"In the music she created for her religious community, Coltrane – unsurprisingly – did not simply mimic Indian tradition when it came to singing praises to Hindu deities at her ashram's mandir, or temple. She created something wholly new, and completely her own. The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda is a powerful and indelibly personal mix of the soulful gospel cadences that Coltrane had been steeped in since her church-going childhood in Detroit, and the brimming, collective energy of the call-and-response kirtans. At the ashram's Sunday services, "She would start playing music and everyone else would join in and they might go two, three, four hours of doing that," recalls Coltrane's nephew, musician and producer Flying Lotus (birth name Steven Ellison), in this collection's extensive liner notes. The songs on this compilation are culled from four recordings Coltrane made in the 1980s and '90s on a series of self-released cassettes that were meant primarily for an audience of her followers. (The label for this reissue, Luaka Bop, calls it the first volume in a series called World Spirituality Classics.) Texturally, these compositions exist on several planes simultaneously: they are grounded by Coltrane's rich, darkly hued, deeply resonant voice (which she had never deployed on her secular recordings); swept along in the currents of her followers' voices, their hand-held percussion, and her harp and organ; and lifted straight into the cosmic stratosphere by the synthesizers that she came to love in her later years. #AliceColtrane #EcstaticMusic #Turiyasangitananda #SwamiSatchidananda #NPRMusic #FirstListen #TheVedantaCenter #SaiAnantamAshram #LuakaBop #JeromesUptownRadio http://www.npr.org/2017/04/27/525541596/first-listen-the-ecstatic-music-of-alice-coltrane-turiyasangitananda (at Los Angeles, California)