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Spiritual jazz (or astral jazz) [1] is a sub-genre of jazz that originated in the United States during the 1960s. The genre is hard to characterize musically but draws from free , avant-garde and modal jazz and thematically focuses on transcendence and spirituality .
Feb 11, 2019 · Below, Ill Considered have listed their ten favourite spiritual jazz tracks that continue to inform the music they make today. 1. Wayne Horvitz & Pigpen – ‘Miss Ann’
Apr 13, 2017 · Spiritual jazz is often more about a feeling than a specific approach, but with Easter just ahead of us, we’re turning to the music that speaks to something beyond our earthly understanding. Take a trip through some deeply soulful and mystical masterpieces with our list of 10 essential spiritual jazz albums.
- John Coltrane and Impulse Records!
- Pharoah Sanders
- Tony Scott
- Alice Coltrane
- Lonnie Liston Smith and Beyond
- Sun Ra
- Don Cherry and Beyond
From John Coltrane’s Love Supremeto the advent of Impulse! records and his musical disciples who carried the creative torch after his passing, we examine the place spiritual jazz occupies in the world of jazz and avant-garde music at large and the music markers who broadened hearts and minds while making it. As the mid-60s sparked seismic change in...
Coltrane’s death left a spiritual and creative void that was later occupied by his wife Alice Coltraneand saxophonist Pharoah Sanders – both members of his later groups. They picked up where Coltrane left off, marrying melodies with ambient-rich improvisations and introducing a new musical vocabulary through African and Indian percussion instrument...
Like Sanders, clarinetist Tony Scott was another early proponent of world music and his record, Music for Zen Meditationin 1964, is considered to be the first New Age record. Scott had a serious jazz pedigree, playing with everyone from Sarah Vaughan, Miles Davis, and Benny Green and cycling through different styles before doing away with them all....
As the “other” Coltrane, Alice was a controversial figure in jazz, though not by choice. While her talent was respected, she was blamed for breaking up the greatest jazz group of the mid-60s when she replaced McCoy Tyner as pianist in her husband’s rhythm section. Abandoning the constraints of bebop, Alice’s albums serve as the precursor to modern,...
Another pianist and key player in the spiritual jazz movement was Lonnie Liston Smith. Before he gained the reputation as the harbinger of smooth jazz, he cut his teeth playing on Sanders landmark album, Tauhid,and was featured as a pianist (and sometimes co-arranger) on five Sanders albums. While Coltrane was working her magic on the Wurlitzer, Sm...
One cannot speak of spiritual jazz without mentioning the pianist-bandleader Sun Ra. His massive discography even dwarfs Sanders, hovering somewhere around 500 albums, and his live performances are the stuff of legend. He was the physical embodiment of all these disparate threads of spiritual jazz — Afro-futurism, cosmic philosophy, tribal percussi...
Unlike the more blustering and abrasive sounds on the free jazz spectrum, Don Cherry’s Brown Rice(1975) is considered a welcome entry point to the sub-genre and at only four tracks, it manages to win over most cynics at first listen. The title track features Cherry’s scat-inspired vocals layered over the wah-wah guitar of Blaxploitation music. The ...
Mar 13, 2023 · Jazz Music. Spiritual Jazz, also known as Astral Jazz, evolved out of the free jazz of the 1960’s as musicians looked to express their own spirituality and search for transcendence in musical expression. In this article, we take a look at some of the most influential artists and albums in this style of jazz music, with examples of ...
Sep 25, 2015 · Astral Traveling: The Ecstasy of Spiritual Jazz. In the 1960s, John Coltrane led a musical movement that saw artists striking out beyond jazz’s constraints and striving toward spiritual...
6 days ago · Spiritual jazz originally emerged out of the hippie cultural moment and I decided to really focus on this theme for my pick of Tom Scott’s The Honeysuckle Breeze from 1967, where he covered The Beatles, Donovan and most notably, Jefferson Airplane’s song “Today.”
