Alice Coltrane She never compromised her music. Ever. Photograph: Courtesy of the Sai Anantam Ashram

Alice Coltranes ashram can still be found at the end of a winding road, in the California town of Agoura Hills. The Sai Anantam Ashram a spiritual retreat and monastery, of sorts is spread over dozens of wooded acres that are dotted with small buildings. At its center is a surreal sight that seems to emerge fully formed from the verdant landscape, like a desert apparition: a striking white building where services are held.

Coltrane who took on the name Swamini Turiyasangitananda after her spiritual transformation died in 2007, and the property that the ashram is on may be sold soon. But in the white building, for right now at least, services still take place, and the ashram is still filled with her old friends and disciples. Inside the white building, adorned with flowing gold curtains and bright blue carpet, beatific images of her are laden in flower garlands, nestled near portraits of the Indian spiritual leader Satya Sai Baba. Members of the ashram, many of them African-American, and wearing saris and other traditional Indian clothes, still gather to sing bhajans traditional Hindu devotional songs, in arrangements written by Coltrane.

A new reissue of her devotional recordings from the 80s and 90s, World Spiritual Classics: Volume I: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, is being released by Luaka Bop, the label established by David Byrne and best known for re-releasing William Onyeabors Nigerian electro-funk. It collects devotional music from the ashram albums that were issued on cassette tape via the Avatar Book Institute in the 80s and 90s recordings that were previously known only to ashram denizens and serious Alice Coltrane aficionados.

In the music, you can hear traces of Coltranes Detroit roots she grew up there, as Alice McLeod, playing in churches and shows steeped in gospel, blues, and jazz, before moving briefly to Paris and then New York. She fell in love with John Coltrane in 1963 and they married in Mexico in 1965; he died of liver cancer, at age 40, in 1967.

She was very upset, says the musician Vishnu Wood, who befriended her early on in Detroit. I had been following this guru Satchidananda and I took her to meet him. They got along very well and he reached out to her, and next thing I knew we were doing an album, Journey in Satchidananda. (Wood plays oud on the album, released in 1970.)

For those whose knowledge of Coltrane centers mainly on her classic albums for Impulse and Warner albums such as Journey in Satchidananda with Pharoah Sanders and Universal Consciousness the ashram tapes come as a bit of a surprise. They involve synthesizers and voice, elements lacking in her classic 1970s work, with their lush arrangements of harp, woodwinds and other acoustic instruments. She sings on many of the ashram recordings her voice a sweetly husky, low alto and she plays a big 1980s synthesizer, the Oberheim OB-8, in addition to organ and other instruments. Several members of the ashram join in too, on voice and on additional instruments.

The synthesizer on the ashram recordings was her daughter Michelle Coltranes idea. Her daughter Michelle said Lets look at synthesizers, mom, you might like it, and she found the Oberheim OB-8, which was easy to use, and she applied that rather liberally to her music, says Baker Bigsby, the audio engineer who worked with Alice Coltrane as well as Sun Ra and Ornette Coleman.

Michelle Coltrane remembers that her mother generally shied away from technology; she even shunned using appliances like microwave ovens. She was happy having a grand piano, a big Steinway grand, and she did love the organ she had one at the ashram and one at her home, says Coltrane. I said, Mom, you gotta check out Roland and Korg and all these products that are coming out, that have arpeggiators and all these things that she might find attractive, and that are easy to transport as well the next thing you know, were on that Oberheim.

When looking through the spiritual eye, or the third eye encased within the human mind, one can see vividly beyond the ken of human eyesight, beyond the material atom, and into the future, thereby transcending the limitations of time and space, she wrote in her book Monument Eternal, published in 1977 after shed become a swamini herself. Through it all, she continued making music. In the 1980s and 1990s, she shied away from major labels, choosing instead to release material on private press cassettes.

Now theres a movement to reintroduce Coltrane. As well as the reissue of her ashram tapes, theres also an upcoming film by director and sound artist Vincent Moon is in the works, and numerous tributes, including the closing concert of this years Red Bulls New York festival, featuring her son Ravi Coltrane (her grand-nephew is Steven Ellison AKA Flying Lotus). Meanwhile, with these newly rediscovered tapes from the 1980s and 1990s, perceptions of Coltranes body of work are changing, too demonstrating that she was a tremendous musician whose work did not end with her legendary 1970s run of records.

On a recent Sunday at the ashram, the musician Surya Botofasina played some of these bhajans on keyboards rousing and jazzy renditions, imbued with gospel and blues while everyone sang along. I was one of a number of kids who grew up on the ashram, what we call our ashram family, Botofasina says. To this day it still remains home sweet home for the heart, because of the tremendous spiritual energy that swamini put into it on every level, including the bhajans we were fortunate enough to sing every Sunday.

World Spiritual Classics: Volume I: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda is out now on Luaka Bop; The Ecstatic World of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda will take place in New York on 21 May

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Higher state of consciousness: how Alice Coltrane finally got her ... - The Guardian