Alice Coltrane sounds authoritative yet supplicatory above the droning chords of her Wurlitzer organ on a new and almost shockingly intimate remix of Turiya Sings—the album of stately and austere devotional music she recorded during a single 15-hour session in 1981. The mountainous string overdubs that appear on the original are missing from the Impulse! label’s Kirtan: Turiya Sings. Likewise, so are the ascendant synthesizer swoops that would serve as sonic signature on the subsequent albums of bhajans (devotional songs) that she recorded for the Southern California ashram she led.

Turiya Sings marked a transition for the musician, who took the spiritual name Turiyasangitananda—Sanskrit for “the Transcendental Lord’s highest song of bliss.” She was also abandoning the maximalist jazz-orchestral[1]Indian fusion music she recorded following her husband and musical partner John Coltrane’s death in 1967—masterpieces such as Journey in Satchidananda (1971), Universal Consciousness (1971) and World Galaxy (1972). From Turiya on, with a single exception, she concentrated exclusively on the Sanskrit chants employed by Hindu practitioners and her fellow Western travelers.

As the son of Alice and John Coltrane, saxophonist and Kirtan: Turiya Sings producer Ravi Coltrane knew the devotional side of his mother’s broad musical vision intimately. And he notes that Turiya marked the first time she had ever sung in a recording studio.

“I’ve been hearing these songs since I was very, very young,” the esteemed saxophonist recalls from his Brooklyn home. “And the context was familiar to me; that’s the same organ I heard my mother play every day of my childhood, practically.” The Wurlitzer now resides in the home of Ravi’s younger brother, Oran, who is a DJ.

Ravi discovered the stripped-down Kirtan tapes while looking for material his mother could record for 2004’s Translinear Light, a late-life reprise of Alice’s ‘70s genius that also happened to be her first commercial release in 26 years. It also turned out to be her final album; she died in 2007. While Ravi’s original notion was to release the improvisation-free—and, one might say, purified—Turiya on Impulse!, executive producer Ken Druker suggested a deluxe edition that would include a remix of the dazzling original version released privately on Alice’s Avatar Book Institute label.

“She had a bold vision for how she wanted to present her music,” Ravi says, connecting the original Turiya Sings to her earlier maximalist concoctions, which embellished her harp and piano parts with strings, synths, horns and percussion. “But when we went to the 24-track tape,” he continues, “not all the original music was there.” Some of the tracks, he believes, might have been dubbed down to a two-track master reel. “We’re probably going to go back and do a little detective work,” he says, “a little sleuthing to figure out how the missing material ended up on the two-inch tape.”

Decades before meeting John Coltrane, pianist Alice McLeod had already been exposed to some deeply spiritual music in the often ecstatic Baptist and Holiness churches of her Detroit youth. The aspiring jazz artist began performing in lounge acts and married “Poncho” Hagood, a scatting bebop singer with whom she moved to Paris. There she met the great Bud Powell, who became her piano mentor. After returning to the United States, she joined vibraphonist Terry Gibbs’ quartet, which happened to be opening for the John Coltrane Quartet at New York’s Birdland one fateful evening in 1963. John and Alice married in 1965, and she replaced McCoy Tyner in her husband’s quartet a year later, helping him explore increasingly “anti-jazz” realms of blissfully overblown cosmo-spirituality.

Born in 1965, Ravi was the second of the three sons John and Alice had together. (The eldest, John Jr., died in a 1982 car accident.) Ravi knew Alice was special. “My mother was always her own person,” he says. “She was following her path and, whether we understood it or not, it was happening around us. But I was definitely aware that my mom wasn’t like the other kids’ moms.”

Alice’s path took a particularly challenging turn following her husband’s death, when she took a vow of celibacy and embarked on a nearly medieval series of spiritual renunciations and austerities. These included bouts of insomnia, temperature experiments and severe weight loss that resulted in her hospitalization. In 1976, she renounced secular life altogether and became a swamini, or spiritual director, of what would become known as the Sai Anantam Ashram.

On Sundays, she led services at the ashram, singing bhajans to her own organ accompaniment and leading the communal chants known as kirtans, a devotional style that has been popularized by Ram Dass, Jai Uttal and Krishna Das, among others. Kirtan: Turiya Sings contains vowel-rich Sanskrit praises to the complex pantheon of Hindu deities. “Govinda, Hari, Ram, Krishna/ Names of God,” she offers on “Govinda Hari,” emphasizing how “Dear to Sita is the lotus[1]eyed/ beautiful Rama.”

Turiyasangitananda devotees can look forward to more new releases. Ravi expects the next up to be Sacred Language of Ascension, one of the last things his mother recorded before she passed away. “My mother was always in the studio and never stopped recording music, even when she wasn’t under contract to a label,” he says. “So we have a lot of archived music we’d like to bring to the people.”

As for Ravi’s favorite Alice Coltrane album, he’d prefer not to have to choose. “I have my little memories tied to each of the records,” he says, “but it all really just sounds like home to me, the sound of my mother.”