Lloyd Miller – Gol-E Gandom
Salah Ragab & the Cairo Jazz Band – Neveen
Spiritual Jazz: Esoteric, Modal & Deep Jazz from The Underground 1968-1977
This collection was originally released through Jazzman in the UK in 2008, but recently got a stateside release through a partnership with Now-Again, a Stones Throw subsidiary. The music contained here carries the “Spiritual” title, not necessarily because of its religiosity, but more so because of the feeling it evokes. This is jazz music that is clearly inspired by post-A Love Supreme Coltrane and the African turn (expressed in the music of Randy Weston, McCoy Tyner and others) in post-bop jazz in the mid 1960s. It sometimes flirts with the avant-garde, but rarely goes into the kind of aural histrionics that groups like the Art Ensemble of Chicago excelled at.
Instead this music is often contemplative, at times plaintive but often will rolling rhythms at slightly odd time signatures that you wouldn’t generally have seen in American jazz (though most of the artists appear to be from overseas, the vast majority of this music was recorded in the US), except on similarly styled labels such as Tribe or Strata East. The people who’ve put this compilation together (including Malcolm Catto, drummer for the Heliocentrics) have focused of largely obscure artists and recordings that were never widely available, mostly private presses that might have been sold originally at performances, but never got widespread distribution.
Virtually every track is a winner, from the “Motherless Child” inspired “The Introduction” by the James Tatum Trio to Lloyd Miller’s santoor led “Gol-E Gandom,” the African chant Funk of “Ayo Ayo Nene” by Mor Thiam, the JB inspired vamp “No Jive” by The Frank Derrick Total Experience, to the best track from Egyptian jazzster Salah Ragab, “Neveen.” Highly recommended for those who want to expand their musical horizons with sounds that could very well be a gateway drug into the world of “serious” record collecting.