For over 40 years, the Detroit Jazz Festival Foundation has celebrated Detroit’s rich history of jazz music by providing year-round concerts and educational programming, and of course, organizing the world’s largest free jazz festival, featuring world-class talent, over Labor Day weekend. “Sonically, jazz is genetically related to the city of Detroit,” says Chris Collins, president and artistic director of the Detroit Jazz Festival Foundation.
The spirit of musical lineage and legacy is one that infuses this year's festival.
Opening night on Friday will mark the premiere of “Translinear Light: The Music of Alice Coltrane.” The performance on the Carhartt Amphitheater Stage at Hart Plaza will feature Alice Coltrane’s son, saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, with special guest Brandee Younger and the Detroit Jazz Festival Chamber Orchestra.
Alice Coltrane was born Alice Lucille McLeod on Aug. 27, 1937 here in Detroit. Her family was inherently musical. Her mother Anna was a singer in the church choir. Her sister Marilyn would go on to be a songwriter for Motown.
She honed her musical skills in church — first on the organ, then the piano. Her family supported her dreams and she moved to Paris in the 1950s. She married and had a daughter Michelle before returning to Detroit. In the early 1960s, while playing with the Terry Gibbs Quartet, she met saxophonist John Coltrane and the two married in Juárez, Mexico in 1965, and they had three more children together.
“Alice was ahead of her time, one of the first people to move outside the mainstream, and certainly one of the first female, Black, American jazz musicians to record her own music in her own studio, and to release music on her own terms,” her son Ravi said in a press release. “There is something to be said about timing. It can take a moment for people to recognize where the energies are, where the weight is... But now people across all generations are finding their way to Alice’s music in a myriad of different ways. It’s hard to pinpoint what makes her music so powerful, but there’s something in her spirit, in her intention that is very clear — and people can feel that immediately.”
The Coltrane family’s foundation, The John & Alice Coltrane Home, have declared 2024 and 2025 to be “The Year of Alice.”
The celebration will feature previously unreleased music and reissues, community programming, a multimedia museum exhibit, newly choreographed ballet works, and more — all inspired by the life and legacy of Alice Coltrane. The Detroit performance of Translinear Light will mark one of the inaugural events — one that the family hopes will expose audiences to Coltrane’s music more than 17 years after her passing.
“She was just a very kind and loving and generous person,” Ravi Coltrane tells Metro Times. “She was in search of a universal love, a higher love — and spreading that message through her music and her spiritual and religious practice. She had a message of peace and love that I think just radiates from everything that she was and all the music that she created. I think younger audiences feel that when they discover her.”
“To truly honor and celebrate the artists who have left an indelible mark on history, especially someone as deep as our Detroit sister Alice Coltrane, we must develop an accurate understanding of the gifts they left behind and build on those gifts with new perspectives, generations and artistry,” says Collins. “For 45 years the Detroit Jazz Festival has sought to propagate the living breathing jazz legacy and the artists as agents of inspiration. We are very proud to work with the Coltrane house and the Coltrane family to rediscover Alice’s music from the source and present a world premiere that brings her voice to new generations and embodies her legacy of challenging boundaries, evolving the art and inspiring all of us to new heights.”
The legacy of another pioneering woman will also be highlighted this year.
Known as the “Angel of Jazz,” Gretchen C. Valade had unwavering commitment to the propagation of Detroit’s jazz legacy and the preservation of the Detroit Jazz Festival Foundation and the Detroit Jazz Festival, the world’s largest admission-free jazz festival.
She passed away at the age of 97 in 2022.
Valade was a Detroit philanthropist whose grandfather founded the work clothing line Carhartt. She donated millions of dollars to jazz studies and performance at Wayne State University, and this year will be the first year that many of the performances will take place at the newly built Gretchen C. Valade Jazz Center. “This space was crafted acoustically, visually to honor jazz music,” Collins says of the center. “Everything — even the backline — was curated for the genre.”
The jazz center features an extensive renovation of the Hilberry Theatre, 350 seats (with increased leg room), outstanding acoustics, renovated and expanded restrooms, star dressing rooms, choral and orchestra dressing rooms, elevator access to restrooms and lower level, and an underground Jazz Café on the lower level — where some of this years performances will take place.
Of this year’s festival, Ravi Coltrane says, “I love that festival. I’ve played it many times. Detroit is a beautiful city. And the fact that it’s a free festival means the energy in the crowd is always very, very positive and very festive. So the energy of playing there is always just something very unique. Only in Detroit.”
“Translinear Light: The Music of Alice Coltrane” starts at 7 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 30 at the Detroit Jazz Festival; Hart Plaza; see detroitjazzfest.org for the full schedule. No cover.
