Ashram Community Singers

A special celebration of the life, music and spirit of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda will take place at LSO St Luke’s on Saturday 18 November. The Ashram Community Singers will perform in this intimate and serene space, the perfect setting to extend the feeling and energy of Alice’s LA-based ashram to London. The performance will feature the devotional music Alice invented – inspired by the gospel music of the Detroit churches she grew up in, mixed together with the Indian devotional music of
her religious practice.

In the late 1970s Alice Coltrane adopted the Sanskrit name Turiyasangitananda as she embraced the spirituality that became so central to the last four decades of her life. By 1983 she had established a 48-acre Sai Anantam Ashram at which she began to record music which was released only within her spiritual community in the form of private cassette tapes. In May of 2017, with the blessing of Alice’s children, Luaka Bop released a compilation of these songs titled World Spirituality Classics, Volume 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane, making them available to the public for the first time. 2017 also marks what would have been Alice’s 80th year of life, as well as the 10th anniversary of her passing.

The Ashram Project is an experiential and participatory event and as such attendees are encouraged to embrace several aspects of the ceremony. At its core this event is an opportunity to chant and sing along with The Ashram Community Singers, ‘bhajan books’ featuring the lyrics will be given to all members of the audience, and will also be available to download in advance. Loose clothing is encouraged and shoes will be removed upon entering the space. After the ceremony ‘prashad’, a religious offering of simple vegetarian food will be served. To mirror the traditional sunrise and sunset
ceremonies the event will take place twice on Saturday 18 November, first at 11:00
and secondly at 17:30.

These concerts precede A concert for Alice and John Coltrane at the Barbican Hall, featuring Pharoah Sanders Quartet, Denys Baptiste and Alina Bzhezhinska. Celebrating the profound musical legacy of Alice and John Coltrane, the stage will be graced by both a collaborator of John Coltrane in Sanders, and two prominent artists from the UK jazz scene – each drawing inspiration from the Coltranes.