In the late summer of 1967, a delivery truck pulled up to a suburban home where a newly widowed mother of four was living, and workers unloaded a massive Lyon and Healy concert harp. John Coltrane had ordered it for his wife before his death at age 40 on July 17, 1967. This episode follows Alice Coltrane, born Alice McLeod in Detroit in 1937, from a gospel-soaked family home to Paris, where she studied with bebop architect Bud Powell and worked as intermission pianist at the Blue Note, and back to Detroit as a single working mother before she met and married John Coltrane.

The conversation explores how she replaced McCoy Tyner in Coltrane's group in 1966, how she interpreted the devastating grief after his death as tapas, a Sanskrit period of purifying fire, and how the physical demands of a 47-string harp forced her to slow down and invent ...