Sunday February 11th!
We will be joined by WPFW Program Director Katea Stitt as our presenter!!
Classic Album Sundays is the world’s most popular album listening experience and allows the listener to hear music contextually, communally, uninterrupted, and in great sonic detail. At our worldwide listening sessions, music fans are able to immerse themselves into an album that has helped shape our culture and in some cases, our lives.
We relay the artist and album’s unique story and provide a musical context that gives the listening experience deeper meaning. We share the experience of hearing the album in its entirety, on vinyl, and on a world-class audiophile hi-fi so that fans can experience the music as close as possible to the artist’s original intention. Classic Album Sundays treats the album (and music in general) with the respect it deserves rather than as a free commodity or aural wallpaper. We remind people what they love about music.
For our February (Black History Month) 2018 session we present Alice Coltrane’s “Journey in Satchidananda”! The changes in Alice Coltrane’s highly variable music during her remarkable run of solo records closely paralleled those in her spiritual development. But all along, her music was concerned with the big questions: birth, death, meaning, purpose, the nature of the cosmos; you got the sense that music was for her foremost a tool for uncovering and expressing universal truths.
This is one that hooks you. Everything is laid out in the first few seconds of “Journey in Satchidananda”– the commanding, simple bassline, the buzzing tambura drone, and Alice’s glorious harp, which sounds in her hands like the instrument of angels it was always reputed to be. Once thought of as an expansion upon a favorite John Coltrane moment, the composition “India” that he played in 1961 at the Village Vanguard, really, it sits in its own space. Pharoah Sanders on soprano sax draws from the intensity he’d been riding since the mid-1960s, but the sense here is less a furious search than a deserved arrival conveying a vibe of expansive, inclusive peace.
Join us at one of our Classic Album Sundays Washington album listening sessions around the world to experience Alice Coltrane in a way you never have before.
