Ptah, the El Daoud, recorded and released in 1970, is the third solo album by Alice Coltrane. The album was recorded in the basement of her house in Dix Hills on Long Island, New York. This was Coltrane's first album with horns (aside from one track on A Monastic Trio (1968), on which Pharoah Sanders played bass clarinet). Sanders is recorded on the right channel and Joe Henderson on the left channel throughout. Coltrane noted: "Joe Henderson is more on the intellectual side, while Pharoah is more abstract, more transcendental." All the compositions were written by Alice Coltrane. The title track is named for an Egyptian god, Ptah, "the El Daoud" meaning "the beloved". "Turiya", according to the liner notes, "was defined by Coltrane as "a state of consciousness — the high state of Nirvana, the goal of human life", while "Ramakrishna" was a 19th-century Bengali religious figure and also denotes a movement founded by his disciples. On "Blue Nile", Coltrane switches from piano to harp, and Sanders and Henderson from tenor saxophones to alto flutes. The album's cover design was by Jim Evans. Reception In a review for AllMusic, Stacia Proefrock called Ptah, the El Daoud "a truly great album", writing: "listeners who surrender themselves to it emerge on the other side of its 46 minutes transformed. From the purifying catharsis of the first moments of the title track to the last moments of 'Mantra,' with its disjointed piano dance and passionate ribbons of tenor cast out into the universe, the album resonates with beauty, clarity, and emotion... Overlooked and buried for years in obscurity, this album deserves to be embraced for the gem it is." Mark Richardson, writing for Pitchfork, commented: "Coltrane is tremendously versatile on this record, at some points hunkering down in gauzy mysticism while elsewhere concentrating on logical, disciplined soloing. Echoes of her grounding in post-bop jazz are still present, though less so than on her 1968 debut A Monastic Trio. The eight-minute 'Turiya and Ramakrishna' runs the gamut and contains some of her greatest piano playing on record, as she moves from the tough blues of the main theme to a soaring, impressionistic, and, yes, harp-like flurry of notes that seem to hang suspended in space." At the JazzIz web site, Matt Micucci included the album in his list "Five Essential Albums of 1970", calling it "the culmination of her 'first period,' marked by