Blue Nile

Although Alice Coltrane's music has never been one of my favorites in jazz, her early solo albums contain some wondrous materials and interesting uses of the harp in the jazz idiom. Like John Coltrane and others of the late 1960s and 1970s, her music was immersed in alternative spirituality and aesthetics drawn from Africa, India, and the avant-garde. However, I found Coltrane's later music to have become too heavily invested in the Indian influences. Her early compositions, like the alluring "Blue Nile," capture that "Eastern" aesthetic and droning bass and rollicking drums with a catchy horn line and bluesy roots with provocative harp-playing. This is the best period in Alice's music, in this blogger's humble opinion.