Alice Coltrane hasn’t got her due as a talented musician. A new Philly show wants to change that.

Saxophonist John Coltrane was a jazz icon well before his untimely death in 1967. It took considerably longer for his widow, pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane, to achieve her rightful place in the music’s pantheon. With Alice & John: A Coltrane Festival, Penn Live Arts celebrates the work and influence of both members of this personal and musical partnership.

The festival, which runs through Oct. 23 at the Annenberg Center, features performances dedicated to both Coltranes. Thursday is dedicated to the screening of the documentary Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes. Friday and Saturday, Pam Tanowitz Dance will present three world premieres including Walk With Me, a newly commissioned piece set to the Coltranes’ music, performed live by festival artistic adviser and saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin with her band, Pursuance.

Despite sharing an instrument with John, Benjamin learned about Alice first, when a friend and collaborator played her an album during her teen years. “I thought it was amazing, so I ended up going out to Amoeba Records and buying everything I could find,” she recalled. “Eventually I looked in the liner notes and she said something like, ‘All praise due to John Coltrane.’ At the time I was like, ‘Who’s John Coltrane? Maybe that’s her brother.’”

A Google search later, Benjamin returned to the record store, where she began buying John Coltrane’s extensive catalog in chronological order.

“It gave me a different perspective,” Benjamin said. “At that point I had heard all of Alice Coltrane’s records, so I had a complete picture of her work in my mind. I took a whole journey from John’s beginning to the end so that I could compare them.”

Benjamin will take the stage Sunday night with her band and special guests saxophonist Gary Bartz and vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater. The set will feature music from the saxophonist’s latest album, Pursuance: The Coltranes, supplemented with the entirety of John’s landmark suite A Love Supreme and music from the recently rediscovered trove released in 2019 as Blue World.

Next week, John and Alice’s son, saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, will present his project Cosmic Music featuring the compositions of his parents, and harpist Brandee Younger will perform Alice’s classic 1970 album Ptah, the El Daoud in its entirety.

Younger’s first-ever performance of Ptah, the El Daoud takes on greater meaning as it follows by less than a month the death of saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, whose indelible sound played a crucial role on the album. Both Younger and Benjamin agree that they draw especial inspiration from performing the Coltranes’ music in Philadelphia, where John spent formative years living in Strawberry Mansion.

“This sounds so cliché,” Younger said, “but it’s true: Where someone comes from really shapes who they become as a person. When you look at the neighborhood, the kinds of people, the kinds of religion — these are the foundations so many Black Americans grew up with. But it also shows that the sky is the limit.”

For Benjamin, the city takes on additional meaning because she garnered early experience playing with drummer Rashied Ali, a Philly native who played with Coltrane in the saxophonist’s latter years.

“Rashied Ali really raised me,” Benjamin said. “He would take me to Philly to Chris’ Jazz Café, or to meet his family, and we talked about Trane all the time. So it’s a place that means a lot to me. I love the people, I love the food, and anytime I play in Philly the crowd is soulful. To me, this feels like a homecoming.”

While the festival takes place in a city that John Coltrane once called home, Alice & John is notable for devoting a significant portion of its programming to Alice Coltrane. After joining her husband’s band during his final years, she spent the decade after his passing recording a visionary series of albums that would prove foundational to the transcendent, searching approach now tagged with the nebulous term “spiritual jazz.”

By the end of the 1970s, Alice had retreated from public view and became the director of the Sai Anantam Ashram in California, creating music solely for spiritual purposes. As interest in her work grew among a younger generation, she returned to recording and performing in 2004 until her death in 2007.

Younger found her introduction to Alice Coltrane revelatory. A harpist trained in the classical tradition, she’d never heard such a unique approach to the harp until her father brought home a compilation of Alice’s music. “I was totally taken aback by what I heard her doing with the instrument,” Younger said. “I thought, ‘Oh my Gosh, what’s this harp doing? I want to do that.’ It blew my mind.”

Younger has since become a tireless advocate for Alice Coltrane’s legacy, along with that of her fellow undersung jazz harpist, Dorothy Ashby (perhaps best known for her playing on Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life). In 2007 she was asked by Ravi Coltrane to perform at his mother’s memorial service and has since collaborated with him on numerous occasions.

“I’ve always made it a point to amplify Alice Coltrane’s music,” Younger said. “The harp community can be very traditional and old-fashioned, and I didn’t feel that Dorothy Ashby and Alice Coltrane’s music was valued and respected in the way that it should have been. Alice Coltrane is my lodestar. She is a harpist, she is Black, she is a woman, and she played the heck out of this instrument in a way that I’ve never heard.”

Catch Lakecia Benjamin on Inquirer Live at Lunch on Thursday, Oct. 13, at 12:30 p.m., on The Inquirer’s Instagram page @phillyinquirer.

Alice & John: A Coltrane Festival runs Oct. 12-23; Annenberg Center, 3680 Walnut St., Phila. For tickets, visit pennlivearts.org/events/coltrane.php