with dates still to come. For forty years the only way to hear this music was to drive to the ashram and ask. Soon it will simply be on a shelf, and whether that changes anything is a question only the people who did the driving can answer.