Wallace Stegner’s All the Little Live Things would have you believe that people move to California solely because they’re paid as hell and need to distance themselves - spatially, and grip-on-reality-wise - from the human cost of their good fortune. He’s correct. San Francisco and LA, the two major destinations, offer opposite approaches: in the former, the outside world is an obsession, with no end of jackasses all too willing to reassure you that you’re making it a better place; the latter sprawls enough to be entirely self-contained, with vast expanses of natural beauty as a second line of defense. Not surprisingly, it’s in Los Angeles that new age music had its moment. The nonsensical vernacular of the new age movement begins to make sense when read as a diagnosis for what most of us would consider nonsensical problems: the struggles of the rich. No doubt spiritual crisis can be experienced by anybody, but to go so far as to seek actual treatment for it (i.e. to be able to make it a medical priority in lieu of, say, diabetes)? That’s a luxury. And so 1980’s LA gave rise to a bizarre sort of patronage, perhaps the most successful reallocation of capital from the wealthy to artists (musical, con, and all points in-between) in our nation’s history.

Of course, the best art still requires some conviction. There’s an overwhelming amount of entirely non-notable music from the new age era, in large part due to the open-endedness of the problems it sought to solve (and the fact that composition with the end goal of relaxation is basically a solved problem). However, this makes the distinguished works of the era all the more remarkable; unsurprisingly, most come about from the legitimate curiosity of actual, pre-existing musicians (Hiroshi Yoshimura, Suzanne Ciani, much of the Windham Hill roster) rather than the come-lately entrepreneurial types that sprang out of the woodwork when ocean sounds become profitable (you make the call).

Alice Coltrane is most assuredly of the former group. As a bandmate and wife of John Coltrane, great-Aunt of Flying Lotus, and indispensable architect of the spiritual jazz canon, Alice is woven into the very fabric of jazz and the avant-garde, the most explosively creative pairing of the 20th century’s latter half. In 1978, she had a revelation. That year’s Transfiguration capped an unbelievable run of releases, often multiple per year, of which 1971’s Journey in Satchidananda is the best known. And then, nothing. Coltrane, more often called Turiyasangitananda by this point, withdrew into the Vedantic Center in Agoura Hills, giving herself over entirely to the spiritual quests which had always underlain her music. When she returned four years later, her musical and spiritual duties had become one, and the result was something entirely new. Gone were the rhythm and horn sections, replaced by enormous synthesizer swells and chanted devotional mantras. Fully in service of Hinduism, Turiya’s musical blessing was now an exclusively spiritual device.

Here’s where it gets dicey. While life at the ashram was apparently perfectly serene (check this phenomenal radio program documenting its history), its big proponents these days are mostly weirdos, envisioning appreciation of Turiya’s music as a sort of holistic experience that includes full-on subscription to the spiritual component. I haven’t fully resolved my thoughts about listening to this stuff constantly (Divine Songs, in particular, has been maybe my third- or fourth-most played album over the past year) with zero interest in the accompanying baggage. Charitably, the same spiritual sensibility it rides for would have me find my own way; less so, it sure is convenient that this stuff is in another language, making it easy for me to pretend that I’m not surgically removing the part I’m into (the music) from an entire contextual entity that, despite being part and parcel of the music’s creation, I’m discarding. For the time being, I'll probably treat it like I do the rest of these conflicts: carry right the fuck on and do some karmic penance elsewhere.

Speaking of, a sort of greatest hits of Alice Coltrane's devotional works was just released: give a listen here or elsewhere on the internet and then think for at least a second about buying it.