Jazz And Harmony

Farrow, who died in 1969, turned her on to the intricacies of bebop, to the genius of Charlie Parker and Bud Powell. "He loved music," Alice says of Farrow, "and umph , he could play ." She fell in love with bebop's muscular braininess, with its off-kilter chord changes and speeded-up tempos. By high school, she was gigging all over town, chasing bebop's jagged rhythms. If Cannonball Adderley or Sonny Stitt landed in town without a pianist, she was on their shortlist to call.

After graduating from Northeastern High School in the mid-'50s, Alice passed up a scholarship at the Detroit Institute of Technology and headed straight to New York, with a temporary detour in Paris to study with Powell, legendary even then. Jazz -- instrumental jazz -- was a macho world, and with the exception of a few, such as Mary Lou Williams, Carla Bley, Hazel Scott and Marian McPartland, women weren't exactly welcome. Alice ignored the macho machinations.

"There was no way I was going to be mannish and do the things men did," she says. She just played, mindful of her Baptist upbringing. She carried herself like a lady, just like her mother taught her, and that, she says, is exactly how she was treated.

"She was a sweetheart, a lady lady , that's how I would put it," says vibraphonist Terry Gibbs, with whom Alice played Jewish melodies as part of her New York experimentation. "A good-hearted person."

And what made her a good musician?

"What makes anybody good? They're good. She played all the right notes, all the right chord changes. Her timing was perfect. What makes Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, good? That cliche 'good for a girl' was not true."

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Gibbs likes to take credit for playing matchmaker to Alice and John. Mention this to Alice and a little righteous Detroit indignation creeps into her mellifluous voice, which often brings to mind India more than Motor City.

"Only Terry and I know the real story," she says, turning to look at her sister, Marilyn, and raising her eyebrows. She won't elaborate except to say that it was while gigging with Gibbs at the legendary Birdland in Manhattan in 1962 that she got to know John. She was 25; he was 36. By then, John had battled and beaten his much-publicized addictions to booze and heroin, and was deep into exploring yoga and religions, from Islam to Buddhism to Hinduism.

Backstage, the two (Gibbs calls them "introverts") opened up and started chatting about religion, architecture, languages, the world. Depending on whom you talk to or what you read, they both may have been married at the time -- she to jazz vocalist Kenny "Pancho" Hagood, with whom she had a young daughter, Michelle; he to Naima Coltrane -- but Alice and John were soon inseparable.

"I don't think he cared about her physically," Gibbs, the erstwhile matchmaker, says. "I think he just saw a great human being."

Alice joined John's group, and they toured the world. But home was Dix Hills on Long Island, far from nightclubs and chaos. Their family grew: John Jr. was born in 1964; Ravi, named after Indian classical musician Ravi Shankar, followed in '65, the year that the couple wed in Mexico. Oran, the youngest, was born in 1967, a few months before John died.