A Journey of the Heart

Welcome back for another dispatch. I don't know if you all have noticed, but here in the states, things are, to put it mildly, absolutely fucking terrible. (If you think this state of affairs is great, fuck right off, and I mean that sincerely.) I'm not going to run through all of the reasons why; you can read newspapers or magazines for that. In the constant maelstrom of shit that these idiots are unleashing on the unwilling populace on a daily basis, one needs a place of solace. This gave me an idea.

This week's dispatch is about a genre that brings joy and hope to listeners and opens up new realms of thought: spiritual jazz.

Spiritual jazz is a sub-genre that pulls from avant-garde music and free jazz as well as various religious philosophies (e.g., Transcendental Meditation, Zen, Hinduism, Southern Baptist Church, Zulu) and international sounds to craft a new direction for the genre. With the changes arising from the Civil Rights movement, many artists wanted to push for a purer expression of themselves and their music. This meant a search for music that was transcendent and explored a higher plane of understanding.

While the genre can be hard to explain on some levels, spiritual jazz is easy to understand on a visceral level. When you listen to it, you can feel the ecstasy in the interplay between the artists in the session. You can hear the desire to open a new realm of thought and expression. It can touch you in a way that other music cannot.

If you want to hear the purest expressions of this idea, there are a few places you can start, but the one that everyone, including myself, will recommend is John Coltrane's magnum opus, A Love Supreme.

I'm not sure that I can say anything new or extremely profound about this album. What I can say is that when you listen to it, you can hear Coltrane reaching for something greater, something beyond jazz. It crosses into a higher echelon of consciousness. Its majesty is all encompassing and glorious. The band—Coltrane on sax, Mccoy Tyner on piano, Elvin Jones on drums, and Jimmy Garrison on bass—is firing on all cylinders, showing their contemporaries and the future the true power of jazz.

John Coltrane was not the only one to help with this expansion of jazz. Another key contributor to the spiritual jazz movement was his wife, Alice. While it is hard to live with a legend (ask Lee Krasner), she established herself as a major figure on her own terms. You can hear her ideas most clearly on her 1971 album with Pharaoh Sanders, A Journey in Satchidananda. Sanders and Coltrane combine their instruments—saxophone for Sanders and harp and piano for Coltrane—with eastern instrumentation like the oud to create a sense of peace and mental expansion. The result is something that pushes towards enlightenment, the sense of calm one finds when the past, present, and future collapse into a singular now. It's truly impressive to create a way to express this rather ineffable feeling.

There were other artists, particularly those on the Impulse label, that contributed in significant ways to development of spiritual jazz in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One such artist is Coltrane’s collaborator, Pharaoh Sanders. His 1969 solo album Karma is a major landmark of the style because of “The Creator Has A Master Plan,” a 32-minute tribute to peace, love, and understanding greater powers in the world. A smooth bass line and steady groove anchors Sanders's chanting. This rhythm is occasionally punctured by free jazz explorations where Sanders and his band let loose. The album is a true testament of what the movement is all about.

I would be remiss in talking about the beginnings of spiritual jazz and not mentioning Sun Ra. An absolutely prolific bandleader, Sun Ra took the earthy rhythms and free jazz freak outs and launched them to the Van Allen Belt by bringing Afrofuturism to the spiritual jazz movement, opening the genre to a new level of mind expansion. If you've never dealt with Sun Ra, start with Space is the Place. It is the most succinct introduction to his music as well as a very good album. If you decide to listen to more, I will tell you now that his catalog is daunting. (According to Wikipedia, he recorded over 100 albums before he died. There are more recordings by the Arkestra.) If you pace yourself, you'll be fine.

Spiritual jazz didn't die in the 1970s though. A new generation of artists have taken up the mantle set by the Coltranes, Ra, Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, and others. The first I'll talk about here—and arguably the most prominent—is saxophonist Kamasi Washington. Known through his work on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly, Washington has brought many people to the world of jazz with his high-energy recordings. His music, like that of his predecessors, touches on both the present and transcendent, taking listeners to higher planes of listening. If one is to start with him, one should start at the beginning with The Epic, a three-hour debut album that lays out Washington's cosmology and his unique perspective on jazz. A fusion of various jazz eras and styles of music (e.g., hip-hop, funk), The Epic is long, but it is absolutely worth your time.

Theo Croker is another artist who takes a cosmic and spiritual approach to jazz music. Much like Washington, he filters jazz through R&B, funk, hip-hop, and Afrofuturism. Unlike Washington, however, do not start at the beginning with him. While those first two albums are good, he doesn't truly hit his stride as either a composer or bandleader until his 2016 album Escape Velocity. It is here where his fusion of new sounds with spiritual and soul jazz really takes off to a new level. And from there, he really locks in and highlights why he is a prominent force in jazz today.

Another album of note is Makaya McCraven's album Universal Beings, a double album on which McCraven forms tracks out of extended improvisations with different band configurations. On this album, there were four ensembles for four cities: Chicago, New York, London, and Los Angeles. Each side has a different vibe based on the personnel and the band's interplay, but McCraven ensures that they all link together into a connected whole. It is an album that proves grooves can awaken our universal spirit.

Two of the players on Universal Beings are both stars of the spiritual jazz revival: Nubya Garcia and Shabaka Hutchings. Both are saxophonists born of the London jazz scene, which is a very interesting place to explore if you have the time. In addition, both incorporate the transcendental ideas of spiritual jazz into their music, mixing them with various elements from the African diaspora as well as the British club scene. If both of these names sound familiar to you, I talked about both of them in my 2024 review of albums. Both Hutchings and Garcia released majestic albums full of intuitive, passionate music that reaches sublime new heights.

If you enjoyed both of their albums from 2024, they have plenty more to explore. Garcia's first album, Source, is a powerful listen that shows her immense talent. She also plays on many fantastic albums, highlighting the talented musicians making jazz music exciting right now.

For Shabaka, his work with Shabaka and the Ancestors is worth highlighting for the purposes of this dispatch. I recommend listening to We Are Sent Here by History. The video is a track from the album.

The last person I'll touch upon here is Nduduzo Makhathini. A pianist from South Africa, Makhathini builds directly from the legacy of those 60s Impulse artists referenced above while pulling Zulu mysticism, Afrofuturism, and African rhythms into his sound. He is another artist that I discussed in my 2024 roundup, and that album is a fantastic listen. I also recommend his 2022 album, In The Spirit of Ntu.

In the darkest era of our darkest timeline, we all need some sort of hope to break the spell. These albums all provide that. As I noted in the subtitle, this is intended to be a breezy review. This could get way more detailed and highlight more artists, but we are already taking on too much information. I just wanted to provide a push in some directions for listening. Take some time to go on your streamer of choice or YouTube or visit your library and listen to these. They will be the balm your soul needs in these trying times.

Next week, we'll get closer to new music again by talking about a few people including one of the true enigmas in music. Tell your friends to subscribe, and we'll talk again soon.