Writer Andy Beta, a San Antonio native now based in New York, threads the needle between underground musical rabbit-hole dives and broader cultural context in his work for outlets including Pitchfork, the New York Times and Rolling Stone.
This month, Beta took the leap from articles and reviews into his first book, Cosmic Music: The Life, Art, and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane. This expansive, deeply researched biography weaves in-depth analysis, cultural context and lyrical prose into something that flows like a piece of music itself.
Beta’s subject is the late wife of jazz icon John Coltrane, who’s also a brilliant musician in her own right, mostly known for her virtuosic playing and seemingly boundless creativity. Unfairly maligned by jazz critics of the time, largely due to her gender, Alice Coltrane mastered be-bop piano, jazz harp and Stravinsky-style classical composition.
Eventually she became a guru, adopting the name Swamini Turiyasangitananda — shortened to Turiya — and founding a Southern California ashram. During this later period, Coltrane shunned the music industry, solely making devotional “new age” music on synthesizers, which she produced in small-run cassette tapes and sold at her ashram.
After being rediscovered by modern musicians such as Bjork and Radiohead, re-contextualized with the popularity of ambient music and repped by her nephew, the groundbreaking DJ and musician Flying Lotus, a new generation has discovered Alice Coltrane’s pioneering work.
Indeed, the album Journey in Satchidananda is a truly groundbreaking work of experimental jazz, while her cassette Turiya Sings, is one of the most beguiling — and rewarding — new age albums ever recorded.
Beta’s Cosmic Music corrects the historical record, providing an uncluttered view of this inscrutable musician. The journey is winding and can almost overwhelm with detail, but the extra detail feels necessary to finally give Coltrane her due.
As a biographer, Beta balances in-depth analysis with a compassionate eye. Alice Coltrane deserves our attention — not because she’s a woman musician, not because she was married to John Coltrane — but because she remains a brilliant composer and musician regardless.
Before relocating to New York, Beta was a San Antonio music scene fixture, hosting punk rock shows and performing with experimental music ensemble Tonalamotl, which featured fellow San Antonians Ryan Sawyer, Chris Branca, Jake Garcia, Sam Sanford and Troy Curry.
We caught up with Beta to discuss his new book, his process and his time in SA.
Did you study music? The musical analysis in the book is well done.
Never studied music, and almost any real analysis of the music stems from things Alice said in liner notes. The exception would be an interview with composer Nadia Sirota, who shed some light on the orchestral arrangements.
Do you think Alice’s jazz training led her to deeper, richer new age music?
While I know there are some parallels and I believe she was a great influence on new age music, I don’t believe what Alice was making was new age music. She knew to align it with Hearts in Space perhaps, but by that point, it really was this expression of [and] to God. If anything, I think of these ashram tapes as being a manifestation of her earliest music, the church music played in the Mt. Olive Baptist Church of her youth. That she performed every Sunday for her congregation felt like a full circle moment.
What was the most surprising connection you came across? It was amusing reading about the recording studio run-in with Guns n’ Roses.
There are lots of these kinds of connections. I guess one that stood out for me is that I’ve long been a fan of [R&B singer] Syreeta’s music. I love her Motown albums and the collaborations she did with her ex-husband, Stevie Wonder. So learning that Syreeta and Alice knew one another — perhaps even back in the Detroit days — and even traveled to Ethiopia together for a meditation retreat and played together was a cool story to uncover.
Why was Alice Coltrane so underestimated for so long? Was it pure misogyny, or partially because folks worship John Coltrane so much? Some mix of the two?
I would chalk it up to misogyny. And most of the critical writing that I uncovered really was caustic towards her. The one with the line about her being a “virtually talentless lady who married the right man” in particular stood out. And that was the consensus at the time. One of my goals was to show just how talented a musician she was. She knew the classical canon, played bebop, mastered the harp and learned how to do orchestral arrangements. And look at the types of musicians she had on her albums: Jack DeJohnette, Charlie Haden, Ornette Coleman, Roy Haynes. They wouldn’t have suffered her if she couldn’t play.
Completing your first book seems very different from writing articles or a reviews. You’re maintaining a story arc over hundreds of pages. Were there any books that were touchstones for you?
John Szwed’s Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith, Ben Ratliff’s Coltrane and Will Hermes’s Lou Reed: The King of New York come to mind. Szwed does a good job of telling a story about public figures who are at some level basically unknowable. Hermes has a way of detouring in his prose to capture these fascinating details and side stories in tight paragraphs without losing his trajectory and track.
You began writing about music when blogs were thriving and Pitchfork ruled the roost. How have things changed since you started?
Let’s just say I haven’t had steady work in years and am broke as hell.
Tell me about your San Antonio roots. Who were your favorite groups you knew or saw? What venues were your favorite? Any other fond memories of SA?
My roots are in SA. As a teen, I often snuck into Tacoland multiple nights a week to see all sorts of punk and hardcore bands. I even put on a bunch of punk rock shows in my living room. My favorite bands of that era were El Santo and Glorium and Worm. As a punk rocker, I was into this Dischord band Nation of Ulysses, who used this “signo de exclamación” in their graphics. One day at Apple Records on San Pedro, I saw a copy of John Coltrane’s Om and realized [Nation of Ulysses] was referencing [Impulse Records’] famous “I!” logo. So I bought it and had my mind melted by its intensity and chaos. Inspired by this open-ended approach to noisemaking, some friends and I started our own improv noise band for a few years, Tonalamotl.
But while working at a health food store in SA, an older coworker who made new age music on the side suggested I check out Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananda, calling it the most beautiful music in the world. It had come out on CD … around 1997. I still wonder what led me to check it out, in that at the time I wasn’t really interested in “beauty” per se. My memory of it is that it drifted past without me really grasping it. But it must have planted a mustard seed though, because I still own the CD. And it was probably another five years before I realized she made more than one album.
What are the strengths and drawbacks of making art in a highly conservative atmosphere like Texas?
I think the conservative oppression of such a place tends to lead you to make work that is reactive, or overly concerned with pushing people away. I only did music briefly while there but I still think about the idea of that band [Tonalamotl], of having no hierarchy or predetermined course of action. It was messy and unlistenable and unfocused, perhaps better as a concept than a listening project.
Do you ever come back to town?
I don’t get back to San Antonio as often as I’d like. But when I do, I definitely try to catch up on eating Tex-Mex. I have had the luxury of being a Spurs fan for the past 30 years or so.
Sign Up for SA Current newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
