Monument Eternal

ALICE COLTRANE (1937-2007) was a composer, master of various musical instruments, improviser, spiritual leader, and wife of John Coltrane. Throughout her adult life, she worked within and combined a broad range of musical genres, including gospel, R&B, bebop, free jazz, Indian devotional song, and Western art music. She recorded more than twenty full-length albums for Impulse and Warner Bros. Her music speaks to her experiences as a child playing for church congregations in Detroit; the transcendent and mind-bending avant-garde improvisations she performed with her husband John Coltrane; and her religious pilgrimages to India. When Monument Eternal was originally published in 1977, Alice Coltrane was living in Southern California and had recently become a swami, building and nurturing an alternative spiritual community. In these pages, she says that the book is 'based upon the soul's realizations in Absolute Consciousness and its spiritual relationships with the Supreme One.' Monument