Whether it’s a style of music, a way of playing or more an emotional feeling, spiritual jazz is having something of a moment right now. As part of a deeper, wider story the music stretches back to the likes of Pharaoh Sanders and John Coltrane in the 1960s and the latter’s widow Alice into the 1970s. Today, fuelled by Kamasi Washington, Nala Sinephro, Isaiah Collier and more, the music’s lineage is stronger and more international than ever. Tony Higgins tries to unpick the many facets of spiritual jazz and hears how according to Gilles Peterson the sometimes provocative term has enabled “a huge amount of music to get new ears…”

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In early 2020, an excited young saxophonist was looking forward to the next phase of his musical path and the possibilities that had opened up before him, including plans to take his music around the world. That was until that very same world suddenly stopped. Stopped not just for him, but for virtually everyone on the planet.

“I just got done doing a tour in Mexico. I was feeling revitalised. I was just charged. ‘Man, when I get back, I’m hitting the ground running.’ I get back 13 March  2020. But I hit the ground running into a lockdown. Everything was flipped. And I remember I watched a lot of documentaries like the ‘Birth of the Cool’ about Miles Davis, Malcolm X documentaries. I watched Nina Simone’s documentary, plus the John Coltrane one. Those were the main ones that were my reality checks and my anchors.”

For Isaiah Collier, the Covid pandemic was a watershed moment for him and the development of his music. “I refused to allow this to define me. The pandemic could have defined me. There were a lot of artists who quit. There were a lot of people who stopped doing what they said was their life’s purpose. I had to make a decision and my decision was, I’m gonna stick with it.”

Stick with it he did. In doing so, Collier recorded an album that elevated him and his music into the consciousness of a bigger, global audience. Released in 2021, that album was ‘Cosmic Transitions’. Given a five-star rating by influential American jazz publication, DownBeat, it’s a majestic and powerful suite that is considered a contemporary classic in a genre called spiritual jazz, a style of jazz that has been in constant flux since it first appeared in the 1960s and one that has been undergoing a huge resurgence in popularity in recent years. 

As a musical style, spiritual jazz first emerged in the febrile tumult of the American civil rights struggle via the works of artists like John Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders and Albert Ayler - a triumvirate sometimes referred to, respectively, as the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Collier is considered by many as the inheritor of that spirit first divined by that sanctified trio, a spirit carried on through the works of Coltrane’s widow Alice, as well as other key figures including Archie Shepp, Yusef Lateef, Don Cherry, Sun Ra and thousands of others over the years. 

Today, the flame of spiritual jazz remains undimmed. Indeed, in 2024, as we approach the 60th anniversary of the recording of what is considered spiritual jazz’s origin story, John Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’, the music is in rude health, developing along new and exciting vectors that embrace modern classical, minimalism, drone, ambient and electronica.

This story of a continuum, of continuing that legacy and pushing spiritual jazz forward, is a defining characteristic of both the music itself and Collier as a person. A native of Chicago, he recognises his small part in that story of change, of maintaining forward momentum whilst rooted in tradition. 

“In early 2020, there was a producer called Sonny Daze and he told me he wanted to do a project. And I was like: ‘If you can get me Rudy van Gelder’s studio, then maybe I can do it.’ Which was a cheeky statement to make. Then, lo and behold, about May 2020, mid-pandemic, I get an email: ‘Hey, we got a date.’ Man, we’re set to record September 23. I ask myself: ‘Why is this familiar?’ Well, not only is it Coltrane’s birthday, but most importantly, it is the equinox which, when you put it in perspective, is why he wrote the song [of the same name].”

As well as being recorded in the same studio Coltrane cut ‘A Love Supreme’ and so many of his incredible Impulse recordings, Collier’s album ‘Cosmic Transitions’ was steeped in the tradition of classic spiritual jazz – channelling the energy and vibration of the present while tapping into something far deeper and eternal – but it was far from an ersatz pastiche. It was an exultant cri de couer birthed in the political and social chaos of modern-day America. 

“At the time, I was thinking that the world is on fire,” says Collier. “I went to the George Floyd protest in Chicago and watched all the anarchy, man. You could feel the adrenaline in the air, you could feel the hurt, the rage, the disappointment, it was very feral and then seeing the police move in and mobilise and people start stampeding and running for their lives.” 

That stark phrase Collier uses – ‘world is on fire’ – also happens to be the name of his new album, just released on Division 81 Records. It is the final part in what Collier sees as a sequence of recordings by his group, The Chosen Few, that reflect and interpret the state of mind of not just contemporary America, but the current global psyche, engaging in topics ranging from environmental collapse and police brutality to hope and redemption. His previous album with The Chosen Few, ‘The Almighty’ delved into the relationship between the everyday person and the Divine Source. ‘The World is On Fire’ takes an outward look into society and reverberates with the zeitgeist of today’s socio-political landscape. 

“This project is a sonic exploration, blending sounds, consciousness and activism to raise awareness about the pressing issues of our time,” says Collier. “Through my music, I strive to capture and personify the profound impact of the challenges we face.”

For British spiritual jazz and reggae musician Nat Birchall, Collier is someone he “always heartily recommends to anyone who asks me, he’s something else and I’m sure he’s just going to develop more and more over time”. Broadcaster and DJ Gilles Peterson echoes Birchall’s assessment, calling Collier “the future”. 

For all of that, the term spiritual jazz is one that Collier himself resists, preferring ‘black cosmic music’ to refer to what he does. In this regard, he is in the tradition of Max Roach and Roland Kirk, who baulked at the music they made being termed ‘jazz’ at all, a word they saw as a derogatory white term applied to a highly developed and complex form of black expression. Peterson also alludes to this when he says the term spiritual jazz is, in a way, applied to the type of jazz that rock journalists deem acceptable: “The Mojo, Melody Makers and the NME writers who are OK with Coltrane but don’t get jazz funk or fusion. They bracket it with a kind of post-rock, free improv scene too, so it all blends into what they approve as gatekeepers.”

This is where we get to the thorny issue of definitions. What is spiritual jazz? And what is spiritual jazz today? Well, it depends on who you ask as it’s very much in the ear of the beholder. It may be easier to say what it is not rather than what it is.

For Peterson, spiritual jazz was used in the 1990s among DJs and record collectors on the jazz scene that covered “modal jazz; a slightly more reflective, deeper jazz that you can also play on the dancefloor, tracks like ‘Brother John’ by Yusef Lateef or ‘Effi’ by Max Roach. I think it became spiritual jazz on a major level after Kamasi Washington released ‘The Epic’ in 2015. That was the record that opened up the Pitchforks and the Resident Advisors to this term which until then had been bandied around among collectors and DJs for several years before, like some secret code. I’m the one who pretty much coined the term acid jazz, so who am I to criticise? It’s a space that has allowed a huge amount of music to get new ears. And that’s got to be a good thing, right?” 

If Washington’s ‘The Epic’ (released on Brainfeeder, a label established by producer Flying Lotus, who also happens to be Alice Coltrane’s nephew) was the tipping point that saw spiritual jazz take its place in the musical mainstream, it was in no small part due to Washington’s association with hip hop star Kendrick Lamar. Washington appeared on Lamar’s huge hit album ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ and the follow-up, ‘DAMN’. 

Even if Washington’s album did get the likes of Rolling Stone and Mojo to sit up and take notice of spiritual jazz for the first time, other artists had been exploring that sound for years and continue to do so. One of the leading exponents of contemporary spiritual jazz is saxophonist Muriel Grossmann. Originally hailing from Austria, Grossmann is currently based in Ibiza and has released a series of highly-regarded albums that have positioned her at the forefront of the current scene.

“The core would be modal jazz, free jazz and the blues,” says Grossman. “Then influences from Indian music, African music, Latin American music, gospel, funk, soul jazz, avant-garde music. Concrete music, too. Stockhausen, Varese, Pierre Boulez. What I enjoy about it is the vast possibilities to explore.” Her crossover album ‘Golden Rule’, released in 2018, was issued on an Estonian label, the excellent RR Gems (home to other notable spiritual jazz releases from Devin Brahja Waldman, Organic Pulse Ensemble and Mush Tone Ensemble). Each of Grossman’s albums has explored spiritual jazz from different perspectives, embracing a range of influences and instrumentation. 

“On ‘Reverence’ (2019) I was trying to incorporate more African music into my blend of spiritual jazz. On ‘Quiet Earth’ (2020) I was exploring the core elements of spiritual jazz. Using rubato and out-of-time presentation of the theme. On other records like ‘Earth Tones’, the focus was on the drone music, no time, no structure, no rhythm. On the record ‘Birth of the Mystery’ (2010) the line between free jazz, avant-garde, spiritual jazz, minimalist music and musique concrète in general is blurry, yet very organic.” Grossmann’s forthcoming album ‘The Light of the Mind’ is likely to show yet another facet of her seemingly limitless skill at reinterpreting spiritual jazz without sounding derivative.

One of Grossmann’s peers is British saxophonist and composer Nat Birchall. Across his numerous albums, Birchall sticks closely to the classic style and structure set out by John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, focussing on a mainly acoustic sound. His close association with trumpeter Matthew Halsall – also a prime mover in establishing and spreading the sound of spiritual jazz in the UK – cemented Birchall’s reputation as a player and composer steeped in the tradition of spiritual jazz’s elders. Over that time, Birchall’s output has been as consistent as it has been prodigious. Albums such as 2009’s ‘Akhenaten’, ‘Sacred Dimension’ (2011), ‘Cosmic Language’ (2018), and ‘Afro Trane’ (2022) are replete with tracks that evoke meditative, almost devotional moments. For Birchall, spiritual jazz is synonymous with modal jazz and, in that view, he echoes both Gilles Peterson and Muriel Grossman.

“If we take spiritual jazz as a style or genre rather than a way of playing, then I think it’s important to note that it’s modal music for the most part,” says Birchall. “In modal music, the song can be based on any number of modes but is often just one mode or scale, in which case there would be no set number of bars which act as the ‘form’ of the piece. This tends to give the music a more open sound which can generate a more flowing feel to the music. This modal approach also tends to make for more evocative music. I think a term like spiritual jazz certainly means different things to different people.

“That classic horn/piano/acoustic bass/drums combination is a timeless sound to me. Even though a lot of people seem to hear my music as meditative or mellow, it’s actually quite rhythmic and dependent on certain dynamic variations. If you play purely in the service of expressing a particular feeling then the music tends to communicate something to the listener which they can feel and hopefully resonate with. Your ego has to be removed from the equation as much as possible. This is why a lot of devotional music, like Rastafarian music or other ancient religious music, tends to have a very deep or communicative quality. I don’t think you have to be religious to play spiritual music, you just need to be able to remove your ego from the process of playing, so to me spiritual jazz isn’t a style of music but a way of playing.”

Ultimately, it is the emotional connection between the listener and the music that is the key characteristic of spiritual jazz. For DJ, producer and record label owner Rebecca Vasmant, spiritual jazz “is a feeling, it’s the way the music I listen to that falls under spiritual jazz makes me feel. It’s about peace and it’s about feeling calm. There are certain elements and instruments that seem to feature on these records. It’s about a feeling. It’s about an emotional reaction, rather than the structure or the components.”

Compared to the spiritual jazz of the 1960s and 1970s, the contemporary incarnation exhibits certain characteristics that set it apart from its antecedent. One is the prominent place of women in the mix. It’s worth noting that spiritual jazz has always had a female musician and composer, Alice Coltrane, as one of its lodestars. Yet, despite the transcendent and elevated position she occupies in the spiritual jazz hierarchy, there were not many prominent female artists within the field.

There were a few notable exceptions: vocalists such as Dee Dee Bridgewater, Jean Carne and June Tyson must be name-checked as does pianist and composer Amina Claudine Myers, whose unique sound and space remains compelling. Jazz legend Mary Lou Williams holds a special place too, with her mix of gospel, blues and swing. And let’s not forget another harpist, Dorothy Ashby, whose ‘Afro Harping’ (1968) and ‘The Rubáiyát of Dorothy Ashby’ (1970) albums earned her a seat in the spiritual jazz pantheon. 

Given Alice Coltrane’s position as queen of spiritual jazz, it’s no surprise that female harpists are centre stage once again. Ukrainian-born but UK-based Alina Bzhezhinska has made a name for herself with her radiant playing and Amanda Whiting’s albums on the Jazzman label show how the harp is still a vital instrument. Across the pond, Brandee Younger writes original music inspired by Ashby and Coltrane and has a background in classical music. Her last two albums have been released on Impulse, the same label that issued classic Alice Coltrane albums like ‘Ptah’, ‘The El Daoud’ and ‘Journey in Satchidananda’ in the 1970s.

The female voice is strong in contemporary spiritual jazz, with artists as diverse as Anna Butterss, Allysha Joy, Yazz Ahmed, Tamar Osborn, Nicole Mitchell, Nubya Garcia, Cassie Kinoshi and Chelsea Carmichael all making incredible music. One of the most distinctive and critically lauded is London-based composer Nala Sinephro. To date, she has released two stunning albums on Warp showcasing her ambient jazz compositions, where she plays modular synth, pedal harp, keyboards and piano. 

Remarking on the significant position women hold in the current scene Peterson is vocal in his praise. “Nala Sinephro has found a really great place. But then you’ve also got people like Jessica Lauren and quite a few of them that have ended up signing with International Anthem; Bex Burch, Ruth Goller, so yeah, it’s great. Oh, and Valentina Magaletti, she’s an amazing force, and she’s got that Italian thing going on.”

The other noticeable facet of contemporary spiritual jazz is the global nature of the sound. Whereas the ‘classic era’ of spiritual jazz was largely centred on the USA in terms of artists and labels, the current scene is truly international. In recent years, a vibrant and enthralling array of artists have emerged from Scandinavia that are giving spiritual jazz a refreshing spin, often infusing the sound with folk, psych and electronic textures. Names to check out include Teemu Åkerblom, Oiro Pena, Gustav Horneij’s Organic Pulse Ensemble and labels like We Jazz from Finland and Jazzaggression from Norway. 

Further south across mainland Europe, there is a rich and varied stable of musicians and composers who have, over the past decade or so, explored the creative possibilities that spiritual jazz can offer and have created a fascinating catalogue to discover. French outfit Florian Pellissier Quintet position themselves firmly in the mid-60s modal sound whereas The Selenites Band mix spiritual jazz with the Ethio jazz of Mulatu Astatke and the afrobeat of Fela Kuti to create a head-nodding, foot-shuffling brew. A more experimental take is the German outfit Bohren & Der Club Of Gore, who explore a doomy drone that lulls the listener into a liminal headspace akin to hypnagogia. 

Spiritual jazz below the equator is in a healthy place too and has been developing at pace over the past few years. The South African jazz scene is on fire right now with artists like drummer Asher Gamedze, bassist Herbie Tsoaeli and US-based saxophonist Linda Sikhakhane all representing that very particular South African flavour informed by its unique history.

Spiritual jazz’s vibration has also reached our antipodean cousins and given us some extraordinarily good music of late. Names to watch for include bands like Meganerie and The Circling Sun, both of whom stay relatively faithful to the modal elements that Nat Birchall and Muriel Grossmann adhere to. Even Brazil has got in on the action with superb albums in recent years from Thiago França and Guerrinha. 

Closer to home, the UK has long been a welcoming home for spiritual jazz. Indeed, as far back as 1990, acid jazz groups like the recently reformed Galliano and their then label mates K-Creative, both on Gilles Peterson’s iconic Talkin’ Loud label, sampled and interpolated spiritual jazz classics from Yusef Lateef, Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp into their tracks played to a club crowd. Bands such as Cinematic Orchestra and musicians like saxophonist Chris Bowden were similarly early out of the gate with their own take on spiritual jazz in the mid-to-late-90s and early-2000s. Bowden’s ‘Time Capsule’ album, released in 1996 on Soul Jazz Records, sounds incredibly prescient given the current popularity of spiritual jazz. The Cinematic Orchestra’s ‘Every Day’ album, released in 2002, meshed hip hop and heavy jazz and even featured singer Fontella Bass, herself considered spiritual jazz royalty through her marriage to trumpeter Lester Bowie of legendary free/spiritual jazz group, The Art Ensemble of Chicago. 

The proto-spiritual jazz revival by 90s British acts like Galliano and others is a thesis Gilles Peterson strongly subscribes to. “Whether it was [samples or references to] Cedric Im Brooks and Silent Force, or Archie Shepp with ‘Here Comes the Family’. Or whether it was ‘Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah’ by Pharaoh Sanders. Because again, here in the UK, it went through a process to get to where it eventually arrived at via all the trip hop, the acid jazz and nu jazz and all of that stuff. I do think Two Banks of Four was also really interesting, as a precursor to a lot of this, because they were coming out at the same time that groups like Cinematic Orchestra were coming through. Even the Cinematics, if you listen back to a lot of their early records and some of the influences that they had, they were in that kind of post-trip hop kind of soundtrack and spiritual jazz space.” 

These British acts of the 1990s were among the first to recognise the connection between spiritual jazz and club culture, a connection that is explicit today in the club playlists of DJs like Rebecca Vasmant, although she is quick to point out that one has to pick the moment to drop it in a club.

“If it’s in the right moment, in the right circumstance, with the right crowd that is open-minded and receptive,” she says. “If you’ve drawn them in enough for them to be able to handle anything they will. It’s kind of like a game. I always tend to have about 10 spiritual jazz records in my bag when I DJ, just in case the moment is right. I’ve had a situation, during a fairly housey-style night, when I feel like people are waiting for jazz. I’ve got that vibe, so I’m just going to do it. So I’ve gone in, and it was like, stop, start. Completely changed the vibe. And everybody was banging on the roof, shouting, ‘Here we fucking go!’ to spiritual jazz. At three in the morning. It was ridiculous. And the club owner came up and said: ‘What the fuck is actually going on? People are banging on the roof to jazz. I’ve never seen anybody do that to this stuff.’”

The current spiritual jazz sound of the UK is incredibly rich with talent, populated in large part by a post-acid house generation who mix and blend myriad styles of music and culture to create a dazzling and colourful scene that includes electronica, ambient, hip hop, dub, spoken word and much more. There is an astonishing array of skill and flair in the current UK scene that includes groups like Graham Costello’s Strata, Ari Tsugi and Azamiah, who all hail from Scotland. Trumpeter Yazz Ahmed’s Middle Eastern vibe, Tony Burkhill’s Work Money Death modal jazz project, The Forgotten Fairground, the Kevin Figes Quartet, Tenderlonious, Greg Foat…

America remains the temporal and spiritual (ahem) home of spiritual jazz and the pre-eminent label showcasing this vast sound gallery is International Anthem, celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. For Peterson, International Anthem is a key platform in developing and spreading the sound.

“It’s exciting because I think people are gravitating towards the anti-algorithm. It’s about as far away from being able to find the AI version of it because the rules are difficult to repeat. Labels like International Anthem have done brilliantly using the community and the performance space. They’ve found a formula that’s worked in elevating these fringe artists – so to speak – into a kind of marketable community that people want to be a part of.

“Artists that have grown out of International Anthem, some of them have been plucked by the majors. So then that creates tension because we all get offers and we want to grow. But groups like Irreversible Entanglements and Makaya McRaven, Angel Bat Dawid, and the late Jaimie Branch – it’s amazing that they are prominent names in contemporary jazz and improvised music now.”

The spiritual jazz journey started by African American musicians in the 1960s soundtracked the civil rights struggle and Vietnam. It continues today, often addressing global and universal themes – this time from Black, white, Latino and Asian artists. All united in sound. All united in spirit. It’s a spirit that precedes jazz itself. It was there at the beginning, and it will be there at the end. Call it humanity, call it art, call it God, call it whatever you want. After all, the word spiritual means ‘relating to or affecting the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things’. 

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This article first appeared in issue six of Disco Pogo.

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