Review: Brandee Younger Honors the Music — and Spirit — of Alice Coltrane at SFJAZZ

I had started to worry about the term “spiritual jazz.”

For the past six or seven years, it has become divorced from its radical roots to become the new Putumayo Music — a hip, vaguely “exotic” sound for well-to-do middle-aged white people to dabble in its aesthetics in order to feel sophisticated. It is no longer the social and political undercurrent of “Alabama,” “Space is the Place” or “Colors,” but playlist wallpaper. A few years ago, when I was in one of those lifestyle boutiques on Valencia Street — you know the kind, with candles, bespoke jewelry and a single rack of long dresses — and heard Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananda, I knew something was amiss culturally, like something reverent was being stolen.

Thankfully, Brandee Younger came to the SFJAZZ Center this past weekend to take it back.

For her program dedicated to the music of Alice Coltrane, Younger brought players closely connected to the music’s lineage. Nicole Mitchell, founder of the Black Earth Ensemble and former chair of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, played flute. On drums was Makaya McCraven, whose father played with Archie Shepp. On saxophone, well, you can’t do much better than Ravi Coltrane, the son of John and Alice Coltrane.

But it was Younger’s total immersion in the music, and commitment to honoring it deeply and properly, that elevated the program from surface-level tribute to sacred ritual. From lesser-known songs like set opener “Rama Rama” to eternal compositions like “Turiya & Ramakrishna,” Younger played solos that dug probingly into Coltrane’s modal chord figures and prodded the band to moments of transcendental alchemy.

That Alice Coltrane was overlooked in her time is no secret; plainly sexist notions, of her as mere wife of one of jazz’s most prominent musicians, kept the world from recognizing her genius. Shattered by her husband’s untimely death at the tail end of the civil rights era, she turned to religious education, founded Sai Anantam Ashram in Southern California and recorded privately pressed cassettes of Hindu devotional songs.

In other words, she lived with intention — and the group on Saturday night matched it. There were quite simply no weak links on stage. Credit must go to De’Sean Jones, who conducted a string sextet with a keen ear for dynamics, especially on the delicate “Pranadhana,” played by just harp, soprano sax and strings. Bassist Rashaan Carter anchored the group (the bass line for “Journey in Satchidananda” was one of the first he ever learned, remarked Younger after the song) and included a few brilliant solos of hammer-ons and pull-offs that never got too flashy for their own good.

Mitchell traded fours with Coltrane on the perpetually accelerating “Los Caballos,” which gave McCraven a chance to break out of his support role and play the disassembled beats he’s known for. On “Blue Nile” — a song that Alice Coltrane performed at her last-ever concert, at San Francisco’s Masonic Auditorium in 2006 — Mitchell infused her invigorating alto flute solo with a bluesy, human cry of experience. (Andre 3000, take notes.)

Ravi Coltrane, who just gets more revelatory every year, propelled the uptempo “Affinity” with a thrilling solo that maneuvered inside and out of the music. As for Marc Cary, who played piano and synthesizer? At the end of “Prema,” he soloed so bracingly up the piano keys that his fingers kept right on playing, off the right edge of the piano, into the air.

Younger’s high regard for Alice Coltrane is more than evident; she introduced three different songs as “my favorite Alice Coltrane composition.” What she did with that esteem at SFJAZZ on Saturday night, though? You won’t get it in a spiritual jazz playlist piped through Sonos speakers at a Thai fusion restaurant in Napa. You just had to be there, and let it wash over you.