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Hank Mobley's 'Soul Station' At 60: How The Tenor Saxophonist's Mellow Masterpiece Inspires Jazz Musicians In 2020

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This laid-back date with pianist Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Art Blakey is a pillar of hard bop — and it taught these top-shelf musicians a thing or two
Morgan Enos
GRAMMYs
Oct 5, 2020 - 1:05 pm

Jazz is about more than just the innovators. As far as tenor saxophone goes, most in the know will rightly tell you to begin with Coleman "Hawk" Hawkins and Lester "Prez" Young. Separately or together, those two lit a match under John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, Stan Getz and countless others — all who inspired legions in their own right. But with all genuflection to the trailblazers, those who simply play this music exceptionally well deserve reverence too. Need an example of this? Your next stop is tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley’s 1960 album Soul Station.

Mobley was an alumnus of the Prez school. That means he had a relaxed, melodic sound as opposed to Hawk’s, which was often extroverted and teeming with information. And Soul Station, which features pianist Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers and drummer Art Blakey, is Mobley’s most rewarding listen despite not breaking the mold. This unassuming program consists of Mobley originals (“This I Dig of You,” “Dig Dis,” “Split Feelin’s,” and the title track) bookended by two standards (Irving Berlin’s “Remember” and Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin’s “If I Should Lose You”).

Because Mobley fully tilled the land he occupied rather than searching for new terrain, Soul Station, which turns 60 this month, is a post-bop building block and a terrific entry point for the jazz-curious. From a creator’s standpoint as much as a listener’s, the album has aged magnificently. These nine musicians of various ages and persuasions still regularly check out Soul Station — for its full-bodied sound, its hip melodic structures and the in-the-moment interplay between the quartet.

“It’s one of those records that’s just nice to hear,” saxophonist Chris Potter tells GRAMMY.com. "There’s nothing about it that doesn’t sound good. That’s one of the great things jazz can express — a relaxed feeling of camaraderie. That’s how the band sounds. No one’s trying to outshine anyone. No one’s trying to do anything except play music and swing. And it swings from the beginning to the end."

Like a perfectly crafted cappuccino, Mobley’s sound is creamy with just the right amount of bite. "That sound is pure heaven for someone like me," tenor saxophonist Dayna Stephens tells GRAMMY.com. "I would put Hank’s tone up there with my favorites on tenor saxophone. That warm, fluffy sound is something I model my sound after. A lot of the cats from that era had a brighter sound. Not a lot of them had that velvety sound at that period."

One can understand that sound on both an emotional and a physical level. The Chilean-born tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana zeroes in on his time and phrasing: "The way he played is very personal,” she tells GRAMMY.com. "You can hear one note and know it’s Hank Mobley. That’s the most meaningful thing to me." Potter cites his gear as a factor: "Often, when you hear Mobley, there’s a few little chirps in the reed, which I don’t mind,” he says. “Every saxophonist’s reed tends to do that. They’re finicky. On this, there’s not. He just had a really good reed."

Soul Station has added luminousness from its production and the dimensions of the room in which the band recorded it. Mobley, Kelly, Chambers, and Blakey recorded it in one go on February 7, 1960, at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, less than a year after Rudy Van Gelder moved his operation there from his parents’ house in Hackensack, New Jersey. His new studio, which is still operational today, featured cement floors, cinder-block walls, a cathedral ceiling, and a wooden steeple.

Plus, Van Gelder’s recording equipment and engineering style were exquisite. “The way he miked the piano fits how Wynton Kelly was playing,” Potter says. “It’s so clear, the way he plays. Especially when he’s kind of in the upper register — he kind of leaves a lot of space between the upper register and he’s comping a little lower. His playing is just so swinging, but also so accurate. He doesn’t sound sloppy. Ever. It’s one of his greatest performances.”

“Rudy was at the top of his game,” alto saxophonist Jim Snidero tells GRAMMY.com. "All of Rudy’s records sound great, but that one, in particular, captures the essence of his sound. The way it blends is incredible. It’s just one of those dates, man — where everybody comes together, and it’s magic from top to bottom."

Then, there’s the nuts and bolts of Mobley’s playing. "Hank introduced a concise, streamlined concept to hard bop," Snidero notes. "It was an extremely sophisticated [yet] linear approach that was nuanced, relaxed and swinging.”

As the seven-times-nominated tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman puts it to GRAMMY.com, "He’s a great resource for me in trying to learn this language and keep myself melodically honest. Every note counts; nothing is overstated; nothing is oversold. He always takes care of the changes. He never skirts around them; he always addresses them. He always outlines them in the melodies that he plays, and he always plays beautiful, compelling ideas."

Out of all the songs, “This I Dig of You” has been studied the most by jazz students. “That’s a solo all of us transcribed when we were at Berklee,” Aldana remembers of her collegiate years, calling the song a “masterclass” in sound and time feel.

“‘This I Dig of You’ is one of the most analyzed solos of the era for sure,” Snidero says. “Both Mobley and his bandmate in the Jazz Messengers, K.D. — [trumpeter] Kenny Dorham — came up with a different way of thinking about Charlie Parker’s language. Hank was more about the line and the harmony than the rhythm. He was very keen on creating hip lines. You can tell that in the way he deals with dominant chords and resolutions.”

Tenor saxophonist James Carter says this is due to Young’s influence. “His solos build along the lines of what Prez would do,” he explains to GRAMMY.com. “It starts with a simple statement, then Mobley builds the structure vertically from there, and it grows in intensity. It’s hip how calm he is through all of this. It doesn’t seem like he goes above high F or G regularly, whereas Rollins and Trane would. It’s a paradox that he could stay so even-keeled in his playing but stay building at the same time.”

Could any amount of transcribing capture that feeling? “The thing that’s great about it is maybe the thing you can’t put in a formula,” Potter says. “He’s just playing one melody after another.” As opposed to the unrestrained blowing sessions of the bebop era, Soul Station is highly listenable because of its subtle organization. Take, for example, the tag at the end of “Remember.” “There’s some thought put into the arrangements, but it’s not worked out overly,” Potter says. “It’s right in that sweet spot where it’s people playing music that they’re comfortable playing.”

Mobley’s old boss is a crucial player on Soul Station. Mobley was an original member of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, which had a 35-year run with a rotating membership of dozens. So Mobley has numerous successors; one is tenor saxophonist Javon Jackson, who was in the collective for its home stretch. “I’m a Jazz Messenger, and he was an original Jazz Messenger, so I’ve put him under the microscope,” Jackson tells GRAMMY.com. “We call [what we do] spelling the chords, and he spells so well. The way he presents his lines and his soloing style is impeccable.”

Many jazz fans associate Blakey with his hands-of-Zeus playing on tunes like “A Night in Tunisia”; Soul Station captures him at his most restrained. But to call this an aberration would be to misunderstand — or condescend to — Blakey’s art. “A lot of people speak of Art Blakey’s approach as primal and instinctive, but he was a highly intelligent musician,” Ralph Peterson, Jr., who joined the Jazz Messengers as their second drummer in 1983, tells GRAMMY.com. “He dealt on the highest levels of form, structure, and nuance, and it’s on fantastic display on [Soul Station]. It’s one of the records that drew me to his playing.”

“He’s such a custodian of the pocket,” Redman marvels about Blakey on Soul Station. “He takes care of that beat. He just keeps everything rock-solid and moving forward and grooving. Even when they’re just playing 4/4 swing, it feels like it’s on the verge of a shuffle. You feel that two-and-four a little more strongly, and there’s a little more of that rockin’, dancin’ implication to the rhythm.

Peterson contrasts Blakey’s Soul Station performance with what he lays down on tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin’s 1957 version of “The Way You Look Tonight.” “Art Blakey’s role there is a little more white-hot, a little more red-hot,” he explains. “But on [Soul Station], he’s in the blue part of the flame. The thing is: if you know anything about fire, the blue part of the flame might be the lowest part of the flame, but it’s also the hottest part of the flame. Art was a master of those kinds of subtleties."

That said, “Some of the fire came back during his solos,” Stephens says of Blakey. That’s true of his unforgettable drum break on “This I Dig of You,” in which he throws down bone-rattling rolls without disrupting the tune one iota. “He just explodes in his solo, and as soon as he’s done, they go right back into this restrained, beautiful, almost classical zone,” tenor saxophonist Jeff Lederer tells GRAMMY.com. “I don’t use the term ‘classical’ in terms of genre, but of the overall aesthetic of the record. The way Mobley shapes his solos goes to the classic aesthetic of art more than the ecstatic.”

The combination of Blakey with Chambers and Kelly was unusual for the time. (One can also hear a rare Chambers-Blakey pairing on two tracks from Drums Around the Corner, which was recorded in 1958 and 1959 and shelved until 1999.) “Because it’s a hodgepodge group, I think there’s a fragmented cohesion,” Carter says. “He’s dealing with two of Miles [Davis]’s cats and, of course, his former employer, but it all comes together sweetly.” (In 1961, Mobley briefly became one of Miles’s cats, replacing John Coltrane in his quintet.)

All four of these musicians were pros, so they knew not to play over each other. As a result, Soul Station flows from beginning to end with no loose nails. “You can hear a conversation. There’s no ego,” Aldana says. “It’s not like ‘Who can solo [the fastest]?” Instead, it’s like, ‘How can we all tell a story together and communicate?'"

After Soul Station, Mobley released about half a dozen other stellar albums, like 1963’s No Room for Squares, 1966’s Dippin’, and the same year’s A Caddy for Daddy, all three of which feature the incendiary Lee Morgan on trumpet. “They’re great!” Snidero says of Mobley’s later works. “But they’re not as focused as Soul Station. Soul Station has a center and a power to it. It’s the apex of hard bop.”

Most of Mobley’s peers held him in the highest regard, but he didn’t ride the wave as jazz underwent seismic changes — including fusion — in the late 1960s. Suffering from respiratory and addiction issues, he largely faded from the music scene in the late 1960s and. In 1986, he died at only 55.

Today, one can scarcely read about Mobley without encountering “the middleweight champion of the tenor saxophone,” a boxing metaphor that jazz critic and producer Leonard Feather coined to describe Mobley’s place in the pantheon. To Feather, Mobley wasn’t a “heavyweight” like John Coltrane, nor a “lightweight” like Stan Getz — he was in-between. While Feather was arguably referring to the intensity of Mobley's sound rather than the extent of his abilities, Snidero says this isn't accurate — and, in 2020, mostly serves to trivialize him. (He evokes 1956’s “Tenor Conclave,” in which he eats Cohn’s, Sims’s, and a still-developing Coltrane’s lunch, as proof positive of this.)

“‘Middleweight champion’ is a cute tag, but it means he’s in a different class, that he’s somehow not a heavyweight saxophonist and artist,” Snidero says. “In my opinion, Hank’s depth and refinement on Soul Station, among other recordings, proves otherwise. Was he as great as Trane or Sonny? Maybe not, but he was certainly a heavyweight."

“I don’t think he felt the weight of innovation on his shoulders, and I think that’s a wonderful thing,” Lederer says. “Because jazz is folk music. It’s not science; it’s music that has come out of a culture. While there are artists that will want to innovate all the time, there’s also a special place for artists who speak and transmit the language and don’t feel the need to completely change up the fundamentals of the music that they love.”

“You might be hard-pressed to take any specific element of Soul Station and say ‘That’s innovative. That’s something different with harmony or rhythm or melody that had never been done before,’” Redman says. “But it sure is an influential record. That record has inspired generations of jazz musicians and taught them about a deep pocket, a deep groove, and beautiful melodic lines flowing with forward motion through the changes.”

Indeed, Soul Station’s accessibility and listenability is a feature, not a bug. “The music of Hank Mobley was important for me because I could access it,” Peterson says of his early days as a “frustrated trumpet player.” “It served as a stepping stone to get to other soloists on the way to John Coltrane’s Giant Steps and beyond. You’ve got to start somewhere, but it’s not just a starting point. It’s valid in and of itself.”

Indeed, one can stay on Soul Station for life or hitch a ride to another platform. Either way, this hard bop classic endures for simple reasons: it’s all about playing the blues, weaving hip melodies, and, most important, swinging hard. Anyone with ears to hear can dig dis.

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Alice Coltrane circa 1970

Alice Coltrane circa 1970

 

Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

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'Ptah, The El Daoud' At 50: How Alice Coltrane Straddled Heaven And Earth

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The pianist-harpist's home-recorded album, featuring Joe Henderson, Pharoah Sanders, Ron Carter and Ben Riley, is otherworldly yet drenched in the blues
Morgan Enos
GRAMMYs
Dec 30, 2020 - 8:39 pm

Every morning, the alto saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin rises before the sun, settles behind her 88-key electric piano and offers wordless thanks to the Creator. "My goal is to get to it before sunrise," she tells GRAMMY.com from her New York apartment. "That's when the universe is most receptive, right before the day is about to break and everyone gets in their prayers. I'm there before everyone." 

Right then, Benjamin plays a composition that means more to her than any denominational hymn: "Turiya And Ramakrishna," the worshipful blues from pianist, harpist, and composer Alice Coltrane, off her 1970 album Ptah, The El Daoud.

Benjamin last performed "Turiya And Ramakrishna" for a paying audience back in March. That was at Dizzy's Club at Jazz At Lincoln Center during the release show for her tribute album, Pursuance: The Coltranes, on the cusp of the national COVID-19 lockdown. 

"'Turiya And Ramakrishna' puts me in a place of worship," Benjamin says of her setlist, which invariably features the tune. "I usually take that moment to get deeper into how the audience and I are feeling. I try to bring them into a place of worship to realize this song is not the same as the rest. It's not a church song, but for her style of music, it is. Whether they take it as a church song or not, I'm going to the next step." 

These days, critics are reappraising Coltrane as an artistic equal to her husband, John. But of all her albums, from her early days as a Detroit bebopper to her recordings as the spiritual director of an ashram, Journey In Satchidananda (1971)—Ptah's follow-up—gets the most ink. (It was her only album to make Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time list, at No. 446.) 

But Ptah, The El Daoud, which turns 50 this year, deserves a seat at the table, too.

Ptah, which Coltrane titled in tribute to the Egyptian creator god of Memphis and patron of craftspeople and architects ("El Daoud" means "the beloved" in Arabic), contains abundant hypnotic power and emotional import. These qualities relate to the inner journey Coltrane underwent at the time, the fact she recorded Ptah at home, her quintet's performances, and the album's matrix of ancient Vedic and Egyptian references.

By all accounts, Coltrane conceived Ptah, The El Daoud, and its predecessors, A Monastic Trio (1968) and Huntington Ashram Monastery (1969), during a period of grief and spiritual evolution. In the years after her husband, John, died of liver cancer in 1967, she experienced physical, mental and metaphysical phenomena, as documented in her 1977 spiritual memoir, "Monument Eternal." 

"Sometimes, my heartbeat shifted to the right side of my body. All of the hair on my head would stand on end as if it were electrically charged," Coltrane wrote, citing the "extensive mental and physical austerities" she underwent during this time.

As evidenced by the track titles from this period, like "Lord Help Me To Be" and "IHS" (or, "I Have Suffered"), she interfaced with her traumas and pushed past them into a transcendent space. "My meaning here was to express and bring out a feeling of purification," Coltrane stated in Leonard Feather's liner notes to Ptah, The El Daoud. "Sometimes on Earth, we don't have to wait for death to go through a sort of purging, a purification."

"A lot of those tracks [on A Monastic Trio], like 'I Want to See You' and 'Gospel Trane,' I think of them as mourning because she'd suffered that loss," harpist Brandee Younger tells GRAMMY.com. "And by the time we get to Huntington Ashram Monastery, you know, that title speaks volumes. So then we have Ptah, The El Daoud: 'This is my next phase, and it's more than what you got before.'"

"You know what I think is cool about this album, but also [about] just her in general?" pianist Cat Toren asks GRAMMY.com. "She had four young kids, and she had lost the love of her life. I think that's huge. It speaks to her power as a woman, to go forth no matter the adversity of what else is going on in her life. I would be interested to know her support network and how she was able to produce this incredible work under such challenging conditions."

Vijay Iyer, a pianist, composer and Harvard professor, is careful to note that Coltrane's spiritual quest was more far-reaching than her husband's loss. "She was in public life from 1960 until [her death in] 2007, and for four of those years, she was married to John Coltrane," he says. "Yes, she was grieving, but there was something else she went through in those years that was the beginning of a much larger transformation. Not to reduce her role in the family or her relationship to [John] or anything like that, but she was on her own journey, too."

"When [John] passed, it's not just his passing; it's the combination of his passing, plus mothering, plus careering, plus the world is in unrest," Younger says. "I feel it would be impossible not to be affected by that combination of factors. In the big picture, she went through a serious transition, and there's no question about that because it's written in the book."

"I mean, think about it," she adds. "That happened in that house, where she recorded that record. How could one not affect the other?"

John and Alice Coltrane's home in Dix Hills on Long Island, New York

John and Alice Coltrane's home in Dix Hills on Long Island, New York | Photo: Steve Pfost/Newsday RM via Getty Images

As with A Monastic Trio and Huntington Ashram Monastery, Alice Coltrane recorded Ptah, The El Daoud in the basement of her ranch-style house at 247 Candlewood Path in Dix Hills on Long Island, New York, which she and John shared from 1964 until his death; she remained there until 1973. Tenor saxophonists and flutists Joe Henderson and Pharoah Sanders, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Ben Riley accompanied her on the recording.

Read: Hank Mobley's 'Soul Station' At 60: How The Tenor Saxophonist's Mellow Masterpiece Inspires Jazz Musicians In 2020

"When I hear that record, the first thing I hear is the room," saxophonist-clarinetist Jeff Lederer tells GRAMMY.com, describing the rich, boomy atmosphere of Ptah, The El Daoud as "comforting." "It's not a [Rudy] Van Gelder sound or anything, but you can feel [like], 'Wow! She was making this record in her house.' It's not the kind of sound you'd expect."

In that regard, Steve Holtje, a keyboardist, writer and the manager and producer of the long-running, Bernard Stollman-founded label, ESP-Disk', views Ptah as something of a landmark. 

"It's not the first time anybody ever did this—it's not even the first time she did it—but I have a certain fondness of placing this album in the lineage of DIY recording," he says. "It happens that Ed Michel at [jazz label] Impulse! got the producer credit on this, but I'm not sure how much a producer he was in terms of influencing the music." 

"Was she a Billie Eilish in the making?" Ashley Kahn, the author of "A Love Supreme: The Story Of John Coltrane's Signature Album" and "The House That Trane Built: The Story Of Impulse Records," asks GRAMMY.com. "The self-produced, self-sufficient musician idea has been around for many, many years and expressed in many different ways." 

"It's a Black female artist taking control of her music," Holtje states. "That's really important."

"It may be that that sensibility was in the air at that time," Iyer adds. "A sense of self-determination to make this work for you on your terms, rather than a transaction with a corporation, which doesn't necessarily have your best interests at heart. Particularly for Black artists in the 1960s and '70s, that was a movement."

"It's homey. It has that Sunday-afternoon-after-church vibe," bassist Melvin Gibbs tells GRAMMY.com of the feeling "Turiya And Ramakrishna" exudes. "Even the Van Gelder records were recorded in a living room, so it's not that far out of context in the sound of jazz, but it feels like your relatives were playing for you. That's evocative for me." 

"The room is the invisible instrument. The other member of the band is the room in which you record the live date," vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Georgia Anne Muldrow tells GRAMMY.com. 

But when it comes to record-making, a lush-sounding room doesn't mean much without stellar musicians within its walls.

"Ptah, The El Daoud has darkness and richness of tone that speaks to me, and some of that comes from the incredible sound of every musician [on the album]," keyboardist Jamie Saft tells GRAMMY.com. "The musicians on this record, their tone is as rich and developed and important as it gets. Joe Henderson and Pharoah [Sanders] have some of the greatest saxophone tones of all time. Alice Coltrane's piano tone and Ron Carter's bass tone are so important to jazz music." 

Aside from "Lord Help Me To Be" on A Monastic Trio, where Sanders tears a hole in the firmament, Ptah, The El Daoud is Coltrane's first album with horns. 

"I think what makes this album so great is that you get to hear her comp with great horn players," pianist Matthew Shipp tells GRAMMY.com. "The beautiful plant and flower that her chordal language and her touch had [relates to] the interplay of those two horn players."

Joe Henderson circa 1970

Joe Henderson circa 1970 | Photo: Tom Copi/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

The musicians featured on Ptah hail from both the avant-garde and straight-ahead jazz scenes. 

"This rapprochement between those two styles was very deliberate on [Coltrane's] part," Holtje says. "Ben Riley is best-known from Thelonious Monk's quartet. And before that, Riley had been playing with the Johnny Griffin/'Lockjaw' Davis quintet, which was very much a popular style."

Holtje goes on to note that while Carter played with Miles Davis and Henderson had come off a string of exploratory-yet-tonal albums on Blue Note, Sanders was "Albert Ayler-influenced—a real firebreather in Alice's husband's band." 

"Aside from Pharoah, Alice's band on this record looks, to me, like a deliberate move away from associations with John," he observes. "And to do that, she put together a set of musicians who were not especially associated with each other."

Read: 'Bitches Brew' At 50: Why Miles Davis' Masterpiece Remains Impactful

As for the rest of the rhythm section? 

"Ron Carter's walking on air. You can't get away from the fact that this is a blues-based, cosmic cat," Shipp enthuses. 

"Ron is maybe one of the two or three most important bass players in the history of jazz from a harmonic standpoint," drummer Gerry Gibbs adds. "Alice's music only has a few chords; usually, it doesn't have a lot of chord progression. So that gives Ron a lot of space to use a lot of his harmonic brilliance.

"Ben [Riley] was a very soft drummer," he continues. "He never really played much with a crash cymbal; he usually played with a ride and a flat cymbal. He was never a basher." 

"He's the kind of drummer I'd like to be," Muldrow adds. "The kind that supports what's going on and makes statements through the ways he supports the music. There are things he does with the brushes on that record that I'll never forget."

"There's this real attention to groove and the meaning, the importance of that," Iyer says of Riley's performance. "Even when the [music] seems to kind of wash along, there's precise attention and care for how the pulse is expressed. You hear her dealing with that in a way you don't as much as when she plays with Rashied Ali. It gives this album a certain backbone that's important."

Despite its harmonic and rhythmic dust devils, Ptah has an undeniable core and pulse.

"'Ptah, The El Daoud,' to me, sounds like a battle cry of sorts," Younger says. "The interplay between Sanders and Henderson, and the way Coltrane favors the low end of the piano for nearly the entirety of the head and horn solos, gives it this riveting edge."

"After it's all done," she continues, "'Turiya And Ramakrishna' is the perfect release. Spiritually, and she references this in so many of her composition titles and writings, she sought to express a state of nirvana. This track achieves just that. That blues, the way it just keeps going, this cyclical driving-home, and then how the bass moves underneath it to give all types of new qualities to this one scale—it's just beautiful how she did that."

"There's stasis in here, but it keeps moving. It's like a spiral," guitarist Brandon Ross says of Coltrane's pianism on "Turiya And Ramakrishna." "It's moving laterally, but not in a broad sense. It's elevating each time to the cycles in another dimensional field of its orbit."

"She's going back to the roots," Kahn says about "Blue Nile," for which Coltrane switched from piano to harp, with Sanders and Henderson picking up alto flutes. "But never mind bebop; it's a blues. It has that comfortable feel, yet the sound, textures and mysterioso, in-the-air feel is like waking up in the morning and looking out the window, the same window you're familiar with, and you see the lunar surface or the rings of Saturn. It's both comfortable and otherworldly at the same time."

"Whereas the harp can be more glissando-focused, the way she plays piano, she gives you everything. But the use of the blues is always present," vibraphonist Joel Ross tells GRAMMY.com.

"The only track where Pharoah asserts himself in the whole avant-garde sense is 'Mantra,'" Holtje adds. "That is the longest track, so that is the track where they have the most time to explore, if I can use that word. So that's kind of a natural thing to be happening there, but Pharoah also had a good grounding before he went out. I'm sure he respected Joe Henderson, and I'm sure Joe Henderson respected him."

While Muldrow characterizes Ptah as "a nice little cutaway, a rest stop," Iyer and Kahn see it more as an on-ramp. 

"There are many effective doorways to Alice Coltrane's world," Kahn says. "It's an unbelievably kaleidoscopic mixture of music that'll leave stretch marks on your ears and brain as far as what is possible. It combines so many different musical traditions on this planet in a way that feels very organic and satisfying on a bunch of different levels: culturally, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. Ptah, The El Daoud is as effective as any other doorway that I would recommend for any listener trying to get into Alice Coltrane and grasp what she's about. But it shouldn't be the last stop, either. It should be a welcome mat, and it's a very effective one."

Ptah, The El Daoud is a tribute to God through ancient Vedic and Egyptian lenses, and the parallels between the two cosmologies run deep. 

"You're talking about ancient evidence of contemplating the universe. That's the point of relation," Muldrow says. "Ptah, that's coming from Africa, up from Ethiopia into the Nubian civilization, all the way into what we call Egypt today." 

"Bringing the Black experience to the Sanskrit thing, I feel like there's a circle that gets completed," she continues. "What dovetails everything is the history, the landscape and the people. That's what brings it all together, and she was completely aware of it. She's quite a scholar."

The album's heavily stylized, Jim Evans-painted cover features a wealth of emblematic information. 

"If you look at this album cover, it's got many different images in it," cultural scholar and essayist Menzi Maseko tells GRAMMY.com over Zoom from Zimbabwe. "What you see in the hieroglyphs are the names of God and of becoming. It says, 'The father of beginnings, the creator of the egg, the sun and the moon.' It's got the cobra at the bottom, which symbolizes cunning, superior intellectual capability and danger."

"The fact she even mentioned the word Ptah, to me, is like a whole history lesson," bassist Lonnie Plaxico tells GRAMMY.com, connecting Ptah to the ancient Egyptian vizier named after the deity. "I would tell people to go look at 'The Teachings Of Ptahhotep,' and you'll understand why she [evoked him]. I encourage people to go check out who Ptahhotep was. I think that was her intent. It's like a seed. I think she was putting the seed out there, like, 'You should know about this person.'"

Regarding the importance of Egyptian and Vedic systems to Coltrane, "I wouldn't put one over the other; it all becomes this percolating stew," Iyer notes. "There are all these different influences, from Islam to ancient, pre-Hindu Indian spiritual practices to Kemetic systems of knowledge. All of that intersected and had that transformative impact on Alice Coltrane to the point that she then took on the name Turiyasangitananda."

To Maseko, to make an album bearing Ptah's name is a sacred action. 

"It is all in devotional service to the Supreme Being," Maseko says, with a hint of awe. "She's immortalizing the name of Ptah, but every musician is involved in the creation of that work. Pharoah Sanders carried on the tradition. Joe Henderson carries on the tradition. Last year, you probably didn't know you would be doing this, but you're doing it because it's the will of Ptah. We didn't plan it. It's something inside your DNA, inside you and inside me, that has brought us to this moment. It's a miracle, bra'. It's an unfolding of the divine will."

In early November, Benjamin, clad in white and gold, emerged from the lockdown for a livestreamed gig at Jazzfest Berlin, her first since the album release show at Dizzy's. Midway through the set, she, Plaxico, pianist Zaccai Curtis and drummer Darrell Green changed gears and took the socially distanced crowd to church.

"That last song we played was an Alice Coltrane song entitled 'Turiya And Ramakrishna,'" she said on the mic. "Most people tell me it sounds like a love song. It's a constant seeking out the Creator, your purpose, and why you are here and getting closer to the source of the one that gave you life. It is a love song, but it's a love song to the universe."

While that "love song to the universe" may be under-discussed among casual jazz fans, its inspiration ripples forth via these musicians' hearts, minds and hands. To the question of why a jazz layperson should hear Ptah, The El Daoud, Muldrow takes what feels like half a minute for silent contemplation. 

"Because it will make you feel better," she finally allows. "You're going to hear something special in this record. You're going to feel love in this record. If I were to give this to a layperson, I'd say, 'Man, you're going to feel better after you listen to this.'"

"If you're not versed in Alice Coltrane, why do you need to hear it?" Younger asks. "Because 'Turiya And Ramakrishna' will save your life. If it doesn't save your life, it'll change your life." 

Brandon Ross sounds captivated, serene, even a little solemn while reflecting on the same track. "What else can I say about this, man?" he asks as it burbles in the background. "It's self-explanatory. They need to play this when I die, as a lift."

'Giant Steps' At 60: Why John Coltrane's Classic Hard Bop Album Is More Than A Jazz-School Worksheet

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Paul Winter

Paul Winter

Photo: Bill Ellzey

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Paul Winter On How His New Album, 'Light Of The Sun,' Starts A New Path In His 60-year Recording Career

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Over the decades, the 81-year-old, GRAMMY-winning soprano saxophonist swerved around rock 'n' roll, embraced whale songs and so much more. 'Light Of The Sun' encapsulates his contemplative, meditative vibe
Pamela Chelin
GRAMMYs
Dec 30, 2020 - 8:45 am

When the soprano saxophonist, composer, and bandleader Paul Winter gazes at the night sky, he's not just looking for the Man on the Moon. Not only did Apollo 15 astronauts name two craters after his songs ("Icarus" and "Ghost Beads"), but they left a cassette copy of Road, a 1970 live album by Winter's longtime band The Paul Winter Consort, on the moon. "When I look up at the moon at night, and I remember that story, sometimes I don't quite get it," Winter tells GRAMMY.com over the phone from his farm in Connecticut. "'I think, 'No, that's not possible.' But they said they left the cassette up there, so I've told friends, 'When you go to the moon, take a cassette player and see if you can find my cassette.'"

Winter, who's won six GRAMMYs as an artist, may have turned 81 this year, but he shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, the 81-year-old's latest release, Light Of The Sun, released last month (Nov. 13) via Living Music, starts a new path in his 60-year recording career. It's the first time Winter is the featured soloist after decades of assuming the role of bandleader and involving numerous collaborators in his recordings. "It's something I'd dreamed about doing for a long, long time," he says. "When I turned 80, I thought, 'This is as good a time as any to do it.' It was great fun to focus on my playing. It's been a great labor of love, and I consider this my testament as a sax player, but I don't mean to imply it's my last one. I'd like it to be my first one."

Light Of The Sun embraces Winter's lifelong fascination with the sun. (Some of his previous album titles include Sun Singer, Journey With the Sun, Morning Sun, and Everybody Under the Sun.). "The idea was to try to see if the feeling of the sun, the sunlight, could be transmuted into music the way sunlight transmutes chlorophyll giving life to all the plants," he says. "I've long been fascinated with the sun and the ways that we experience it. It's the source of our life. All life on Earth comes from the sun, and it's just a tremendous factor in our lives that we don't think about too much."  

To Winter, the sun also symbolizes hope, kindness, love, serenity, and optimism. As Winter's soprano sax takes front and center, winding prominently through the record, the 15 compositions are as celebratory as they are soothing. At times, the music sounds uplifting, like a morning prayer. At others, the soothing music sounds like the perfect companion to a relaxing glass of wine at the end of the day. A welcome antidote to a dark and stressful year, Light Of The Sun offers a delightful musical reprieve from 2020's turmoil.

To best capture his sound, Winter utilized wide open spaces to allow for the most robust musical resonance and reverberation, recording in three unique locations: the Miho Museum in Japan; the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York and the Grand Canyon. He first discovered the powerful acoustics inside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 1968 during Duke Ellington's funeral service, where Ella Fitzgerald sang, and musicians from Ellington's orchestra played in honor of the jazz composer and bandleader. Since 1980, Winter's been the artist-in-residence at the historic cathedral, where he's held winter solstice celebrations for forty years. 

Growing up in Altoona, Pennsylvania, Winter switched from clarinet to saxophone after falling in love with big band music when he was seven years old. "It was in the 1940s and the big band era," he says. "I loved that music more than anything, and to have a whole genre of music very much in the air and alive in our culture to inspire me then was exciting." Luckily for Winter, his grandfather owned a music store, making it easy to get a saxophone.

By the time he was 12, Winter had a group in the vein of German drinking bands. He played churches, the local YMCA, and the rotary club. His mom was his roadie. "It was great fun, and people loved seeing these kids play this happy, wacky music and telling jokes that were very corny, of course, but all the funnier because we were only twelve," Winter says. He received his first payday when, one night, he made 50 cents after a performance. "When you were twelve in 1951, that was big money," he says. 

A couple of years later, his band morphed into a 9-piece dance band, playing Great American Songbook standards. "That music is so timeless," he says. "That shaped my aesthetic a lot." While enrolled as a Northwestern University student, Winter formed the Paul Winter Sextet, incorporating bebop music. In 1961, they won an intercollegiate competition judged by jazz virtuoso Dizzy Gillespie and record producer and talent scout John Hammond, who had discovered Aretha Franklin and signed Bob Dylan. Hammond promptly signed Winter to Columbia Records. "It was astounding; I'd never dreamed of anything like that," Winter says.

Unfortunately, Winter says that because jazz was an underground phenomenon, there was nowhere to play publicly. Sitting around his apartment with nothing to do, he decided to write to the U.S. Department of State, asking to be sent on a goodwill tour of Latin America. 

"We were perfectly integrated with three Blacks and three whites at a time early in the Kennedy years when civil rights were the burning issue, and I was extremely interested in cultural exchange," he says. Winter didn't expect a response to his letter, but a few months later, his request was granted. For six months, the Paul Winter Sextet toured Latin America, played concerts in 23 countries, and received steady pay. He recalls the joy he derived when he performed for 5,000 barefoot villagers in Bolivia: "They had no experience with what we were doing, but they loved it because it was rhythmic, and in the warm countries, people like to move."

When they returned from their tour, the band decided to move to New York to try their luck. But though their tour of Latin America was a success, there was still no work to be had and nowhere to play live. Winter considered going to the University of Virginia law school, whose acceptance he had deferred for a year. By then, the Paul Winter Sextet had put out two records, 1961's The Paul Winter Sextet—which only came out in Latin America—and 1962's Jazz Meets the Bossa Nova, which became a minor hit, selling 30,000 copies.

Fortuitously, the band got to play an unusual and unlikely venue. As part of Jackie Kennedy's Concerts for Young People By Young People initiative, the Paul Winter Sextet was the first-ever jazz group invited to perform at the White House in 1962. When they arrived, the First Lady told Winter that she'd been listening to Jazz Meets the Bossa Nova nonstop for three weeks. As President John F. Kennedy worked down the hall nearby, Mrs. Kennedy watched the performance, along with a room filled with children and reporters. The following day, according to Winter, the news headlines read, "Jackie Loves Jazz." With his moment in the spotlight, Winter got work touring clubs around the country. But he didn't like it. "In nightclubs, you were almost a liquor salesman, there to entertain people so they would drink more, and the acoustics were bad."

Soon after, Winter broke up the jazz ensemble and lived in Brazil for a year. Playing with Brazilian musicians planted the seeds for his next musical pursuit. In 1967, Winter formed the Paul Winter Consort, combining jazz, world and classical music, and nature sounds. A few years later, he signed with Albert Grossman, who managed Dylan, Peter, Paul, and Mary, the Band, and other luminaries. But the Paul Winter Consort didn't fit into an apparent musical genre, making it hard to break through to an audience despite having released three records. "Record stores didn't know whether to put it in classical, jazz, or folk, so they put it nowhere," Winter says. 

To attract a large audience to the band, manager Bennett Glotzer introduced Winter to the Beatles' famed producer George Martin. Martin played oboe and had a deep grounding in classical and instrumental music. "George agreed to have lunch with me, and we hit it off so well," Winter says. With Martin at the producing helm, the Paul Winter Consort spent three weeks recording in the coastal town of Marblehead, Massachusetts, in 1971. They released the resulting Icarus to critical acclaim in 1972. 

That's when Winter became renowned as a pioneer of new-age music, which makes him laugh. "It's a joke," he says. He explains that the new age classification was given to him by the record industry when electric music dominated the music scene. Many perceived acoustic music to aid meditative purposes and alternative therapeutics. The simple tag of "new age" positioned the Paul Winter Consort's genre-evading records in record store aisles and awards categories.

While the Paul Winter Consort never fit neatly into one musical category, there is a specific music genre of which Winter's never really been a fan; rock music. So it was ironic when Winter found himself on bills in the seventies with rockers like Procol Harum, Spirit, and Bruce Springsteen. The latter opened for Winter at a gig in 1973. The Boss's friendliness and his extreme confidence struck Winter, but he watched just a small portion of Springsteen's set. "When he started talking about New Jersey, David Darling and I said, 'OK, let's go out for dinner,'" he deadpans.

Nature's music was more Winter's speed, and he had first fallen in love with it when he heard humpback whales in 1968. The yearning quality in whales' songs enamored him, which led to his fascination with other wild animals' sounds. For instance, wolves' howls express what Winter calls "the universal blues." Since the 1970s, Winter has been incorporating what he calls "the symphony of the earth" into his music. He's currently working on a new recording project, recording Indigenous peoples' music in fifteen countries situated along the African-Eurasian flyway, to raise support and awareness for migratory birds, including storks and cranes, who need protection.

As humble as he is hard-working, Winter doesn't display any of his six GRAMMYs on his mantle, preferring to keep some of them in boxes in his barn. He gave several of them away. "I don't think it's healthy to keep awards around. It gives you an illusion that you've accomplished something," he says. "For me, it's always what I'm doing next." He's even reluctant to take credit for his success, continually attributing it to good fortune. "I think if one realizes any dreams in their lifetime, they're lucky, and I've had a huge abundance of luck," he says.

Though he hasn't had the same level of success as some of his contemporaries, Winter says he wouldn't want it because it often comes at a cost. "I think something happens when you have huge success," he says. "Once you become used to the fame and the adulation and the entourage, it seems like often people lose their muse, that the thing that originally propelled them toward resting whatever they did that reached a wide audience and their output ends. They can still perform, but their music is no longer full of magic. There's a certain amount of humility and creative aspiration that is needed." 

"Of course, I can't be critical of people who had great success," he adds. "They earned it. It's remarkable how the adventures that it afforded them, but it's very hard to find people who reach that level who still have their original values intact."

He points to acclaimed folk singer Pete Seeger as a rarity who never lost his integrity. Winter first heard Seeger's music when Hammond took him to a Carnegie Hall concert in 1963. "It was like a revelation hearing a voice that seemed very real to me," he says. "It didn't sound like a pop music voice where you feel somebody's trying to sell you something. And he spoke about [authentic] things in the world. I had never been allured to listen to folk music. That was the big turning point for me." Three years later, the pair met at the Newport Folk Festival, where they bonded and became close friends. (Winter later produced Seeger's album Pete, which won a GRAMMY for Best Traditional Folk Album in 1996.)

Though Winter has endured his fair share of ups and downs in the music industry, he says he wouldn't have it any other way. To him, it's been more critical to stay true to his musical vision. He says that music, for which his appreciation grows more profound with each passing year, has been a "magic carpet," allowing him to travel to places he'd otherwise not have gone and to meet people, including his wife, he'd otherwise not have met. The couple has two daughters.

"I can't say our path has been easy," Winter says. "But it's been profoundly gratifying because I've always been able to keep somehow making the music I love, and I didn't have to try to fabricate something that would be more commercial. I've come to appreciate the challenges. You don't grow without challenge, so there's been no shortage of that for me."

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SPAZA

 

Photo by Andy Mkosi Tumba Makonga

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South African Jazz Collective SPAZA Look To The Past To Capture The Present On 'UPRIZE!'

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The album was recorded in 2016 as the soundtrack for Sifiso Khanyile's 2017 documentary of the same name, which tells the history of the 1976 uprisings in Soweto against the racist apartheid government
Noah Berlatsky
GRAMMYs
Sep 12, 2020 - 7:25 am

SPAZA's new album, Uprize! (out on Oct. 16), has a fierce, enthusiastic title, complete with exclamation mark. The cover is similarly joyous; it shows two women raising their arms ecstatically in the air, fists clenched. It makes revolution look like fun.

The music inside that upbeat package, though, is a stark contrast. Uprize! is an album of meditative, solemn, spiritual jazz. Every intimation of joy wreathed in mourning. The opening of the first song, "Bantu Education," starts with deep, agonized notes from Malcolm Jiyane's trombone, and an ambient chorus of worldless gospel moans led by singer Nonku Phiri. The album is less a celebration than an eerie, heartfelt and extended lament.

The mixture of pain and triumph is fitting given the album's subject. The music was recorded in 2016 as the soundtrack for Sifiso Khanyile's 2017 documentary Uprize! The television film tells the history of the June 16, 1976 uprisings in Soweto against the racist apartheid government.

Most older radicals and activist leaders, like the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, had been jailed or killed by the mid-1970s, and older people were understandably terrified of opposing the regime. "Most of our parents in those years were in total fear of government," says 1976 student leader Seth Mazibuko in one of many excerpts from the documentary included on the album. "They'd say to us, 'You don't stand against the government. You don't say things against the government. You'll go to jail for years, like Mandela! You'll go for life!'"

But when the government demanded the Black schools start teaching students in Afrikaans, the language most associated with the apartheid regime, something snapped. Inspired by a new generation of radicalized teachers, high school students went on strike and took to the streets to protest. Bantu Education, the government's program for Black schools, "was a project to keep Black people uneducated, undereducated and basically just a preparation for the labor market, that's all we were good for," the documentary explains. Student protestors were both demanding better instruction, and showing through their own political engagement that Black youth were more than the worker drones the regime was trying to turn them into by force.

The album is a tribute to and celebration of the children's resistance. The uprising was major turning point in South African history, and led eventually to apartheid's repeal in 1991. But the album is also a eulogy for those who died over the grinding decade and a half between rebellion and freedom. Police and government forces may have killed as many as 700 people in the 1976 demonstrations. One of the most harrowing anecdotes in the documentary describes a Black student trying to talk to a Black policeman during the protests. The policeman shoved him away twice. When he returned for a third time, the policeman shot and killed him.

"I remember crying," Malcolm Jiyane said of the first time he saw the documentary. "And while watching a melody came to me. I hummed it to the rest of the band and they added their input. And that's how all the music was composed, from everyone's ideas."

As Jiyane says, the group, including Jiyane, Phiri, bassist Ariel Zamonsky and percussionist Gontse Makhene improvised the music while watching the film. The result is strikingly polished, especially considering that the musicians were not exactly a working band. Makhene and Zamonsky had recorded together as SPAZA before with a number of other performers assembled by the Mushroom Hour Half Hour label. But Phiri and Jiyane were new additions.

Jiyane ran away from home as a child, fleeing parental abuse. "I grew up in a children's home called Kid's Haven," he told me by email. "One December, the home had a Christmas party and Dr Johnny Mekoa, who had a music school in a township called Daveyton, came with his big band to perform for us. It was my first time seeing musical instruments live and hearing music being played live. After the show he asked every child who had interest in learning music to come to his school." Jiyane, who had dropped out of formel education in fifth grade, joined Johny's academy in 1997 at age 13 to learn drums. He eventually switched to piano, and then to what became his main love, the trombone.

Phiri has been an eclectic vocalist from almost as soon as she could talk. "As a toddler apparently I was really good at mimicking Whitney Houston and a whole bunch of other artists," she laughs. More recently, she's recorded in a range of jazz and non-jazz contexts: she's worked with everyone from the classic South African vocal group the Mahotella Queens to Portuguese producer Branko. She says she leaped at the chance to work with the rest of the new SPAZA.

"It was a group of artists that I really respected," Phiri told me. "Collaboration for me, and I mean this in the most innocent way, it's kind of like creating a baby that can't be duplicated with anybody else."

You can hear that new, lovely thing being born on "Sizwile." Phiri's languid vocals sigh and soar up high and then impossibly higher. Gontse Makhene's percussion skitters quietly around the edges of the song, while Zamonsky's bass provides a steady, quiet pulse. Jiyane sometimes responds with vocals in dialogue, or adds piano flourishes, or towards the end of the song solos on trombone while Phiri yodels in response. "Siwile" means "we have heard" in Zulu, and the musicians sound like they're listening not just to the protestors in '76, but to each other, building the song as they go out of responses and silences.

Recording a new soundtrack for the album was a counterintuitive choice. The documentary could have used music from the time, as do most documentaries about the Civil Rights era and its legacy in the U.S. Many interviewees in Uprize! do reference Miriam Makeba, the Beaters, and kwela, as well as international acts like James Brown and Bob Marley, all of whom influenced Black resistance in South Africa.

Having SPAZA on the soundtrack, though, emphasizes the present day's distance from and continuity with, South Africa's past. The music reaches across a gulf, that's both too wide and too present.

Zamonsky's family came from Argentina to South Africa in 2005, when Zamonsky was in high school. "It was already many years, what 10-11 years from democracy," he told me. "It's difficult for me to imagine how it was before—it's unthinkable somehow." And yet, at the same time, much of the inequity and oppression of apartheid-era South Africa persists. "Obviously, everything has changed, but there are the same kind of attitudes. South Arica is one of the most if not the most unequal countries in terms of who how many people make money and who doesn't make money, there's a lot of poverty." Makhene adds, "The leaders are doing the same thing that the leaders that they kicked out of power were doing. White face, black mask, as they say."

The documentary and the album are both ambivalent in tone because the uprising was not exactly victorious. It was crushed by the police, and even today many of its goals have not been won. "We Got a Lot of Work to Do," as the title of the final song on the album puts it. But clips from the documentary in that song also explain that the album itself is part of the work that needs to be done.

"They want us to be sort of the image of what it means to be Black, and we will adopt a different image of what it means to be Black. And in that way you are defeating apartheid," a documentary clip explains, as Zamonsky's bass throbs underneath, and Jiyane's piano explores and probes. Through Bantu Education, South Africa was "putting our minds in a box," the documentary says. The authorities didn't just want to keep Black people in poverty; they wanted to prevent them from thinking or creating. Uprize! the documentary is a chronicle of that history, but Uprize! the album is at least in part a triumph over it.

SPAZA takes pain and the past and makes music out of it together, spontaneously. It's a live demonstration that oppressors can't stop Black people from thinking, or singing. That's why, despite many reasons for sadness, the people on the cover have something to cheer.

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Nubya Garcia

Nubya Garcia

Photo: Adama Jalloh

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Meet Nubya Garcia: The Rising Star Taking The London Jazz Scene By Storm Talks Debut Album 'Source'

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The emerging artist tells GRAMMY.com about how her first solo album explores identity and community, how the sounds from her multicultural roots left a "life-changing" impact on her and why she thinks livestreams will never replace live music
Hugh Morris
GRAMMYs
Aug 23, 2020 - 4:00 am

In clubs around Britain, a loud, colorful revival is happening. Shaped by artists like Soweto Kinch, Shabaka Hutchings and impresario Gilles Peterson, the blossoming U.K. jazz scene, propelled by a welcoming attitude to genre and a celebration of diversity, is bringing a healthy challenge to jazz's long-running U.S. focus. 

In the middle of London's vibrant scene sits Nubya Garcia, a saxophonist and composer who has a hand in many of the next wave of U.K. jazz outfits. You can find her in Nerija, the female-led septet now signed to the Domino label. She changes tack in Maisha, an outfit contributing to the history of spiritual jazz. It's telling of her pivotal place in the scene that Garcia's lucid sax lines appeared on over half of the tracks on the era-defining We Out Here, the 2018 compilation album spotlighting London's rising jazz scene.

Garcia now follows two successful EPs, Nubya's 5ive (2017) and When We Are (2018), with her first album, Source, released Friday (Aug. 21) on Concord Jazz. But even on this debut solo release, the temptation to hog the limelight is never satisfied. Despite being imbued with questions of personal identity and roots, Source truly feels like a group effort. Appearances from Nerija bandmates Cassie Kinoshi and Sheila Maurice-Grey as well as versatile pianist Joe Armon-Jones only add to this feeling. This community-driven scene behind Source creates a uniquely cosmopolitan sound as Caribbean flavors meet EDM-infused club culture, all built on a solid understanding of Black jazz history.  

Garcia is a star in this world, a role model for youngsters across the country. But the outlook on Source is global, as is its creator's reach. 

GRAMMY.com chatted with Nubya Garcia about how her debut album, Source, explores identity and community, how the sounds from her multicultural roots left a "life-changing" impact on her and why she thinks livestreams will never replace live music.

The Guardian recently described your music as "post-American" jazz. What sort of sounds and influences do you find in your music that you might not find in more straight-ahead, bebop-oriented music?

Labels are really interesting; they can often leave out quite a lot in the picture they create. I'd say you can find a lot of reggae and dub. You wouldn't necessarily hear it in my music, but I [also] love garage, footwork, tiny bits of early dubstep and music from the Latinx community. Essentially, I like music from all over the world—global music. I don't like the term world music, and I'm glad that's slowly leaving 'cause it's ridiculous—we all live in the same world! 

How much of this stems from growing up around these sounds in Camden, North London?

Kind of in a big way, but also, I wasn't exactly listening to bashment at home when I was a kid. We had a lot of reggae and dub in the house, but as much as that, we had classical music and mum's '70s and '80s pop records. A really big influence for me growing up was visiting Trinidad Carnival when I was 10; that was my first dive into a culture that I was born into [Editor's Note: Garcia's father is Trinidadian]. Witnessing the multitude of sounds within soca and calypso was life-changing. Since then, I gravitate towards it—I seek it.

I guess our music is a real involvement of jazz within a different dancing complex. Jazz has always been dance music, and it's taken little windy routes away and back from this. Perhaps this is another one of those moments. Bringing jazz to different venues has charged the music with a different energy, too, although it hasn't lost any of the influence of "the tradition." I can still play a ballad in a club if I wanted to. And by club, I don't mean a jazz club.

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Exactly. I think one of the most interesting things about the U.K. jazz scene at the moment is its emphasis on space and place, as well as sound, which often means jazz-influenced music turns up in unexpected places.

We're blessed with curiosity and a supportive community, which includes venues, too. There are lots of places to play, to see what everyone's up to and collaborate. 

Collaboration isn't unique to us, but there is certainly freedom of creation. [In non-COVID times,] we were in jazz clubs alongside pubs, warehouses alongside "club" clubs, places that only had indie bands, rock bands, grunge, punk … These weren't really places for jazz-inspired music, and that's what's really exciting to me. We're just creating, playing what we like and pushing it together.

On Source, the thing that flows through the album is a focus on identity, but I like that each track shows a different chapter of this story. I imagine it's been a personally rewarding experience putting it together culturally as well as musically.

Rewarding, but challenging. There was a massive pandemic in the middle of it ... It feels like a whole story, but as complete as it sounds, it still feels searching enough to me. There are themes throughout about identity—my identity and our identities as humans—how we connect to it and what grounds it. It's a really honest representation of me at the moment.

Albums like Source and the upcoming Blue Note Re:imagined, the latter of which features an all-U.K. lineup reworking iconic Blue Note tracks, show that the world is listening to your community at the moment. Where's the scene at now and where might it be headed?

It was a really exciting place to be [pre-COVID]. If you saw my calendar … we were finally like … well to be honest, I never really imagined any of this happening. My goal as an 18-year-old was to get a gig! Being able to play the music I grew up listening to all over the world was something I never really imagined could happen.

We'd been touring and building slowly, but really well. Everything felt very rooted in enjoyment rather than sales 'cause it's not pop music …

But where's the movement as a whole going now?

Right now? I think things are opening up. We've done a few sessions, and I've had a couple of livestream offers, but I'm not a fan of the livestream thing, I'll just be straight with you. 

Why?

Because we can't survive on livestreams. I think it's going to become even more difficult to be a musician, which is going to leave a huge gap in generations to come. When we look in five, 10 years, we'll ask, "Why are there no young bands coming through?" Because there's no money in it, there's nowhere for them to play, they don't have any options to get those £100, £50, £20 gigs. Lord, I hope they're not still doing that sh*t anymore!

They still are …

That's what was going on when I was 20! That's how we cut our teeth and learned when to say no, when to say yes and when to push for more. But I think livestreams aren't the same thing. They are something, don't get me wrong, but I'm very worried that it'll become the norm if there are no venues to play out in. I think the big venues will be fine, but we really need to protect the smaller venues that have had such a huge part to play in our development. You need to play out to improve. You can't just play together in a room for a year and then say, "I want to play at Glastonbury."

I'm trying to remain hopeful because I need to, but I don't think livestreaming is the way forward. It's great for reaching out around the world, but it's not sustainable, and it changes how the audience communicates with the other members of the audience, too. Music is a huge part of sharing that experience—it only happens once.

That's the other thing: Source feels live. How have you reconciled this with the current situation where there's virtually no live music?

I've made my peace with it—there's no point crying about it! It's all that we have, and it's the closest we can get to the real thing right now. Hopefully, we can play it in the future, and when we do get to tour it, it'll be mad. I've never done a gig so long after a record has been released, so in a way, it'll be really beautiful because then people will know the album.

What do you hope new listeners will find in your music?

Bits of themselves, bits of other people, stories they've not heard before and stories they're reminded of through the tunes. I just want listeners to listen, feel it and have an open mind, feel some joy, express themselves, dance, move and share. Most of all, I just want people to be present!

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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