About

Who would have guessed that a group of musicians in the brash English city of Manchester would, in 2010, be rekindling the astral jazz forged by saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and harpist and pianist Alice Coltrane in the late 1960s? But it's happening, and happening with luminous conviction. The musicians are centered around trumpeter Matthew Halsall's Gondwana Records label. Saxophonist Nat Birchall's Guiding Spirit is Gondwana's fourth release—following his own Akhenaten (2009) and Halsall's Sending My Love (2008) and Colour Yes (2009)—and is played by the same small grouping of musicians heard, with a few changes, on the other three albums. The most significant difference between the four discs is that Birchall wrote the music for Guiding Spirit and Akhenaten, and Halsall that for Sending My Love and Colour Yes. This leads to small shifts in emphasis: Birchall's discs evoke astral landmarks such as saxophonist John Coltrane's A Love Supreme (Impulse!, 1965), Sanders' Tauhid (Impulse!, 1967) and Alice Coltrane's Ptah, The El Daoud (Impulse!, 1970); Halsall's discs follow a similar route and add trumpeter Miles Davis' acoustic mojo circa Kind Of Blue (Columbia, 1959) to the mix.

Guiding Spirit features all the elements which defined first-generation astral jazz: a generally sunny melodicism, strong bass ostinatos and piano vamps, vocalized horn playing and trippy, "exotic" percussion heavy on the bells and rattles. In a sense, the music is revivalist, but Birchall and Halsall approach their material with such sincerity and engagement that the results are timeless. The six tracks on Guiding Spirit are not the well-crafted replications typical of revivalism, but creative, quirky and full of unexpected twists and turns. — All About Jazz

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Label: Jazzman
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue, Remastered, Stereo
Released: 2016
Genre: Jazz
Style: Modal

File under: Jazz - Saxophone
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