446. Alice Coltrane, "Journey in Satchidanada"

 

This seems like a really good album for Will American Democracy Survive Or Not Day because, although I know more about the structure of the atom than I do about jazz, I listened to this twice through in a row yesterday and found it deeply soothing (if a little boring, go ahead and kill me.)  To a total jazz ignorant like myself, it sounds very nice!  Vaguely sitar-y and Beatles-go-to-India-like, which makes sense.

But among people who know what they're talking about, this album is not just highly regarded, it is a fucking 10!  Like literally a Pitchfork 10, which is exquistely rare.  I think the Pitchfork writer had a religious experience:

When I finally opened my eyes, a beam of sunshine flooded through my apartment. Like the cascading harp at the center of the album, the sunbeam seemed to say to me that art is the only thing that exists beyond death. Shadows don’t exist without light. Each defines the other. Alice Coltrane made Journey in Satchidananda from an in-between place, amid the unlocatable flow of different emotions, different lives, different traditions.

Likewise, Sanae Yamada, of Vive la Void and Moon Duo, heard this album for the first time while living in San Francisco and wrote about it for the Irish Times' "This Album Changed My Life:"

When I look back from here it seems so clear – how the things I wanted to express needed music as a medium – but at the time I was confused and searching. This album seemed to burn through the fog like a signal fire. It sounds cliché to say I didn’t know music could do this, but in my case, it is also true.

So I am going to let these other people who have been intimately touched by this album speak for it instead of my big dumb opinion.