Prima Materia was the working band drummer Rashied Ali built in downtown New York in the early 1990s to play the late compositions of John Coltrane and Albert Ayler, the music Ali himself had helped put on record as Coltrane's last drummer. The band took its name from the alchemists' term for first matter, the raw substance from which everything else is made. It began with a hearing: Ali caught tenor saxophonist Louie Belogenis (credited as Louis Belogenis on the group's records) playing in one of drummer William Hooker's ensembles, invited him up to his own studio, and the two ended up co-leading the group that came out of those sessions. Altoist Allan Chase, a Berklee and New England Conservatory man who had studied with Jaki Byard and written a master's thesis on Sun Ra, joined in 1992 and stayed through the band's whole run. The original rhythm section had no piano at all and two basses instead, William Parker and Joe Gallant, with Ali the only drummer.

That double-bass lineup is the one on the group's first record, Peace on Earth (Music of John Coltrane), issued in 1994 on Michael Dorf's Knitting Factory Works label as KFW 158. Five Coltrane pieces are stretched to fill the disc: "Spiritual," "Peace on Earth," "Brazilia," "India," and "Alabama," none of them under eight minutes and three of them past sixteen. John Zorn, an old friend of Belogenis who had picked out his first saxophone years earlier, guests on alto on "Spiritual" and "Brazilia." All arrangements are credited to the band collectively rather than to any one member, and Belogenis produced. The disc face carries a line of Coltrane's own, "I want to be a force for good," printed over and over as a repeating pattern.

Parker left afterward and the chemistry changed: rather than replace him with a second bassist, the group brought in pianist Greg Murphy, a Chicago native who had moved to New York in 1987 and whose association with Ali would eventually run more than twenty years. That quintet, with Gallant alone on bass, is the band most people mean by Prima Materia. It toured Europe in the spring of 1995, including a full concert at Burghausen, Germany, on March 24 of that year, and it played the Knitting Factory often enough that both of its remaining studio-quality documents were taped there. The first, Meditations, was recorded live on June 23, 1995 during the club's What Is Jazz? festival and released the same year as KFW 180. It is a reading of Coltrane's 1965 suite of the same name, and the group's version should not be confused with the Impulse! original, the record on which Ali and Elvin Jones played together as a two-drummer team. Prima Materia's take runs through "The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost," "Compassion," "Love," "Consequences," and "Serenity," and closes with the band introductions from the stage.

The Ayler record followed a year later. Bells, taped at the Knitting Factory on May 17, 1996 and released as KFW 190, is a single continuous sixty-five-minute performance of Ayler's 1965 piece, split across five index points on the CD. Chase transcribed the music from the original recording. The poet Steve Dalachinsky and Belogenis wrote the liner notes, and the cover carries a Raymond Ross photograph of Ayler. Reviewing it for JazzTimes in April 1997, John Murph praised Belogenis and Chase for "remarkable strength and control" in the face of Ayler's material and singled out Ali's cymbal work and an unexpectedly swinging drive. The same year the band played the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague, and a two-minute edit of "Albert Ayler's Bells" led off Knitting Factory Works' New York Downtown: Jazz & Other Sounds sampler.

The group kept working into the late 1990s without adding to its studio catalog. Wilber Morris took over the bass chair for a stretch, and it is that lineup, with Morris, Murphy, Belogenis and Chase behind Ali, that appears on Vision Volume One, AUM Fidelity's 1998 double-CD document of the 1997 Vision Festival, playing an excerpt of "Meditations." Beyond the Knitting Factory the band turned up at Dharma and The Cooler in New York, and Chase's own account of the years lists a long roll of guests who sat in at one time or another: Andrew Cyrille, Zorn, Dave Douglas, Junie Booth, Steve Bernstein, Frank London, Ahmed Abdul-Malik, Borah Bergman, and Ravi Coltrane. Uri Caine covered the piano chair on occasion. Chase puts the end of his own tenure at 2000.

One more record came out, thirteen years after the first. Configurations (The Music of John Coltrane), also sold as Configuration, was cut at Ali's own Survival Studio and works entirely from Stellar Regions, the February 1967 Coltrane session that stayed in the vault until Alice Coltrane found the tapes and released it in 1995. Nine performances take in "Configurations," "Leo," "Iris," "Seraphic Light," "Tranesonic," "Sun Star," two passes at "Stellar Regions," and "Jimmy's Mode," Coltrane's tribute to his bassist Jimmy Garrison. Both Gallant and Morris are credited on bass, which places at least some of the material before Morris's death in August 2002; Blue Music Group gives no session dates. The label dates the release to August 12, 2009, the day Ali passed away at 76. In an interview given days earlier, Ali said of the music, "Now I feel in peace with this music."

Prima Materia existed to answer a specific question: what does the most extreme music John Coltrane and Albert Ayler wrote sound like when it is treated as repertoire rather than as a one-off event? The band's method was to take a single late piece, give it the whole disc, and play it at full length with the original's structure intact, which is why Bells runs sixty-five unbroken minutes and why nothing on Peace on Earth is short. Nobody in the group imitated the originals. Chase transcribed Ayler's Bells note for note as a starting point and then let the quintet loose on it; the Meditations set keeps Coltrane's sequence of movements but replaces the two-drummer roar of the 1965 Impulse! record with a single kit and a piano. What holds it together is Rashied Ali's multi-directional drumming, the same conception he had brought to Coltrane's band in 1965, deployed here as the band's engine rather than as a texture. AllMusic's Chris Kelsey described the group as a downtown quintet built around Ali's free-time playing, with Belogenis and Chase a complementary pair on the front line and Greg Murphy's percussive attack raising the intensity after the piano replaced the second bass. Ali took the project seriously enough to keep it going for most of a decade and to say near the end of his life that it was the closest he had come to being at peace with this music.