Briefly famous as the pianist in the quartet of her husband, John Coltrane, before his death in 1967, Alice Coltrane became the guardian of his legacy, skilfully supervising the issuing and reissuing of his recordings, and helping to keep both his music and reputation in the public eye. She organised a foundation dedicated to his work and ideals, including organising an annual festival from 1986, and was quick to take legal action against any infringement of his name or recorded copyright.

She also led bands of her own, principally drawing on a pool of her late husband’s colleagues, and in later years also performed with her two sons, the saxophonists Ravi and Oran Coltrane. Her music tended to focus on the spiritual and New Age aspects of jazz, a genre that had been increasingly explored by her husband in the two years before he died.

Yet, paradoxically for a musician who performed in public for much of her life, she was also a quiet and reclusive figure, devoted to the study of Eastern religions in general and Hinduism in particular. In 1975 she founded the Vedanta Centre in California for retreat and meditation. This eventually became something of a cross between an Ashram and a commune, and is currently located in the Agoura Hills. She took the Hindu name Swami Turiyasangitananda, and served as the swami of a temple in the San Fernando Valley at Chatsworth.

Alice McLeod was born in 1937 in Detroit, and back then this spiritual path would have seemed somewhat unlikely. She studied classical piano and was also steeped in the sounds of gospel music, as both a singer and a player at the local Baptist church. But through her half-brother, the bassist Ernie Farrow, she also discovered jazz and in her formative years studied and played with many of the great names in the Detroit area, including the Jones brothers, Hank, Thad and Elvin, and Milt Jackson’s family.

Just out of her teens, she married the bebop singer Kenny Hagood, and their daughter, Michelle, (who became the singer Miki Coltrane) was born in 1960. Soon afterwards, the marriage broke up, and Alice returned home to Detroit.

“My original thought was to go to Juilliard or to the Manhattan School of Music,” she told The Times. “But my brother, Ernest Farrow, was already in New York, and through him I got the chance to do some jazz jobs, and it just went from there. It was because of Ernest I got my first gig with Johnny Griffin, who was already a fine, fine tenor player. Griffin’s piano player was Barry Harris who was a good friend of my brother, and he offered to turn his job over to me. I told him I’d take it, and before long, by the time I was in my early twenties, I’d played with a lot of major musicians.”

The band with whom she ended up playing regularly in 1962-63 was led by the vibraphonist Terry Gibbs, who worked strictly in the bebop style of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. “Learning to play that music gives you a strong focus,” recalled Alice. “I learnt all the standards, the ballads, everything from the semi-classics to Broadway shows, and it was, if I look back on it, a pretty strategic kind of study. It’s paying your dues. All that work goes into forming your own style.”

In 1963 Gibbs worked at a nightclub opposite John Coltrane, who met the young pianist for the first time. He went on to marry Alice in 1965, before inviting her to join his band the following year. The jazz world was horrified as she replaced the virtuoso McCoy Tyner and substituted his dazzling keyboard style with something far more elliptical and abstract.

Her swaths of colouristic out-of-time playing were matched by the drumming of Rashied Ali, who preferred timbre to tempo, and between them these two musicians transformed Coltrane’s band from rhythmic and harmonic intensity to an altogether more spiritual tonal palette.

In the decade that followed John Coltrane’s death, Alice led her own groups and took up the organ, the harp and the synthesizer. She composed a series of abstract, spiritually inspired works. She recorded prolifically, mainly for the Warner Brothers label, and a cross-section of her work, including the albums Transcendence, Transfiguration and Eternity, was reissued in 2001.

For much of the past two decades, she retreated to pursue her spiritual interests, but at some point in most years she reappeared on record or on the international stage, albeit less and less. Her final recording was made in 2004, and despite increasing respiratory problems, she played in a number of concerts with her son Ravi late last year.

Alice Coltrane, pianist, organist and harpist, was born on August 27, 1937. She died from respiratory illness on January 12, 2007, aged 69