Alice Lucille McLeod was born August 27, 1937, in Detroit, Michigan, the daughter of Solon McLeod, a delivery truck driver from Clayton, Alabama, and Anna Johnston McLeod, who sang in church choir. The house was full of musicians. Her half-brother Ernie Farrow (1928-1969) became one of Detroit's busiest bassists, best known for his years in Yusef Lateef's group; her younger sister Marilyn McLeod went on to write for Motown, including Diana Ross's "Love Hangover." The vibraphonist and pianist Terry Pollard, six years older and a friend of the family, gave Alice a piano to practice on when she was around eight. She attended Northeastern High School, playing timpani and snare drum in the concert band because the band had no chair for a pianist, and graduated in June 1955. Her first commercial record came two years later, playing electric piano with a Detroit show quartet called the Premiers on a 1957 Fortune Records single.

In 1959 she married the Detroit singer Kenneth "Pancho" Hagood, who had recorded with Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, and went with him to Paris. There she worked as intermission pianist at the Blue Note and became a protege of Bud Powell. Her earliest surviving jazz recordings are from a French television broadcast on January 9, 1960, where she played "Strike Up the Band" and "Lover Man" alongside saxophonist Lucky Thompson, guitarist Jimmy Gourley, bassist Pierre Michelot, and drummer Kenny Clarke. The marriage did not survive the year. Her daughter Michelle was born in Paris on October 22, 1960, and by the end of that year Alice was back in the United States, first taking a file clerk's job in New York and then returning to Detroit to play full time. She worked the city's show bars in trios and a sextet with drummer George Goldsmith and trombonist George Bohanon, and wrote "Soulsphere," recorded for Motown's Workshop Jazz imprint on drummer Roy Brooks's album Beat.

Late in 1962 vibraphonist Terry Gibbs needed a pianist for his New York quartet. Bassist Herman Wright, a fellow Detroiter, put McLeod's name forward, and Terry Pollard, who had held the same chair years earlier, made the introduction. Gibbs auditioned her in Manhattan around January 1963 and hired her on the spot. She recorded four albums with him that year, starting with Terry Gibbs Plays Jewish Melodies in Jazztime (Mercury, produced by Quincy Jones), where the sleeve credited her under her married name, Alice Hagood. She also learned enough vibraphone from Gibbs to trade four-mallet duets with him onstand. During a Birdland run from July 18 to 31, 1963, the Gibbs quartet alternated sets nightly with John Coltrane's quartet. Coltrane was separated from his first wife, Naima; he and Alice connected immediately. She left Gibbs on short notice that October to travel with Coltrane's group on its European tour, and the two married in 1965.

In January 1966 she took over the piano chair in Coltrane's band from McCoy Tyner, who had left after Meditations, unable to hear himself over the two drummers. Elvin Jones followed him out a few weeks later, leaving Rashied Ali as sole drummer alongside Alice, Jimmy Garrison, and Pharoah Sanders. That group carried Coltrane through the last eighteen months of his life, and Alice is on nearly every document of it: Live at the Village Vanguard Again! (May 28, 1966), the Japanese tour tapes issued as Live in Japan and Concert in Japan, Offering: Live at Temple University (November 11, 1966), Expression, Stellar Regions, and The Olatunji Concert, taped April 23, 1967, three months before Coltrane's passing. Where Tyner had built vertical fourth-voiced pillars under the horns, she played washes, tremolos and arpeggiated clusters, a rippling harmonic bed rather than a chordal frame. Audiences and critics who had come for the classic quartet were not uniformly kind about the change, and the charge that Coltrane had installed his wife in the band followed her for decades.

Coltrane died July 17, 1967, at 40, leaving Alice with four children under seven. A Lyon and Healy concert harp he had ordered was delivered to the house after his death, and she taught herself to use it. Her first album under her own name, A Monastic Trio, was cut at the family's Dix Hills, Long Island home on January 29 and June 6, 1968, with Sanders, Garrison, Rashied Ali and Ben Riley, and released on Impulse! that December with liner notes by Amiri Baraka. Six more Impulse! albums followed in five years, and the arc across them is one of the steepest in postwar jazz: the harp-and-piano trio of Huntington Ashram Monastery (May 14, 1969) with Ron Carter and Ali; the two-tenor quintet of Ptah, the El Daoud (January 26, 1970) with Sanders and Joe Henderson; the tamboura drones and modal calm of Journey in Satchidananda (November 1970), with Cecil McBee, Ali, and Charlie Haden on the live Village Gate track; the shrieking microtonal string writing of Universal Consciousness (1971), whose parts she composed and Ornette Coleman transcribed for the violinists; the Peter Max sleeve and full string orchestra of World Galaxy (1972), which reworked "My Favorite Things" and "A Love Supreme" around narration by Swami Satchidananda; and Lord of Lords (July 1972), a sixteen-piece string date with Haden and Riley that set excerpts from Stravinsky's The Firebird next to her own compositions.

Her spiritual life was pulling faster than her recording schedule. After Coltrane's death she went through a period of weight loss, insomnia and visions that she later described in terms of tapas, austerity practice, and by the early 1970s she had taken mantra initiation from Swami Satchidananda and was studying Vedanta seriously. She moved to California, founded the Vedantic Center in 1975, and received the monastic name Turiyasangitananda, which she rendered as "the Transcendental Lord's highest song of bliss." Four albums for Warner Bros. document the crossing: Eternity (1976), which contains an orchestral setting of The Rite of Spring alongside the Wurlitzer feature "Spiritual Eternal"; Radha-Krsna Nama Sankirtana (1977), gospel-inflected bhajans sung by students of the Vedantic Center with her daughter Sita Michelle on tamboura and her son John Jr. on drums; Transcendence (1977); and the double live Transfiguration, recorded April 16, 1978 at Schoenberg Hall, UCLA, in an organ trio with Reggie Workman and Roy Haynes. That concert was, as her biographer Franya Berkman put it, her farewell to the jazz business.

For the next quarter century she was a swamini first and a recording artist a distant second. The Vedantic Center opened the Shanti Anantam Ashram in the Santa Monica Mountains near Malibu in 1983, rededicated as Sai Anantam Ashram on July 3, 1994; she served as its spiritual director, led kirtan, and wrote books including Endless Wisdom I (1982) and Divine Revelations (1995). The music of those years was made for the congregation and sold only through the ashram's Avatar Book Institute: Turiya Sings (1982), Divine Songs (1987), Infinite Chants (1990) and Glorious Chants (1995), on cassette apart from the last. Wurlitzer organ, synthesizer, her own singing voice and a devotional choir replaced the harp and the horns. She returned to public recording in 2004 with Translinear Light, produced by her son Ravi and cut across sessions from April 2000 to June 2004 with Haden, Jack DeJohnette, James Genus, Jeff "Tain" Watts and her son Oran. Three American concerts followed in the fall of 2006, the first she had given in roughly twenty-five years: September 23 at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, presented by the University Musical Society on what would have been John Coltrane's eightieth birthday, and a November 4 date at the San Francisco Jazz Festival with Ravi, Roy Haynes and Charlie Haden. She was 69 when she passed away of respiratory failure at West Hills Hospital in Los Angeles on January 12, 2007, and she is buried beside John Coltrane at Pinelawn Memorial Park in Farmingdale, New York.

Alice Coltrane is the musician who did the most to turn spiritual jazz from an adjective into a genre. Her piano came out of Bud Powell and Detroit bebop, and she never lost the bebop musician's ear (Bennie Maupin, a schoolmate, remembered that she could transcribe a theme after one hearing), but what she built on top of it was something else: sheets of tremolo and arpeggio instead of comped chords, and, from 1968, a jazz harp vocabulary that had almost no precedent outside Dorothy Ashby's work. She was also a serious orchestral composer at a time when very few jazz musicians of either sex were writing for strings on their own records, and Universal Consciousness and Lord of Lords remain among the strangest and most uncompromising uses of a string section in the music's history. The critical record on her is uneven for reasons that have as much to do with who she was as with what she played: she was dismissed for years as the widow who inherited a band, and the devotional albums after 1975 were largely ignored on release. That has reversed. Journey in Satchidananda landed at number 446 on Rolling Stone's 2020 list of the 500 greatest albums, Universal Consciousness has drawn a 10 from Pitchfork and five stars from DownBeat, and her influence runs through Kamasi Washington, Brandee Younger, Radiohead and her own great-nephew Steven Ellison, who records as Flying Lotus. In 2024 and 2025 the Coltrane family and the John and Alice Coltrane Home ran "The Year of Alice," a program of reissues, concerts, a Hammer Museum exhibition and a LINES Ballet premiere built entirely around her work.