"...Coltrane was by this stage deeply engaged with matters of the spirit. Her compositions began to bend psychedelically to musical traditions around the world, but remained flavored by the bebop environment of her Detroit youth. She recorded Journey in Satchidananda, named for her spiritual adviser Swami Satchidananda, in 1970. All of Coltrane’s early albums bear witness to her exploration of mythology and religion, particularly from Egypt and India, the latter of which she visited several times in the 1970s. But it’s Journey in Satchidananda that pays full tribute to the transformation that she underwent in the late 1960s—as a human being and artist.

As that crystalline harp makes so immediately clear, this is a record as much about the soul as it is about skilled orchestration. The clue is in the title: it’s a journey. Coltrane takes us across uncharted territory in jazz composition, drawing from multiple cultures and diverse instruments, but she also shows us emotion in motion. Because she refuses to stay in one key, instead treating the album’s themes as a set of recurring melodic shapes, the very texture of Journey is defined by transition, process, and flow. Its music has no beginning or end. Instead, as the first bars of the opening track demonstrate, Coltrane is working with the principle of looping and transcendence.

You should listen to Journey beginning to end while lying on the ground with your eyes closed, because those are the best conditions for performing the kind of visualization that Alice Coltrane’s liner notes request: “Anyone listening to this selection should try to envision himself floating on an ocean of Satchinandaji’s love,” she wrote, “which is literally carrying countless devotees across the vicissitudes and stormy blasts of life to the other shore.”