Alice Coltrane and No Wave’s overlooked women step out of the margins

2026 is shaping up to be a year for incredible music books. Some of the best non-fiction books are projects where the writer is stepping up to fill a gap, to document the undocumented (or insufficiently chronicled), to tell a story that hasn’t been told adequately, to share a subject the writer is insanely passionate about. All of the above are true in two new fantastic books: Andy Beta’s “Cosmic Music: The Life, Art and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane” and Adele Bertei’s “No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene.” In both cases, these are sprawling, immersive volumes, authored with obvious knowledge and deep understanding, but written in an engaging, open style that’s clearly meant to engage readers and bring them closer to each book’s respective subjects.

“Cosmic Music” author Andy Beta was a teenage punk rock kid bragging about his diverse musical tastes — he was into John Coltrane  — when someone tipped him off to Alice Coltrane’s “Journey In Satchidananda,” telling him, “‘You’ve got to hear it. It’s, like, the most beautiful music in the world.” At the time, Beta thought to himself, “Wow, John Coltrane’s sister also made jazz music? This is a really talented family.” It was the golden age of music discovery, where music fans relied on personal discovery or recommendation — in Beta’s case, he admits that if Kurt Cobain mentioned a record, he would go and buy that record, but that story isn’t shameful, because plenty of previous generations did the same exact thing.

But in the mid-’90’s, there wasn’t that much information out there about Alice Coltrane (née McLeod). Her records were difficult to find, and as Beta illustrates in the book, over and over again, her work, her formidable talents, and her contributions were largely ignored or dismissed. Beta shared with Salon that he kept thinking that surely at some point there would be a comprehensive book about Coltrane’s life and work, and eventually he realized that the people who knew and worked with her were passing on, and if he didn’t step up, there would be nothing left to write about.

Alice Coltrane was born in Detroit, and was a product of the same environment that gave the world Aretha Franklin, Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross and Berry Gordy, Jr., who was a neighbor. This is where the story rightfully begins, centering the woman whose name is in the title of the book, who made a name for herself on piano long before she became affiliated with the man who would become her second husband. Along the way, the reader is drawn into the history of Detroit, bebop, jazz, John Coltrane and his peers, along with a detour into the growth of eastern mysticism in the west and even something as mundane (at least from the outside) as the history of New Age music as a genre: did you know that the reason that the first wave of New Age music was largely on cassette was because it was used for meditation and no one wanted to have to get up and flip the record? It’s a small but pertinent factoid, one of dozens Beta shares across the journey of unspooling Alice Coltrane’s life.

“Cosmic Music” is over 400 pages long, and that includes 36 pages of footnotes. That is formidable, but this book is meant to be definitive, and it succeeds in accomplishing that. Beta spoke with anyone who he felt had something to add to the story and combed the archives for any relevant mention, even if (as the reader will sadly become accustomed to) sometimes all that represented a record or a concert was a four-line negative review in “Down Beat,” the influential jazz magazine that began publishing in 1934. Beta wasn’t an expert in any of the subjects that he had to master in order to write this book, and yet he dives incredibly deep whenever it is called for. Where other books about musicians might do a quick pass or stop short when venturing into areas that might not be in the writer’s wheelhouse, Beta manages to beautifully synthesize all of these threads into a story that is engaging and highly readable.

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This matters because if the book was too technical or relied on assumptions that the reader already had extensive knowledge of jazz, New York City, or the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, they would likely stop reading. Beta has a fantastic sense of what information is key to the story because he clearly understands his subject, and he operates from a place of generosity and curiosity, which are the book’s vital characteristics and why it is so successful.

Alice McLeod was a highly gifted and accomplished pianist who later became renowned for her mastery of the harp. When she auditioned for a spot in Terry Gibbs’ quartet, Gibbs said, “Right from the introduction Alice played on the first song, I knew that she was something else. She sounded just like Bud Powell. She played chorus after chorus, and every note was a gem.” It was during an engagement at Birdland, where the quartet was first on the bill, that Alice McLeod had the opportunity to experience the John Coltrane Quartet up close. Bassist William Wood takes credit for putting the couple together, but notes, “When you open for somebody, they’re checking you out your whole set. He was able to see her level of musicianship . . . I’m sure he checked her out and thought he would put his money on that.”

She was also a skillful composer and arranger with an uncanny ear; a story relayed in the book is how, when working with a string section, she could hear the smallest off note: “She would stop sessions and tune the strings: ‘Third viola player, would you bring your D up just a little bit?’ in the middle of this oceanic stuff. She had an astonishing ear,” is just one story out of many Beta relays in this book.

Another aspect that Beta handles so well is presenting individual struggles and challenges without judgement. There were a lot of drugs and alcohol and other bad decisions in the history of the individuals he is writing about and he does not try to minimize them nor does he pass judgement. He simply chronicles the information as facts and does so with great neutrality. Beta takes a similar approach to expressions of spirituality and mysticism, which there is a fair amount of in this book, given Alice Coltrane’s personal journey into becoming Swamini Turiyasangitananda. He uses her words, and the words of the people surrounding her or in her community, to express, explain and expand upon her beliefs, whether it’s explaining her approach to making and recording music, supervising her late husband’s catalog reissues, or her uncanny ability to always find a parking place. Beta simply grants Coltrane the autonomy to define her own experience, which shouldn’t be radical, and yet it is.

This skill of presenting information in factual detail also extends to the rampant sexism Alice Coltrane experienced across her entire lifetime. When sexism is mentioned in other books — even by women — it seems to be qualified, couched or explained (e.g., “Well, it was the ‘70s.”) Beta does not do that. He will relate the conversation or the interview or quote from a review and either let its blatant misogyny stand on its own or he will point out what exactly is happening. This matters because sexism isn’t something that happens once or a few times and so you just need to allude to it in passing and move on; it is something that happens to women every single day, it is something female artists are always fighting. It does not stop. Alice Coltrane was attacked on multiple levels for the duration of her public life, with people calling her “the Yoko Ono of jazz” because she was the creative executor of her late husband’s creative output, and many people were outraged that she touched his work, that she supervised his reissues, and that she might possess insight as to his intentions that others on the outside might not have been privy to.

Alice Coltrane accomplished so much, personally, professionally, and spiritually, and her influence is only now rising to the level it should have been when she was still on this planet. Thanks to “Cosmic Music,” anyone interested in her life and work doesn’t have to go comb through microfilm or ancient magazines to learn more about this unbelievably accomplished and completely fascinating human being.

Happy publication day ???? Adele Bertei, No New York @FaberBooks

Adele is our guest and in conversation with Kate Hutchinson 15 April at Mothers Ruin, Walthamstow

Tickets https://t.co/uMYjTcimfD pic.twitter.com/sc7Zh94nYc

— Rock'n'Rollbookclub ???? (@e17RnR_books) March 26, 2026

Adele Bertei has been writing about her life since 2013’s “Peter and the Wolves,” about her friendship with Cleveland punk legend Peter Laughner and their early years in the Cleveland punk scene. In her most recent book, “No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene,” Bertei expands on her life in downtown New York after escaping Ohio for the Big Apple thanks to help from Laughner and his good friend, rock critic Lester Bangs.

Operating on a mixture of audacity, talent, and sheer guts, Bertei became part of the No Wave scene that existed immediately adjacent to the Punk Rock Class of 1975. Where the first wave of bands that emerged from downtown were more traditionally rock and roll and melodic, No Wave was the louder, darker, discordant underbelly and the logical next step.

Although the book’s subtitle states it is about No Wave and the women, what’s actually going on is that Bertei takes the radical approach of inserting the women in the story where they actually belong instead of eliding them or reducing them to bit players like most of the other books about this particular era. This isn’t meant to reduce Bertei’s work or what she accomplishes; it’s meant to point out that this is how it should actually happen all of the time, but rarely does.

But talk about a tremendous life. Among other interludes, Bertei was a member of James Chance and the Contortions, she was Brian Eno’s PA, she was friends and/or a collaborator and/or in relationships with with a vast collection of deeply influential artists such as photographer Nan Goldin, poet Janet Hamill, poet/performing artist Lydia Lunch, novelist Kathy Acker, filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow, and many other names that should be getting profiles in The New York Times Sunday Magazine. Their work was just as critical, just as groundbreaking, just as influential as their male counterparts.

The book is an elegant, vivid slice of that time period; Bertei takes you to the Mudd Club, to Tier 3, to Max’s Kansas City, and, yes, to CBGB’s. You follow her living in squats, rehearsing and writing songs, and experiencing the pain of running off to Europe for two months, only to come home and find that her typewriter and the manuscript of her first novel had been thrown out by her landlord (because, of course, she hadn’t paid rent or made arrangements beforehand). Her writing has always been evocative and incisive, and her economical prose in this book possesses the same kind of rhythms she describes in the music, poetry, film or other art she illustrates. It’s powerful.

An aspect that’s similar between Bertei’s accounts and Andy Beta’s storytelling about Alice Coltrane is that Bertei is unflinchingly honest but does not offer judgment unless it pertains to herself. She tells the story of her initial encounter with filmmaker Jim Jarmusch as he began working on “Stranger Than Paradise,” where he was interested in casting Bertei as the female lead. Bertei explains that she went to a screening of his early film “Permanent Vacation,” and was struck by the differences between the male lead and one of the female characters. She writes, “I wondered why he’d chosen him, rather than Leila, as his focus,” and guessed at how Jim might work with women based on this first film: “I assumed wrong.” Bertei explains her reasoning (and given the time and the context, it’s not difficult for the reader to understand why she was cautious), but it’s meaningful that she was willing here (and elsewhere in the book) to reveal not just her successes and her triumphs, but her failures and her bad decisions.

She also does this when she recounts her drug use. Most of the stories are matter-of-fact, and Bertei avoids the absolute worst consequences for a while before she can’t outrun it any more. She’s straightforward, she doesn’t try to equivocate or romanticize it, and the reader will be holding their breath and/or reading one sentence at a time towards the end of the book, when heroin finally grabs hold of her and she can’t let go.

Then there’s her audience with William Burroughs, where — by her own admission and in her own words —  she thoroughly embarrasses herself (although her companion, who knew Burroughs, said he’d been “amused” by Bertei’s androgyny). She did not need to retell this story; she could have left it out completely, and unless you had been there, you wouldn’t have known that it ever happened. But it’s there because it accurately reflects the god-like status Burroughs had in downtown New York, and Bertei was not the only acolyte hoping to be noticed; there are probably hundreds of stories like this, but most people aren’t going to tell them unless they’re triumphant. But this is indicative of the power of this book, where people are who and what they are and they do what they’re going to do, and her job is to tell the story as it happened and not make it into something it wasn’t.

Although Bertei is also a poet and an actor, she moved to New York carrying her Fender Duo-Sonic in a burlap sack and being introduced (or re-introduced) to the bands she played in at the time is one of the best parts of this memoir. The Contortions sound exactly as transgressive and offensive as they did the one time your columnist saw them at Danceteria, but missing out on her all-girl band, The Bloods (“the first queer OUT all-girl band”) is a definite regret. Luckily, live footage survives in Bertei’s YouTube account and you can watch them perform in Berlin at a festival of all-women bands in 1980, Bertei wearing a black scarf as a tie around her white man’s button-down shirt, deliberately invoking Patti Smith and the French poètes maudits.

“No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene” is a powerful slice of storytelling that fills in gaps between other essential books about downtown New York City. It is important and inspirational and hopefully encourages others to pick up their pens or head off to do some crate digging or other cultural archeology. There’s still so much worth looking for.

The post Alice Coltrane and No Wave’s overlooked women step out of the margins appeared first on Salon.com.