ILLUMINATIONS: Devadip Carlos Santana & Turiya Alice Coltrane; Cassette (1974)
$20.00
Original cassette release of this Avant Free Jazz release from 1974 in Excellent used condition.
Of the handful of varying styles Santana recorded during his career, none reflects his nomadic musical exploration better than his 1974 collaborative LP with Alice Coltrane, Illuminations. The two came together very much due to Santana’s preoccupation with jazz, but both shared a common vision of expressing their spirituality through music. Coltrane’s musical path had been colored by spiritual exploration. She had explored Eastern spirituality and its music with her husband John Coltrane before carving out her own catalog of forward-thinking jazz. Santana’s own musical path also began in the San Francisco’s Mission District in the late 1960s – ground zero for free love and recreational drug use. The resulting record is as strange and fascinating as the pairing would suggest, although Illuminations fits better within Coltrane’s varied catalogue. By the mid-1970s, Coltrane had already released a number of free-form records that married avant-garde jazz, gospel, blues and devotional Hindu music. For Santana, it’s a work that was completely incomparable to anything else he had ever done. None of his previous releases hinted at the improvisational release that was to follow. Illuminations is the deepest Santana would ever delve into the world of jazz. Santana explained years later in Rolling Stone magazine, “This shit is not for me, I don’t care how enlightening it is.”
