Six weeks before her 30th birthday, Alice was a widower with four children, bereft of her soulmate, family breadwinner and chief outlet for her own musical career. Meanwhile, the counterculture was seizing the popular imagination on a number of fronts, be it the Summer of Love, the heyday of the Black Power Movement, or the vogue of alternative religions and forms of consciousness. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were just over the horizon. Alice Coltrane was breaking down.

In her spiritual memoir from 1977, also titled Monument Eternal, she describes what seems like a hellish existence from roughly 1968 to 1970. Unable to sleep or eat properly, her weight fell from 118 to 95 pounds. She had hallucinations in which trees spoke, various beings existed on astral planes, and the sounds of “a planetary ether” could spin through her brain and knock her unconscious. Her family was concerned for her health, and more than once she was sent to the hospital due to self-inflicted wounds, including a third-degree burn so awful that her blackened flesh fell off her hand.

The overarching theme of this riveting, frequently gruesome account is not that Alice fell into the nadir of her existence, but rather that she experienced tapas, a vital period of trial, tribulation and transition. She explains tapas as a time of unremitting austerity, designed to cleanse and enhance her spirit. The relentless and yet serene path she followed in the many decades after her prolonged ordeal validates this outlandish interpretation of events.

The music under her own name from this period seems intended to further the musical and spiritual direction of her late husband. The first song on the first record is an elegy entitled, “Ohnedaruth,” the name she gave his spirit, which is the Sanskrit word for “compassion.” The sidemen on the three records from 1968-70, A Monastic Trio, Huntington Ashram Monastery and Ptah the El Daoud, are primarily her late husband’s cohorts.

And yet, even with many stylistic similarities, we can hear Alice beginning to figure out how to fill the enormous void under daunting circumstances. The songs are mostly hers, modal tunes with somber moods. But there is strength and sustenance too. Her playing is more prominent, and often she is performing on the harp John bought her shortly before he died. As with the piano, she is playing the entire instrument, set free on glissando arpeggios that Kahn describes as “very loose, almost like water flowing back and forth, very spiritual and meditative.”

But there is also the soulful, swinging bottom that is the rhythm of the Christian church —one song on The Monastic Trio is explicitly entitled “Gospel Trane.” There is also more overt blues and rhythm & blues than late-period John Coltrane was invoking, luminous piano-blues like the song “Turiya and Ramakrishna” on Ptah the El Daoud. There are the introductory bass ostinatos and squawking jazz horns common to John Coltrane, set off by sparkling harp and mournful piano from Alice, who wrote sophisticated jazz arrangements and improvisations spangled with a dab of funk. Her first three releases are appropriately the music of someone who is not John Coltrane but who loves him and cherishes his art. At the time, many critics heard the root influence but were not ready to relate to or reward Alice’s distinctive embellishments and so dismissed the records as pale imitations.