Why am I passionate about this?
“Big Butt.” That’s all you need to know about me. It was the first song I wrote and recorded on a dusty cassette tape in 1986. I was 10 years old and an obsessive Prince fan. On the back of his records, he wrote some variation of “written, recorded, produced and performed by Prince.” Those words empowered me to be an artist. More specifically, here’s what I wrote as a 10-year-old: “When I grow up, I want to be a rock star like Prince.” Five years later, I started writing poetry, and all of the poems I wrote felt like songs. Music is the fuel for all that I create.
Marcus' book list on an everlong fire of musical obsession
Why did Marcus love this book?
Can we have more books on Alice Coltrane, please? I enjoy telling people I love “Coltrane” and then correcting them when they assume I’m talking about John.
John was great. He was transcendent. And so was Alice.
Alice came into her true self after John dropped his body. I am eternally fascinated by her music and where it takes me.
Franya J. Berkman’s book is tragically one of the few books where you can learn about Alice’s story. It’s expertly factual and insightful.
1 author picked Monument Eternal as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Alice Coltrane was a composer, improviser, guru, and widow of John Coltrane. Over the course of her musical life, she synthesized a wide range of musical genres including gospel, rhythm-and-blues, bebop, free jazz, Indian devotional song, and Western art music. Her childhood experiences playing for African-American congregations in Detroit, the ecstatic and avant-garde improvisations she performed on the bandstand with her husband John Coltrane, and her religious pilgrimages to India reveal themselves on more than twenty albums of original music for the Impulse and Warner Brothers labels.
In the late 1970s Alice Coltrane became a swami, directing an alternative spiritual…