Spiritual Jazz As A Balm For The Modern World

6 Min Read

Welcome to the latest edition of All the Music of All the World, our weekly series where we aim to share music worth being passionate about. Consider us a guide who can help you get the most out of your Victrola by giving you new music to listen to, or new ways to think about music you already know.

If our analytics are correct, you are very likely reading this on your phone right now. It’s the necessary evil we’ve all found ourselves in now. We need these horrible bricks to stay connected, to feel like we’re attached to the world, to do our taxes, to send our partners funny videos, to watch [redacted], to watch videos various evil governments want redacted, to learn Spanish, to see what that kid in 4^th period Geometry who once drank an entire 2 liter of Mello Yello in class is up to, to see what movie that guy was from, to remember our niece’s birthday, to stay informed about what you can do in your community, to stay informed about what’s going wrong in your community, to see what your cousin ate for dinner on their trip to Charleston, to get sucked into a conspiracy involving the earth being flat, to remember who won the Intercontinental title off Honky Tonk Man, to look at pictures from nine years ago, to shop for groceries, to order food, to check exactly where your doctor appointment is on a map, to….

You get the point. And you’re living some version of that Clockwork Orange-esque life right now, wherever you are in the world. I am too. I’m not here to tell you how you can escape it, because, quite frankly, if I knew how, I’d be keeping that to myself, and protecting it like gold. But I am here to tell you about a musical genre that helps me clear the clutter of my phone and subconscious and centers me when I feel like my head is in danger of spinning off its axis. That genre is known as Spiritual Jazz:

To define Spiritual Jazz, I’m going paraphrase myself from my All the Music of All the World feature on Southern Rock: You know it when you hear it. It’s a branch of jazz that had its Big Bang on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, the single greatest jazz album ever put between two sides of vinyl. Coltrane had been part of Miles Davis’ band in the late ‘50s, but was kicked out because of his heroin use. Coltrane left music for a minute, and got his head on straight, kicked drugs, and realized that if he let his music speak for him, and channeled it as best he could, it was proof that there was some higher power, something bigger than himself out there that could help him make sense of his world. As bebop—the hottest jazz of the ‘50s—splintered into a million little pieces, Coltrane and contemporaries like Gary Bartz, Ornette Coleman, and McCoy Tyner started exploding jazz like a Jackson Pollock painting, leaving form, musical tradition, and the expectations of the listener behind. Coltrane would go to outer space, and recontextualize his own music many times over in his career—he’s one of the rare musicians where if you literally throw a dart at his catalog, you’re listening to something incredible—but A Love Supreme is where he helped kickstart what would be called Spiritual Jazz in the music press.

A Love Supreme channeled all of Coltrane’s searching into one totemic piece of work. Drawing on black church traditions like the speaking of tongues, and drawing inspiration from the Civil Rights movement and his own budding Buddhist faith, the album was recorded in a single long session where it unfurls like a church service that demands you quiet in the pews, paying attention. It laid the bedrock for where Spiritual Jazz could evolve, and a member of Coltrane’s family would be one of the genre’s greatest purveyors.

Alice Coltrane was already an accomplish harpist before she married John, but the years they spent together exploring music and faith before Coltrane’s tragic death in 1967 form—as the genius music writer Jeff Weiss once said—the best unfilmable music biopic ever. Just Alice and John, onstage and in the studio, forming a symbiotic duo making Spiritual Jazz into its own genre.

Alice’s first album, A Monastic Trio came out of these years, but her fourth album, Journey in Satchidananda is my personal favorite: It’s searching, it’s hallowed, it’s beautiful.

Alice’s most trusted collaborator in those early days was one of John’s most devoted students: Pharoah Sanders. Where Alice’s music was ethereal, forming the basis for what would become ambient music, Pharoah took Spiritual Jazz all over the world, blending in Pan-African sounds, and more wounded saxophone work. Another “throw a dart” artist, listen to the title track from Summun Bukmun Umyun (Deaf, Dumb, Blind) above, and hear how percussion can add layers to Sanders’ spectral saxophone.

You could pretty much spend the rest of this year studying at the three person altar of John, Pharoah, and Alice, as any of their albums can serve as an escape hatch to modern living, a way of seeing the world that feels more grounded than anything we have going on *points at earth* here. But here’s a round robin on a few other avenues for you to explore. Eddie Gale’s Ghetto Music is like if Isaac Hayes devoted himself to jazz, or if a late ‘60s love-in accidentally turned into a jazz recording session.

Michael White’s vision of Spiritual Jazz has him playing violin over his band’s frenzy, which gives his music a stately, more refined feel.

Bennie Maupin made his name as a member of Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters, but his own music takes on a meditative, floating ambiance. The Jewel in the Lotus is where you can hear jazz being splintered so far down that it came to ambient music from the other side of the electronic artists like Brian Eno did.

Sonny Sharrock would make his name much later in the ‘80s for his scabrous free jazz, but Black Woman, his debut LP, features his wife Linda’s wordless vocals, forming a reaching, beautiful sound over Sonny and his band’s repeated musical mantras.