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For his third album on Blue Note, Big John Patton decided to expand his band to quintet. Retaining the services of his longtime colleagues, guitarist Grant Green and drummer Ben Dixon, he hired tenor saxophonist Fred Jackson (who also played on the previous work "Along Came John") and trumpeter Richard Williams. – All Music

.gif have earned critical comparison to the likes of Bjork, Yukimi Nagano, The xx and Portishead, but the illustrious pair have managed to retain a fresh and unique dynamic to their chimerical sound, one that proved so compelling that the pair began filling a void of their own making within the Singaporean music scene. 

Following the acclaim of their past releases, .gif's sophomore LP HAIL NOTHING still showcases the haunting vocals, deft lyricism and obsidian production that has become their distinctive sound. The album is named after a line in Ernest Hemingway' s A Clean Well Lighted Place - "Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee." 

The duo digs deeper on HAIL NOTHING; an ode to chaos and nothingness, a love song to the void. Expanding on their synth-driven soundscapes, haunting vocals and poignant lyrics, the album also features guests Bani Haykal and Usaama Minhas. 

The Analog Vault is supremely honoured to be working with .gif for their first-ever vinyl release on TAV Records. 

In spite of the noisy aura it's drawn around itself, there's not much mystery to A Place To Bury Strangers. The New York band has been dishing out slight variations on the same sonic blitzkrieg since its self-titled 2007 debut; the only thing that's changed is the fine tuning. On the group's fourth album, Transfixiation, all of APTBS' trademarks are in evidence. Deadpan vocals float through apocalyptic static. The volume bleeds out. Cacophony reigns. - NPR

Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O. are known for way-far-out space rock. ‘Wandering The Outer Space’ is no exception. Acid Mothers Temples ‘Wandering The Outer Space’ is a sonic liquid light kaleidoscope swirling and fusing rock, jazz, drone, chanting, and electronic music with heavy psychedelic influence. It is not accurate to refer to this music by any of the generic terms listed above. Acid Mothers Temple creates a new sound that is distinctively Acid Mothers Temple. They slip between the cracks of conventional harmony and musical structure, intentionally warping any familiar sound. The opening track ‘Anthem Of The Outer Space’ traverses a dynamic and broad sonic territory it covers traditional bouzouki, blow-out guitars, mantric chanting, comic-ambient drone, and ends with a surprise pop vocal melody. ‘Forsaken Moonman’ is traditional Acid Mothers Temple with a slow build to whaling intergalactic noise-guitar solos, high-frequency synth and fast rhythms echoing across the threshold of space-time.

Acid Mothers Temple has a long winding history beginning in the 1990s with many variations such as Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O, Acid Mothers Guru Guru, Acid Mother Temple SWR, and many more. The one constant is the visionary guitarist, producer, master of sound, Makoto Kawabata. Kawabata says the music he creates is based on recreating extraterrestrial signals. The entire aesthetic has always revolved around U.F.O.s and communication with the universe, making them true space rockers.–The Psych Rock

A TAV Curator's Pick.

Actress, real name Darren Jordan Cunningham, known to friends as DAZ, returns with a new album, now on Ninja Tune and a new music system called “AZD” (pronounced “Azid”), a chrome aspect journey into a parallel world. An artist who has always preferred to make music than to talk about it, in “AZD” he has achieved another remarkable landmark, one which is as resistant to interpretation as it is demanding of it. Following on from his previous albums, R.I.P, Splazsh and Hazyville, an epilogue poem attached to the press release for Ghettoville was construed by media, commentators and spectators that Cunningham had retired. This led him to conceptualise this mass of conclusion as the key to ‘Giving power back to identity.’

So a few pointers, or possible ways to think about “AZD”. The album is themed around chrome – both as a reflective surface to see the self in, and as something that carves luminous voids out of any colour and fine focuses white and black representing the perfect metaphor for the bleakness of life in the Metropolis as suggested by Anish Kapoors Cloud Gate.

Another way to approach would be through the art of James Hampton and Rammellzee (who inspired “CYN,” which Cunningham also sees as a vision of New York in reverse…) – both of whom, though of different generations of the African-American slave diaspora, created art through “Sourcing castaway materials from their environment and reinterprating them into absolute majesty given from the fourth dimension.” There is also the career-long influence of the Detroit techno pioneers, something which becomes clear on this album “there is a contrast in the type of glow or reflection”.

Alternatively, you could write your PhD thesis on Jung’s Shadow Theory and AZD: “Lots of ideas come from dreams, this isn’t new, but sometimes the conscious mind starts to meld into the universal consciousness through constellation tunnelling.” If that sounds too taxing then you could always fall back on Star Wars and, in particular, the Death Star: “It has a dark dystopian backdrop, with highly sophisticated technology, but it is fading into the ether, still holding on and emitting a powerful energy. The music remaking the embers, binding them together and pulling them apart again.”

Alternatively, just listen. That “glow” Cunningham talks about makes this in some ways more immediate than previous Actress releases. Take lead single, “X22RME” (pronounced “Extreme”) which elegantly plays between the lines of Oriental classic rave and Balinese warehouse Techno machined in a Rotherhithe lock up welding the grooves into a seamless cracked joint.

At the other end of the spectrum is “Faure in Chrome,” a byproduct or development from his collaboration with the London Contemporary Orchestra, in which he “repatterns” aspect of Faure’s Requiem into a piece which sounds like the very institution of classical music being encased in electronic ice and scanned through a high frequency bandwidth. In between are gems like “Runner,” a personal re-soundtracking of Blade Runner “its from the deleted Fade Runner scene where AZD in a Peckham Cafe realises his barber has over the years etched a faded scroll into his head using early 80s African synthpop as a vexing serum“, or “Falling Rizlas,” an alienated music-box ballad. It’s a remarkable piece of work, that harks back both to Actress’ previous productions and to earlier iterations of the (broadly conceived) “techno” project without being beholden to anything but Cunningham’s forward-facing, individual and disembodied vision. – Ninja Tune

The simplest you could say about “AZD” is that it’s art – the unique creation of a unique mind. There will be few more distinctive, brilliant or visionary suites of music released in 2017. Call him what you will, this is the year that Darren ‘Daz’ Cunningham - aka Actress, aka AZD – asserts more clearly than ever before his complete independence. “Actress has a talent for melodies that snag at you, as demonstrated on the music-box ambience of Falling Rizlas, or Blue Window, on which house music battles to be heard over the sound of tape hiss. He also has an ability to twist the sound of dance music until it sounds private and intimate. Even the album’s most upbeat moment, X22RME, has a strangely introverted atmosphere to it: when the beats drop out, it doesn’t feel like a euphoric breakdown, but rather as if someone’s mind has wandered in the middle of the dancefloor.” – The Guardian

“…for all its artfully-deployed discordance, *AZD *maintains a musicality that holds the listener close. Sometimes this comes through in more danceable techno moments, like the single “X22RME” or the 80s-leaning synth-driven track “RUNNER,”; elsewhere, it’s in the  emotive minimalist breaks of “FALLING RIZLAS” or “THERE'S AN ANGEL IN THE SHOWER.” Cunningham participates in a futurist tradition, following an arc set by artists and writers like Rammellzee and Eshun. But that futurism isn’t predictive, something yet to come; rather, his combination of science fictions, music histories, and socio-spatial realities feels deliriously adjacent to the world we’re listening to it in.” – Pitchfork

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A suite of electronic laments, tone structures and dreamtime rhythms, with a conceptual arc taking in death, life, sleep and religion.

Right from Hazyville, Actress’s music has been deeply marked by London’s rave music heritage. But after the angular dynamics of Splazsh, R.I.P heads out into deep space. The rhythms and pulses are smudged or blurred, or are hinted at by their absence. 2-step garage is collided into gamelan, and freeform interludes explore microtonal spaces and imagined string instruments.

R.I.P underlines Actress’s reputation as one of the most eloquent voices to emerge from the sub-bass nexus of London dance music. His intuitive and original grasp of beats, textures and rhythm puts him on a parallel path to dance music innovators such as Basic Channel, Burial and Aphex Twin. But the way he engages with electronic sound from first principles, realising his own self-contained sonic worlds, hints at less obvious kinships outside the dance music fraternity, with pioneers of homebrewed sound experiments such as Cabaret Voltaire, Pan Sonic and Oval. It moves the body but the sounds also tap into to something more intangible inside you; you dance, but also ‘slip/drift into another realm, probably without even realising.’ – Honest Jon’s Records

“Darren Cunningham is a dance producer who references extroverted, populist music to create a meditative, introverted, immersive experience.…It's not the sound that makes the music, though, but the structure of it. R.I.P. is a deliberately uncoordinated album. Rhythms, basslines, and melodies slip in and out of line with each other. Comparatively straightforward, house-oriented tracks like "Shadow From Tartarus" are situated next to murk and ambience like "Tree of Knowledge". The emphasis here, though, is on "comparative": Even R.I.P.'s steady 4/4 tracks sound grimy and deconstructed. But there's something almost flirtatious in the way he lets the sounds worm around in the dark, looking to hook up with something firm. When they do, it's both mechanical and mystical, like watching a sculpture cut from raw stone.” – Pitchfork

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Adele Sebastian was an Afro American jazz flutist and singer, active from the early 70s (when she was still a teenager) until her untimely death at the age of 27 (!) in 1983 from a kidney failure. In fact she had been depending on monthly dialysis to stay alive for years. She lived through and for the music and you can hear it on her only solo album “Desert Fairy Princess” which was first issued in 1981. The mostly acoustic instrumentation brings a very natural and therefore rather retrospective sound considering the year the album was recorded.

Adele and her band pull it off right from the start as if it had been 1966 and it was time for a revolution to shake the dust from the old time jazz. In a perfect way she mixes classic American vocal jazz elements with playful and more free passages, Latin music and tribal African sounds in the lengthy and quite rhythm oriented “Man From Tanganyika” and makes the title track start with a mystical “Allahu akbar“ chant while it turns more and more into a dark and gloomy song with something like a psychedelic edge reminiscent of Pharoah Sanders on his early works. Wild rhythms from drums, percussions with tons of bells and chimes weave a thick groove carpet and conjure a magical atmosphere. Those jazz aficionados who love the mid 60s John Coltrane, his sidekick Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane will go crazy for this album. - Light In The Attic

This, too, is a story about control. It’s a manual, maybe half Rosetta Stone, half bird guide. It was made the way they made electronic music in the good old days, all analog everything, right after synthesizers shrunk to a manageable size and you didn’t have to trek down to a university to use one anymore. Hard-earned. Tastes different. Our parents’ electronic. And its subject is staying together, that thing we thought was their province. It’s about trying to fix what hurts. It’s about knowing better. Black Noise is men talking to men about women; Lemonade is a woman talking to women about men, and they both orbit around a failure we take for granted like the sun: loving you is complicated. It’s a skill; we forgot.

Adrian Younge calls The Electronique Void an academic album, by which he means it is both instructional and informational. There’s a problem at the heart of it, a woman who’s been told that she’s loved, but she doesn’t recognize that, can’t feel it, may have heard it all before, may be worrying about the wrong things. Jack Waterson, long a guitarist in Younge’s band, plays the role of narrator, sounding professorial and rather superior as he lays out for the woman where she’s erred. That vocoder you hear is Adrian, talking to her on a subterranean level, the way an artist must. There’s a strong sense of rules here, a prescription and a presumption that there is an agreed upon way to do it, and there is also a wrong way, or at least a way that won’t work. And the fact is, as didactic as that sounds, it might be the truth. Maybe everybody who’s alone can be cured. The discourse on the album is the kind of thing that happens when you go blonde and then you can’t keep ‘em off you. These truths are cold and hard, and our hero begrudges the well-meaning advice being rained down upon her as any independent woman would.

The science of love, its formulas and if-then constraints, causal relationships and observable properties, is best taught experientially, but learning it hurts so, so bad. Music, especially electronic music, reliant as it is on abstraction and unrepentant as it is about hijacking your physiological responses to tempo and rhythm and dynamics, is a way to get there without going through it. Electronic music as practiced and developed by pioneers like Dick Hyman and Raymond Scott and Wendy Carlos is precise and intentional. In making his first electronic album, Younge took his cues from them, reminding a contemporary audience what a synthesizer, deep in its heart, really could be.

The lady of The Electronique Void, only ever seen through a man’s eyes, who’s being told what to do by him, sounds trapped by her history and by her position, her ancestors’ trauma echoing through her lineage and booming out of her as a phobia, distrust, misapprehension, rational response to a fucked up situation. Waterson’s text here seems to say that if his character could go back in time, catch her before the damage was done, she would be able to love. And that’s reasonable. Don’t get hooked. Don’t do wifey shit for a fuck boy. Don’t let it go to your head, no. It’s also possible he has no idea what he’s talking about. The lessons for men in The Electronique Void are unspoken but plain as day.

This music is an urgent tutorial. Adrian Younge looks at us and sees the frontline of a crisis, something we only have time to triage right now. This isn’t romantic and it isn’t about settling down. This is the fight of our lives: how to love. – Press Release

“Younge could be accused of dabbling, but he displays total mastery of his machines, whether he's coaxing sinister rhythms or playful melodies out of them. The drums often hit with as much force as his hip-hop productions, and a lot of the keyboard work carries a creeping menace similar to that of his Venice Dawn material. Presented as a sort of tongue-in-cheek guide to navigating romantic relationships, the set of ten, mostly brief tracks is narrated in affable fashion by longtime Younge associate Jack Waterson…

One can imagine this accompanying a film screened in a musty audio-visual room with flickering shots of a young couple flirting on a party line, frolicking in leaves, and hanging at a drive-in or bowling alley. It's stimulating and informative enough on its own, and too accomplished and substantive to be disregarded as a dilettantish novelty.” – Allmusic

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In Spades is the eighth studio album by American alternative rock band The Afghan Whigs, released on May 5, 2017 on Sub Pop Records. - Wiki

“Cleromancy” isn’t a word one normally finds in rock lyrics. Then again, In Spades – the forthcoming album by The Afghan Whigs, from which the new song “Oriole” hails – is defined only by its own mystical inner logic. The term means to divine, in a supernatural manner, a prediction of destiny from the random casting of lots: the throwing of dice, picking a card from a deck. From its evocative cover art to the troubled spirits haunting its halls, In Spades casts a spell that challenges the listener to unpack its dark metaphors and spectral imagery. – Sub Pop

“As ever, Dulli spends the majority of In Spades teetering on that shaky precipice where romance turns to rancor, and pillow talk leads to restraining orders. But like a master genre filmmaker, he’s always got a couple of new tricks up his sleeves to keep us on our toes. “Birdland” honors his tradition for slow-burning, cinematicscene-setters, but rather than gently immerse us into his nocturnal netherworld, we’re pushed right in by staccato shocks of harmonium and operatic vocal gasps, like strobe-lit flickers of an image that take you a few moments to process into a fluid moving picture. “We’re coming alive in the cold,” Dulli declares, like a beast reawakened and ready to do damage once again.

In Spades clocks in at just 10 songs in 36 minutes, but feels as expansive and substantial as a double-album statement. And that’s thanks in large part to coolly paced, multi-sectional songs like “Arabian Heights” and “Light As a Feather,” where Dulli masterfully ratchets up the tension before unleashing his fevered howl at just the right moment (while reminding us that the Whigs are the rare rock band that can pull liberally from ’70s Blaxploitation funk without sounding like they’re making a jokey porno soundtrack).” – Pitchfork

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Greece is maybe not the first country that comes to mind when you think of Afrojazz. Afrodyssey Orchestra unexpectedly hit the scene some time ago after we released In the Land of Aou Tila, their debut album — while that first album was going to the hands of the few lucky ones who managed to discover the band back then, Afrodyssey Orchestra were already booking more studio time in order to start working on further recordings. Three years later, we’re proud to present you Under the Sun, with seven new compositions that reflect the logical evolution the band has experienced during this time, including some fine-tuning in their line-up. A melange of African polyrhythms, jazz, a scent of the Balkans and a fling with Afrobeat that holds hands with their beginnings — all this devised through the prism of the vast Greek musical universe. – Alter Cat

“Afterglow is the music moniker for local fashion retailer HOAX's owner Julian. Having been involved in the local music scene for years as a guitarist and programmer, Julian has since found his muse in black music. Driven by this newfound passion, his recent music ambitions sees him going back to sounds he grew up with such as Michael Jackson and Prince, to the disco funk of the 70s and 80s, and the "Free Soul" series of Japanese compilations. "Different Light" is Afterglow's debut album, a music amalgam that takes cues from 80's synth-funk/boogie, electro from Street Sounds, r&b from Tabu, fusion from Herbie Hancock, to the sound of city pop greats such as Toshiki Kadomatsu, Tetsuji Hayashi, and Tatsurō Yamashita. A marriage of synths, thumping basslines, and drum machine grooves, the album also features the vocals of both SOPHY Wong and Yeung Tung. In contrast to what one might expect out of a vaporware aesthetic, the result is rather a pop music infused exploration of funk's past and future.” – Bandcamp

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In the early 1980s, Ahmed Malek was already in his 50s, when he discovered synthesizers and electronic music for himself and started to experiment with sounds. None of it was ever released but we got a huge box of master tapes from his family and we're happy to present this different side of Ahmed Malek's music. It was compiled and co-produced by Flako, a fan of early electronic and synth music. This is not a remix album though, Flako's aim was to create an album out of 2 hours of material that sounds like it might have if Mr. Malek would have finished it himself before of his death. Fully approved by the artists family. - Habibi Funk

A TAV Essential Listening Album.

Moon Safari is the debut studio album by French electronic music duo Air, released in. Moon Safari set the stage for the budding downtempo music style.

"French duo Air's debut album is a superlatively happy collection of experimental disco-mood sound nestled between ambient soundscape and breathy pop. It's jazzy and melodic, and mostly laid-back, but not excessively so. There are a few shake-it, shake-it numbers, too, like the absurdly daft hit "Sexy Boy." It's snap your fingers and hang out (while reading) music or dance around sexy-slow with your mate music. It's also the perfect music to do your ironing or some other chore to; it's hypnotizing wallpaper music. It slips in and out of your consciousness, forcing you to move around with a relaxed smile before you even realize it. Oh, and contrary to sampler fashion, Nicolas Godin and Jean Benoit Dunckel played the instruments themselves. Bravo." - Mike McGonigal

Rolling Stone magazine ranked the album #93 on their Best Album of the Nineties list, while the French edition named this album #65 on their list of the 100 Greatest French rock albums.

“Their space-pop debut, Moon Safari, was a truly obsessive hommage to easy listening, a sublime Eurocheese omelet. They built their music out of classic Sixties French schlock: bongos, castanets, vintage electric piano, dream-weaver synths and shag-carpet organ straight from the soundtracks of movies like Un Homme et Une Femme. … Loads of American bands tried to emulate the fab tackiness of 1960s French pop. But Moon Safari proves that the French really do it better themselves.” - Rollingstone.com

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"Soul Jazz Records are re-releasing Airto Moreira’s classic album ‘Samba de Flora’, out of print for 30 years ever since its original release in 1988. The album is very limited to just 1000 copies only, pressed on both vinyl and CD."

"...The impact of Airto Moreira in both the world of American jazz and in Brazilian music is unparalleled. At the start of the 1970s Airto was invited to join Miles Davis’ groundbreaking ‘electric’ group, which with albums such as the seminal ‘Bitches Brew’ helping Davis regain his title from John Coltrane as the most important jazz artist of all time." - Soul Jazz Records

Roughly translating to "dinner is ready," the double-LP was recorded with Yellow Magic Orchestra and originally coproduced with Ryuichi Sakamoto across Tokyo and Los Angeles. The 14-track album showcases Yano's move away from her pop and jazz funk origins towards a synth pop sound. Akiko Yano is a Japanese pop and jazz musician and a longtime YMO affiliate. This reissue follows two Yano albums rereleased on Wewantsounds this year, Japanese Girl and Iroha Ni Kompeito. – Resident Advisor

180 gram reissue of Al Campbell's debut album from 1977. Produced by Phil Pratt (Star Wars Dub) and featuring Ansel Collins, Aston "Family Man" Barrett, Earl Smith and more.

Roots Reggae / Lovers Rock - Classic Here!

An eclectic album that is sure to pique anyone’s interest. Produced by Alan Parker and Alan Hawkshaw, who is perhaps best-known for composing “The Champ”, which has been widely sampled and emulated by hip hop artists. Cool orchestral funk from the 70s on this LP!

“My Name Is Albert Ayler is the debut album by American free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler recorded in Copenhagen in 1963 and first released on the Dutch Debut label.” – Wiki

“Hearing the soft-spoken voice of Albert Ayler at the beginning of this 1963 recording is spooky. Not because he's gone, but because he's so calm, so young, and so hesitantly articulate: Nothing like the voice of his saxophone playing at all. This session is a reissue of a Fantasy recording, and one which pairs Ayler up with a Scandinavian rhythm section that includes the 16-year-old Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen on bass.” – All Music

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Possessing a fluid, versatile guitar style and a smoky, understated voice, Albert King was a major influence on Stevie Ray Vaughn. (Vaughn readily acknowledged King's influence on him and often praised the elder's immense talent.) By the time of THE BIG BLUES, King had long perfected his sound after years of touring. On "Let's Have A Natural Ball," and "I Get Evil," King's voice is as expressive as any blues singer of his time, including Muddy Waters or Jimmy Reed (he backed the latter on a number of recordings).

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King is remembered by many for his dabbling in the psychedelic sounds of the late 1960s, which set him apart from the more conservative blues players of the time. However, On 1962's THE BIG BLUES King was already showing an interest in exploring many genres of popular music. On the rumba-flavored instrumental "This Morning" he gets very close to a full-out surf guitar style, while one listen to the intro of "I Walked All Night Long" will reveal his subsequent influence on Stevie Ray. – All Music

Broadcast from SWR and recorded at the legendary 1967 Free Jazz Meeting in Baden-Baden, Germany this is a collection of four different performances by different line-ups, featuring big names in the European free jazz 60s scene of the time along such top players as Don Cherry, Albery Mangelsdorff, Marion Brown and Evan Parker. – Linear Notes

On this unique Jazz Is Dead recording with Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad, the trio once again demonstrates their ability to elevate their collaborators while also showcasing their distinctive sound, continuing to redraw the boundaries of Brazilian jazz, futuristic funk and their beloved samba. - Tinnitist

“Saying it was an honor and pleasure to make an album with Azymuth is a huge understatement. To the crate diggers of the Jazz & Hip-Hop kind Azymuth’s music is very important. They are the soulful jazz side of Brazil with a dash of psychedelic blended in and a whole lot more. They are incredibly talented giants walking amongst us and they are very humble,” says Shaheed Muhammad. “I feel as if Adrian and I barely scratched the surface of what’s possible with Mamão, Alex and Kiko. The 004 album came together with ease. Watching them play the songs with so much vigor and delight taught me the importance of loving what you do. We hope that people will make this album a part of their regular rotation and I look forward to when we can kick it with Azymuth again.” – Ali Shaheed Muhammad

“This double-LP live set recorded at UCLA in 1978, reveals in total the ambitious and profound free jazz and universal musical frontiers Ms. Coltrane was able to explore in both small and larger groups. The lion's share of the music here features her in a trio setting with bassist Reggie Workman and drummer Roy Haynes. Ms. Coltrane performs on piano and organ. The opening moments of the title track, which opens the album, offer the careening subjectivity through the whole-tone improvisation that Alice Coltrane made her own. Certainly there is the influence of her late husband here, but her sense of phraseological articulation and accent is far different. She moves with one hand over a difficult series of arpeggiattic concerns, creating a strong harmonic line for Workman and Haynes to develop into a rhythmic construct. When a standard modal interlude develops in the rhythm section, Coltrane stretches it to its breaking point until a new one must be developed; it's nothing less than breathtaking…

…The interplay between Workman and Haynes was so telepathic, it pushed Ms. Coltrane into new realms further inside these shimmering harmonics until their shards gave way to a series of symbols and meanings that opened onto new vistas in tonal metalinguistic post-tonalism. It's an exhausting work, but one that leaves the listener in a state of near disbelief at what just transpired. If you can only own one Alice Coltrane record, this should be it.” – All Music

“Transfiguration was recorded live at UCLA in 1978, with Reggie Workman on bass and Roy Haynes on drums. To date, it is the last jazz recording that Coltrane has made. (She has made several subsequent recordings of devotional songs and chants)…

…the best piece here is "Prema", on which Coltrane plays acoustic piano, and is joined by a nine-piece string section (overdubbed) that provides a perfect complement to her slow, gospel-tinged style. Consequently, this track works best as jazz, and also most closely approaches the universal spirituality that Coltrane seeks to convey.” – BBC

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“This LP was recorded in late 1971 and it’s the sixth solo album of Alice Coltrane. It is also considered as being one of the most important and strongest records from her entire music career and ‘’one of the finest moments in jazz from the early '70s’’, as quoted by fellow journalist Thom Jurek. The harp is probably one of the very few instruments that you can reach the most divine and spiritual sound with; and there’s plenty of harp, in each song on this LP. The trilogy of the Galaxies (''Galaxy Around Olodumare, in Turiya and in Satchidananda) travels through time and religion, eventually hypnotizing the listener with its ridiculously rough melody, harmony and love. This album is pure love.” – The Attic

“On the two days in November when World Galaxy was recorded, Coltrane chose drummer Ben Riley, bassist Reggie Workman, violinist Leroy Jenkins, saxophonist Frank Lowe, and timpanist Elayne Jones in addition to a string orchestra of 16 to help her realize her latest vision. Coltrane herself plays piano, harp, and organ on this date, sometimes within a single track, as she does on her glorious post-modal reworking of "My Favorite Things." This was a gutsy move, considering it was one of John Coltrane's signature tunes, but Alice has it firmly in hand as she moves from organ to harp to piano and back, turning the melody inside out wide enough for the strings to whip up an atmospheric texture that simultaneously evokes heaven and hell and skewers the prissy nature of the tune in favor of bent polyharmonics that allow the entire world of sound inside to play. The jazz modalism Coltrane presents on "Galaxy Around Olodumare" is quickly undone by Lowe in his solo and reconstructed into polyphony by the string section; it's remarkable. The harp work on "Galaxy in Turiya" (Alice's religious name) is among her most beautiful, creating her own wash of color and dynamic for the strings to fall like water from the sky into her mix. As colors shift and change, the rhythm section responds, and focuses them in the prism of Coltrane's textured harpistry.” – All Music

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“Within the first 30 seconds of "Spiritual Eternal," the opening track on Alice Coltrane's final studio album, Eternity, the listener encounters the complete palette of Alice Coltrane's musical thought. As her Wurlitzer organ careens through a series of arpeggiated modal drones, they appear seemingly rootless, hanging out in the cosmic eternal. They remain there only briefly before an orchestra chimes in behind her in a straight blues waltz that places her wondrously jagged soloing within the context of a universal musical everything as she moves through jazz, Indian music, blues, 12-tone music, and the R&B stridency of Ray Charles. This is the historical and spiritual context Alice Coltrane made her own, the ability to open up her own sonic vocabulary and seamlessly create an ensemble context for to deliver an unpredictable expression of her vision of harmonic convergence.” – All Music

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“Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana was issued in the mid-'70s by Warner Bros. Forgoing jazz altogether, this set is a series of devotional songs from the Hindu religion that Alice Coltrane practiced. Three of the tracks here are chants, with Coltrane backing a vocal chorus on Fender Rhodes electric piano and organ. They are memorable, catchy, and moving given the near ecstatic joy of the singers. The other two tracks here feature Coltrane's interpretations of Indian songs. On "Ganesha," she plays harp and is accompanied only by Sita Coltrane on tamboura. This is not jazz, but it is engaging, utterly compelling music, particularly notable for Alice's juxtaposition of space against melody.” – All Music

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“This double-LP live set recorded at UCLA in 1978, reveals in total the ambitious and profound free jazz and universal musical frontiers Ms. Coltrane was able to explore in both small and larger groups. The lion's share of the music here features her in a trio setting with bassist Reggie Workman and drummer Roy Haynes. Ms. Coltrane performs on piano and organ. The opening moments of the title track, which opens the album, offer the careening subjectivity through the whole-tone improvisation that Alice Coltrane made her own. Certainly there is the influence of her late husband here, but her sense of phraseological articulation and accent is far different. She moves with one hand over a difficult series of arpeggiattic concerns, creating a strong harmonic line for Workman and Haynes to develop into a rhythmic construct. When a standard modal interlude develops in the rhythm section, Coltrane stretches it to its breaking point until a new one must be developed; it's nothing less than breathtaking…

…The interplay between Workman and Haynes was so telepathic, it pushed Ms. Coltrane into new realms further inside these shimmering harmonics until their shards gave way to a series of symbols and meanings that opened onto new vistas in tonal metalinguistic post-tonalism. It's an exhausting work, but one that leaves the listener in a state of near disbelief at what just transpired. If you can only own one Alice Coltrane record, this should be it.” – All Music

“Transfiguration was recorded live at UCLA in 1978, with Reggie Workman on bass and Roy Haynes on drums. To date, it is the last jazz recording that Coltrane has made. (She has made several subsequent recordings of devotional songs and chants)…

…the best piece here is "Prema", on which Coltrane plays acoustic piano, and is joined by a nine-piece string section (overdubbed) that provides a perfect complement to her slow, gospel-tinged style. Consequently, this track works best as jazz, and also most closely approaches the universal spirituality that Coltrane seeks to convey.” – BBC

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