Alice Coltrane channels the spirit of the blues in her approach to jazz piano on this grief filled instrumental composition from 1970.

 have always thought of myself as, if not an active jazzophobe, at least mildly jazz averse, while occasionally liking the odd tune you might call jazz adjacent.

I may need to reconsider because this lovely, trancelike piano piece by Alice Coltrane is indisputably, incontestably, incontrovertibly, actual jazz. And I love it.

Coltrane captures the spirit of the blues in her approach to jazz piano, seamlessly fusing her blues-drenched tone poem with avant garde and “Eastern” influences.

Played by a trio of Coltrane, drummer Ben Riley and Ron Carter on the double bass, it’s wonderfully calming and, dare I say, meditative to listen to, acting almost as a purifying catharsis (if that’s not too pretentious a notion).

It’s the kind of mystical, transcendental sort of jazz which I can imagine enjoying at 4 o’clock in the morning in a smoky cellar in Greenwich Village or Paris.

Coltrane is, of course, a name with which I’m familiar, though I naturally think first of John, whose album of Afro-Blue Impressions includes a 20-minute improvisation on My Favourite Things from The Sound Of Music that has teste my patience on at least one occasion.

Alice was John’s husband, and played the piano and harp in his band in the mid-Sixties; after his death she alternated her own spiritual jazz compositions – of which this is one  – with devotional activities as a Hindu spiritual leader.

Turiya And Ramakrishna comes from her 1970 album Ptah, The El Daoud, recorded during a period of grief immediately following her husband’s horribly premature death at the age of 40. 

Turiya, which is also the name Alice adopted in Hindu circles  – an abbreviation of Swamini Turiyasangitananda  apparently – was defined by her as “a state of consciousness: the high state of Nirvana, the goal of human life.”

Ramakrishna, meanwhile, was a 19th-century Bengali Hindu mystic, and is also the name of a movement founded by his disciples.

Whisper it quietly but after all these years I may be becoming more open to jazz.