Dance Tribute to Jazz’s Quiet Genius Alice Coltrane at The Soraya

As the kickoff of The Soraya’s fifth annual Jazz at Naz festival (Jan. 31 – Feb. 18, 2026) draws near, the first jazz moves will emanate from the theater’s Great Hall courtesy of a sister art form, dance. The debut performance of Alonzo King LINES Ballet on Saturday, Feb. 21 will feature the acclaimed San Francisco-based contemporary-classical ballet company in a very new work by Artistic Director Alonzo King. The choreographer’s Ode to Alice Coltrane (2024) pays tribute to the pianist/harpist/composer whose subdued spiritual sound was a wellspring of cultural influence in pre-millennial America. A second King work, The Collective Agreement, is staged to an original score by Jason Moran—a giant of contemporary jazz piano who collaborates frequently with LINES and is well known to Soraya audiences, either from his live performances here, or by the scores he has created, for example, for Martha Graham Dance Company.    

The Moran work opens the program. Originally a King commission for San Francisco Ballet in 2018, The Collective Agreement was then restaged on the National Ballet of Canada and is now danced by LINES. King, who calls it “more of a neoclassical ballet,” says, “it holds up beautifully as done by other dancers. But when you have artists who are able to read your every gesture and absorb your consciousness, it is a completely different message.” The work has an unusual light installation by Jim Campbell.

Alonzo King came on board the ambitious celebratory “Year of Alice” invited by two offspring of Alice Coltrane (1937-2007) and her husband, the renowned tenor saxophonist John Coltrane (1926-1967). Ravi Coltrane, himself an accomplished saxophonist, and his half-sister Michelle, a vocalist, felt that their mother’s legacy lagged that of their better-known father. Their prescient idea was to include choreography in the “Year of Alice” mix.

“I did not know Ravi and Michelle. When we met, there was a magnetism,” said King. “They told me, ‘We’ve seen your work and we love it.’” King’s rapid response to the Coltranes’ proposal, he admitted, “may have shocked them a little bit.” For King, the moment sparked an instant “affirmation of a lineage” set in motion decades ago. He had long admired Alice Coltrane’s mystical amalgam of jazz with classical music, African American gospel, and Indian ragas. “When I lived in New York, whenever Coltrane was in town I went to see her. I always wanted to do a work with her. So, for me, this circle was a life’s dream come true.” The roots of collaboration went even deeper: “For years I did ballets with [tenor saxophonist and free-jazz avatar] Pharoah Sanders,” a prominent artist featured on Alice Coltrane’s most celebrated recording, her chef d’oeuvre, Journey in Satchidananda (1971).

While studying classical piano as a child, the Detroit-raised Alice McLeod Coltrane bore the strong aural-and-rhythmic imprint of her local church, Olive Baptist, where, starting at age nine, she served as pianist/organist. Advancing in music, and as a young woman showing up in New York, she gigged as a side player, fending off jazz-world sexism and encountering her future husband. Starting in 1965, a John Coltrane quintet featured Alice on keyboard. As a couple, the two musicians journeyed into modal and free jazz inflected by Indian ragas and Arabic trance music. A mother of four, Alice Coltrane maneuvered through a nearly totally male-dominated arena with quiet grace.

In this marriage, noted King, both people “loved the same god (music) and they were both spiritual. Coltrane changed his life; he transformed from heroin to bliss. He completely shifted. And after his death, she started an Ashram.” Indeed, Alice Coltrane spent her final decade in the northern reaches of Los Angeles as the Hindu spiritual leader Swamini Turiyasangitananda.

King staged his wafting Ode to excerpts he curated from a vast array of Alice’s recorded output, much of it unpublished. “I asked Ravi and Michelle for access to everything and they gave me license; from that large catalogue, I chose what really moved me.”

The most familiar will surely be the titular work of Satchidananda, an album Rolling Stone called “a meditative bliss-out.” It’s a dream soundscape for a choreographer: Cecil McBee’s reverberating bass line; the twang of the sitar-like tanpura, the flood of arpeggios of Alice’s harp, and Pharoah Sander’s soprano sax drizzled upon that foundation.

“Knowing the musicians,” explained King, “The bass [line represents] the vibration of the cosmos. They are really trying to point at the Ohm sound, the vibration that permeates all existence. The summons is [that] heaven and earth are one, and it pulls you in; what it’s addressing is to step away from intellect and fall into this stream. The om sound is so ancient, it is AMIN and AMEN, this Ahhhhh—it’s what they call the celestial roar.”

King continued, “The Sanskrit term for ‘God’ is Sat-Chit-Ananda: Eternal Being or Truth (sat), Infinite Consciousness (chit), and Ever-new Bliss (ananda). Satchidananda means unending bliss. It’s conscious knowledge of the divine. They are talking about infinity.”

So, how do you choreograph infinity? King’s dialogue with this persistently spiritual music relays how well chosen he was as a dance maker to give form to Alice’s aural magical mystery tour. His ballet unspools as a multi-image illustration of his trademark pointe work for tall willowy ballerinas and earthbound forays for men. The parade of dance treatments reflects Coltrane’s musical diversity—it runs from the feathery to the bluesy—in solos, duets, trios and full ensemble groupings. Outstanding light design by Seah Johnson bathes the stage in radiant moon beams and golden landscapes. Designer Robert Rosenwasser’s gorgeous gossamer dresses for the ladies are paired with multifarious bare-chested looks for the men—some in skirts. The work opens with a line of dancers, crawling, one-by-one, toward some destination. At different points, King places dancers on stage bearing witness as their peers dance, a kind of leveler, as the unearthly LINES dancers drop their distinctive dancerliness.  

Alonzo King’s connection with the Coltrane family felt like an “internal recognition of a love returned, and that meant a lot to me,” he said. “We did a beautiful job, and we worked so intently and deeply. Because it was an homage, I wanted it to be everything: beautiful, intelligent, and all the depth and the unspoken profundity of her music.”