For years Alice Coltrane was, in the common account, "the widow" — the wife who took McCoy Tyner's place at the piano and inherited a daunting surname. Franya Berkman was the first to treat her as what she was: an author, a composer, one of the most original voices of her era. Monument Eternal is the first book-length study of her music, and it remains the standard one.
Berkman, an ethnomusicologist, traces the whole arc: the child playing the organ in Detroit's black churches, the bebop pianist, the harpist of the Impulse! and Warner records, and finally Swami Turiyasangitananda, directing a spiritual community in Southern California and cutting devotional chants released only on cassette. Critics long found that path embarrassing; Berkman takes it seriously at every stage, including the ashram recordings that, after the Luaka Bop revival, are now heard by everyone.
For the spiritual-jazz reader it is a valuable book: Alice is central to my chapters and to the contemporary revival, and this is the only study to embrace her complete trajectory, from modal music to devotion. The writing is rigorous but readable, complete with musical examples for those who read them.
It is a slim book — a hundred and sixty pages — and a specialised one, a deep study rather than a general introduction. It should be said too that Berkman died young, in 2012, not long after publishing it.
The title is that of an Alice Coltrane composition. The book earns it: it is itself a monument, to the musician and to the scholar who studied her first.