/Immersive Ritual in Sound and Light
The Alice Coltrane Tribute was conceived as a multidimensional offering where music, image, and spirit fused into an immersive ritual space. Curated in collaboration with harpist and SFJAZZ Resident Artistic Director Brandee Younger, the performance honored Coltrane’s transcendent legacy not through replication, but through the embodiment of her meditative and metaphysical vision. Sound, improvisation, and visual storytelling became conduits for spiritual inquiry and sonic elevation.
“The Alice Coltrane Tribute exemplifies how technology can serve not as spectacle, but as a vessel for empathy, memory, and spiritual continuity.”
The visual language drew deeply from Pheoris West, whose portrayals of the divine feminine, timeless, diasporic, and fluid inform the Afro-Futurist compositions created for the performance. At its center stood the harp, not merely as an instrument, but as a sacred object, a luminous axis around which the visual and sonic worlds rotated.
Funded by a HeArts research grant from the University of Texas at Dallas, the visual production integrated AI-generated imagery, advanced image processing, and spatial compositional design. Celestial harp forms, radiant feminine figures, and ascending architectural structures emerged, each mapped precisely to the contours of Miner Auditorium. Real-time improvisation drove the projection system, enabling the visuals to evolve organically in response to the music. Subtle apparitions of Alice Coltrane surfaced and dissolved within the projection field, while Matt Unkenholz’s live camera work composited the performers directly into the visual space.
“The ensemble’s live improvisation directly shaped the evolving visual environment, merging performers, audience, and space into one fluid composition.”
The ensemble curated by Brandee Younger, featuring Rashaan Carter, Makaya McCraven, Marc Cary, the San Francisco Conservatory String Ensemble conducted by De’Sean Jones, flutist Nicole Mitchell, and saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, produced a sonic environment that was at once grounded in jazz lineage and oriented toward transcendence. Through collective improvisation, the musicians and visual artists evoked the cyclical, devotional structure of Alice Coltrane’s compositions, offering a soundscape that functioned as both meditation and invocation.
Andrew F. Scott, Visual Artistic Director, with Brandee Younger: Alice Coltrane Tribute. Brandee Younger, Resident Artistic Director, Rashaan Carter, Makaya McCraven, SF Conservatory of Music String Ensemble conducted by De’Sean Jones, Ravi Coltrane, Nicole Mitchell, Marc Cary, Matt Unkenholz, remote cameras, and technical direction. SFJazz, Miner Auditorium, San Francisco, CA, March 9–10, 2024.