These 1981 devotional recordings for voice and Wurlitzer, meant to guide meditation through chanting, offer an alternate version of the cosmic jazz visionary’s synthesizer masterpiece, Turiya Sings.

In 1981, Alice Coltrane sang on record for the first time, at the behest of God. Having lived many musical lives—church organist, bebop pianist, cosmic jazz visionary, intrepid experimental composer—she was by then serving as spiritual director for her interfaith Vedantic Center in Southern California, seeking new modes of transcendence. It would be a couple of years before Coltrane opened her Sai Anantam Ashram in Agoura Hills, but already she was deep into a personal journey in consciousness. She had begun a transfiguration following the death of her husband John in 1967, and her auspicious meeting, not long after, with guru and counterculture icon Swami Satchidananda.

“Several years ago, following a long period of elementary meditating and reading of some of the diverse books on spirituality and world religions, I felt the deepest transcendental longing to realize the Supreme Lord,” Coltrane wrote in her spiritual autobiography, Monument Eternal, in 1977. “This longing within the depths of my heart was soon acknowledged, for within a short period of time I experienced the first rays of illumination and spiritual re-awakening.”

Coltrane is still best known for her 1971 record bearing Satchidananda’s name, which mixed cascading harp and droning tanpura with Pharoah Sanders’ expressive saxophone. But a sense of spiritual awe suffused her music from her 1968 debut as bandleader onward. Whether in her glittering post-bop or her orchestral proto-noise psychedelia, Coltrane’s compositions make you feel connected to yourself and the world with preternatural clarity. They make you believe things you otherwise wouldn’t; they may even facilitate the process of temporarily suspending fear. Coltrane spent the second half of the 1970s releasing revelatory albums like 1976’s Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana and 1977’s Transcendence, which fulfilled and challenged her major-label recording contract with manifestations of her Universal Consciousness.

Turiya Sings was the first album she made alone. Having left the commercial music industry behind, she released these uncanny compositions based on Hindu devotionals, or bhajans, on cassette through her Vedantic Center’s publishing imprint, Avatar Book Institute. Luxuriating in every prayerful syllable, naming deities like Krishna and Ramachandra, Coltrane made a small number of the tapes available to her students and Vedantic Center visitors. Though she used relatively spare components—the subtitle of the original album cover read, “Devotional Songs in Original Composition with Organ, Strings and Synthesizer”—they contain an unusual, self-contained grandeur. In the aching shimmer of these hymns, which evoke both South Indian classical music and the Black church, you can hear Coltrane’s life coursing through: her journey from gospel accompanist to jazz prodigy, the drama of the European classical music she loved, the soulful melodies of her Detroit youth, grief and exaltation. Yet the power of this music is elemental. The tone of the original Turiya Sings is as certain and spectral as anything associated with the Coltrane name. Her voice hovers distantly above the mix as if she’s floating, or astral projecting—which she wrote about extensively in Monument Eternal—like a woman actively inhabiting a higher dimension.