Genre: Spiritual Free Jazz
Rating: Transcends Ratings – World Treasure
1971
Universal Consciousness is a special and rare work of art that’s impossibly ambitious and ultimately accomplishes everything the artists intended at the highest level. There’s no higher praise than to say it successfully continues the trajectory set by John Coltrane. And it does and as such it stands with the greatest artistic achievements in human history.
I’m completely comfortable with accusations of deifying John Coltrane. His music is my higher power. He gave us atheists a sonic path to spirituality. No lies and ridiculous fictions needed. He taught us that all war is wrong and all religions are true. I believe that Truth is in his sound and it’s the only non-Cartesian Truth I will ever have. And when I called upon it, it was there for me. The Ramones are my physical self and John Coltrane is the self I don’t understand. Universal Consciousness, which is perfectly titled, captures that.
There’s so much talent on this record you really have to look at who created it. Alice Coltrane obviously but skies above skies if she didn’t get the right people involved. Ornette for the transcriptions. Then for the duets it’s Rashied Ali, the only man to work in duet with John Coltrane. And Jack DeJohnette, who 14 years later would be back in the Ornette Coleman sphere and play on Song X. Which was life changing for me because it was the first free jazz record I ever bought. I did, however, have a quite a few hours of free jazz on cassette that I recorded off of WREK, the greatest radio station of all-time. Thank you to those DJs who introduced me to an entire musical universe that made high school bearable. Thanks to them, I knew there was another world out there. And thanks to them I had music that no one else I knew could possibly understand. It was mine alone.
Destroy All Music
Warmth Highest 