After a whirlwind five week journey to India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) with her guru Swami Satchidananda, Alice Coltrane scarcely had time to unpack her luggage before getting back to the bustle of New York City. Barely a few weeks after the release of her fourth studio album, Journey in Satchidananda, and a mere six weeks before recording Universal Consciousness, Coltrane performed at this benefit for her guru in Carnegie Hall. Alice assembled an octet of what would by any conservative estimate be a dream team of jazz luminaries: reedsmen Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp, bassists Cecil McBee and Jimmy Garrison, and drummers Ed Blackwell and Clifford Jarvis. (The harmonium of Kumar Kramer and tambura of Tulsi Reynolds weren’t properly mic’d, alas.)

At first, Alice was asked to just perform one number, the title track to her new album. The slow meditative catharsis of “Journey” (dilated to double its length as both McBee and Garrison widened its space while Sanders and Shepp soared even higher) was so rapturously received that the group played three more numbers. “Shiva Loka” again returned to the serenity of its jazz-raga fusion that had come to define Coltrane’s recorded works, but the latter two numbers revealed her to be a true force of nature. Sanders and Shepp are legendarily fiery players across their own discographies, so it’s a revelation to hear them together with the widow Coltrane, every bit their peer. Her versions of John Coltrane’s “Africa” and his still-unreleased late composition “Leo” find her to be just as bold and fearless a bandleader as her late husband, pushing the music and her musicians into heady, physically-demanding higher realms. A cathartic concert by any metric, physical or spiritual.