Coltrane

Alongside music by Laura Nyro, Alice Coltrane’s elegiac “There’s Something About John Coltrane” anchors the choreography, which features a Black female solo dancer, costumed in regal all-white, who moves from pantomimes of brutal labor under captivity to ecstatic but brooding liberation silhouettes that wheel and wallow in the restoration of her sovereign identity.

It’s remained in the company’s repertoire for decades, and the use of Coltrane’s elegy for the love of her life has made that music into two dirges, one for husband John Coltrane and another for the woman on the invisible mourner’s bench honoring and channeling him for the rest of her days.

Alice Coltrane’s life and legacy is a series of those callings.

“Cry” and cries aside, her work is in and out of revival, while John Coltrane’s is a cultural metronome such that even his inaccessible-for-some late-period recordings and live performances — during which he squealed and screamed his way toward another realm of psalm — are embraced by critics and jazz fans who dismiss the jazz avant-garde, his free playing their only exemption.

Meanwhile, Alice Coltrane, despite having been one of John’s pianists, is maneuvered into the margins by subgenre euphemisms like “spiritual jazz,” by which many mean, music for hippies and poets, while mainstream jazz is for men who read Esquire and smoke performative cigars on business trips.