“A Tribute to Alice Coltrane,” the JVC Jazz Festival concert on Tuesday, elegantly condensed her family, her interests and some of her better music into two hours.
One of the revelations of “A Tribute to Alice Coltrane,” the JVC Jazz Festival concert on Tuesday night at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, was a short film clip of Ms. Coltrane playing piano in Paris in 1959. She was smiling, running through fast bebop with the drummer Kenny Clarke and the saxophonist Lucky Thompson, and skating through the chord changes.
At the time she was learning from Bud Powell, and her playing showed it. After she moved from Paris back to her hometown, Detroit, and then to New York in 1962, met and married John Coltrane, she was still playing those continuous, blanketing lines on the piano. But they were staying in single chords for much longer, and sounded more like the harp, an instrument she took up as well.
Those long arpeggios remained in Ms. Coltrane’s music until her death last year. Tuesday’s concert elegantly condensed her family, her interests and some of her better music into two hours.
There was her son Ravi Coltrane on saxophone. There was an improvising harpist, Brandee Younger. There was a well-chosen pianist, Geri Allen, also from the Detroit area. (She also occasionally used a Korg Triton synthesizer, the same kind Ms. Coltrane played in later years, using the same ersatz orchestral pre-set.) There was a musician on tablas and tamboura, Ed Feldman, a reminder that Ms. Coltrane made music for Vedic meditation for about half her life, eventually founding an ashram in Southern California. And there were the bassist Charlie Haden and the drummer Jack DeJohnette, who played on some of her early records.
For some listeners there’s a danger of mysticism overload with Ms. Coltrane’s music. Charlie Haden and Jack DeJohnette are instant antidotes. Mr. Haden plays in a mysterious ballad style, as she did, but it comes out as the opposite: plain-spoken and boiled-down. Mr. DeJohnette used a low-slung groove for the minor-key blues pieces, and elsewhere played colors as much as rhythms, with a few dozen different kinds of cymbal pings and splashes. This was music with an intention of great, heaving generality — Ms. Coltrane would have called it universality — but Mr. Haden and Mr. DeJohnette grounded it in specific, isolated mechanics of rhythm and melody. They kept it diverting.
The band mostly played selections from Ms. Coltrane’s 1970s records, including “Blue Nile,” “Journey in Satchidananda” and “Los Caballos,” and then a few pieces from her final album, “Translinear Light,” released in 2004.
The theater is a churchlike space with a high ceiling, and as the band started the first of many long vamps it sounded vague and wet. The piano and much of the bass were lost in the acoustics of the space. But then the band self-corrected, played a little more quietly, and the concert turned around completely.
Ms. Coltrane used to hire some very strong and loud saxophonists; her husband had been a model for that. But her son is a much more careful and pinpointed player, and here and there, as he played long tones in the blues and hymns, he sounded more respectfully pretty than cathartic. Gradually, though, he warmed up, putting in some of his own jagged phrasing; by “Journey in Satchidananda,” at the end, he was playing the soprano saxophone hard enough that it sounded tense and alive.
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