music · Sep 27, 2026 · DAILY TRANSMISSION
Alice Coltrane’s Ashram Songs Meet the Farm-Festival Crowd
At Woodsist’s final Arrowood weekend, devotional music once made for a private spiritual community gets a big, open-air hearing.
Two stages, one very unusual songbook
Picture the final day of a farm festival: two alternating stages, Hudson Valley food vendors, and beer brewed right on site. Then picture a set built from devotional songs once recorded with a small ashram community outside Los Angeles. That’s the lovely, slightly wild collision happening Sunday at Woodsist Festival in Accord, New York.
The set is called Divine Songs: The Music of Alice Coltrane. It lands on a bill with Cate Le Bon, Mdou Moctar, Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band, and more. Woodsist is also saying goodbye to Arrowood Farms, its home since 2019.
That gives the whole thing a little extra voltage. A festival that began in a Brooklyn vacant lot in 2009 is closing one chapter by making room for one of Alice Coltrane’s least conventional bodies of work. Good. More festivals should take chances that are this gloriously specific.
Not “spiritual jazz” wallpaper
Divine Songs points to a real 1987 record, not a vague cloud of incense around Coltrane’s name. Released by the Avatar Book Institute, it credited Coltrane with composition, organ, vocals, and synthesizer. Students from the Vedantic Center added vocals and percussion.
The songs include “Rama Rama,” “Keshava Murahara,” “Chandra Shekara,” “Om Shanti,” and “Hari Narayan.” Their roots are in Vedic devotional songs from India and Nepal. Vedic refers to religious and philosophical traditions connected to ancient Indian texts called the Vedas.
Coltrane reshaped those sources with her own melodies and arrangements. She made this music under the spiritual name Turiyasangitananda. That name belongs in the story, because this wasn’t a side hobby after her better-known jazz years. It was a full creative life with its own community, sound, and purpose.
From ashram tape to shared air
Coltrane established the Sai Anantam Ashram outside Los Angeles in 1983. The recordings from that world were initially private, made for a bounded spiritual community rather than the normal music-business machine. Divine Songs carried the sound of people singing and playing together, not a famous musician standing alone under a spotlight.
So a festival presentation changes the frame. It doesn’t erase where the music came from. But it invites a public crowd to encounter it as living repertoire: songs people can hear together, feel together, and maybe carry home in their heads.
Woodsist has described the event as a special tribute. A later report said former members of Coltrane’s band would take part. A full performer list hasn’t been made public, so there’s no need to invent a fantasy supergroup around it. The known idea is already plenty: a serious encounter with music that has often been treated like a rare artifact behind glass.
The archives are opening their doors
This set arrives during a larger return for Coltrane’s devotional recordings. Matador Records planned the first complete authorized public release of her four “Ashram Tapes,” made across the 1980s and ’90s. Earlier listeners could find excerpts from Divine Songs, Infinite Chants, and Glorious Chants on the 2017 compilation The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda.
That matters because plenty of people know Coltrane through her celebrated 1960s and ’70s work as a pianist, harpist, and composer. Her later music has been harder to find and easier to flatten into a lazy label. “Spiritual jazz” can be useful shorthand, but it can also turn strange, local, devoted music into fancy background sound for somebody’s expensive candle.
Arrowood Farms is not an ashram. It’s a farm brewery and distillery hosting an indie festival. Still, the shared food, open air, collective voices, and gathered attention make for a surprisingly human bridge. On Woodsist’s last Arrowood day, Alice Coltrane’s hidden songs get to step outside and make some noise.
SOURCES FROM THIS TRANSMISSION
WOODSIST FESTIVAL 2026 – Woodsist ↗Divine Songs Full — Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda ↗Woods Will Move Woodsist Festival from Arrowood Farms After This Year ↗Announcing "World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda — Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda ↗Alice Coltrane’s Ashram Tapes Are Finally Getting Released | Pitchfork ↗Woods Will Welcome Destroyer, Cate Le Bon, Alice Coltrane Tribute and More to Woodsist 2026 ↗