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'

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.

Read: Glen Ballard On How His Netflix Show "The Eddy" Puts Music, Jazz And Performance First

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.

Thundercat's New Album Is A Balm For Troubled Times

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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

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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Lin-Manuel Miranda (L) and host/creator Hrishikesh Hirway (R) in "Song Exploder"

Photo: Eric Veras/Netflix

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Beat By Beat: How "Song Exploder" Unlocks The Intimacy Of Music And Creativity

Based on the popular podcast, the newly launched Netflix series dissects classics and current hits one layer at a time, while host and creator Hrishikesh Hirway finds the human connection behind it all

John Ochoa

GRAMMYs

Oct 20, 2020 - 4:54 pm

Most people know "Song Exploder" as the popular podcast giving die-hard music fans a deep, inside look into the sonic mechanics behind their favorite tracks. A whole new class of music-heads now knows "Song Exploder" as the new Netflix series bringing the creativity behind music to the digital screen.

Originally launched as a podcast in 2014, "Song Exploder" dissects classic and current fan-favorite songs, with guest artists breaking down each individual track and element in detail to paint an intimate audio portrait of their art. The podcast, which has accumulated more than 60 million streams and downloads over the years and has hosted guests like U2, Selena Gomez, Björk, Fleetwood Mac, Solange and many others, now breathes new life as a Netflix docuseries.

Introduced on the streaming platform at the beginning of October, "Song Exploder" adds an even deeper layer of storytelling and personal insight to the songs being deconstructed beat by beat. The show's inaugural four-episode run features Alicia Keys ("3 Hour Drive"), Lin-Manuel Miranda ("Wait For It" from "Hamilton"), R.E.M. ("Losing My Religion") and Ty Dolla $ign ("LA"). (Last week [Oct. 15], Netflix unveiled its next slate of guests for the show's second season, set to debut Dec. 15: Dua Lipa, The Killers, Nine Inch Nails and Natalia Lafourcade.

Whether in visual or podcast format, the core of "Song Exploder" remains the same: "an intimate portrait of an artist telling the story of how their artistic mind worked through creating one of their songs," host and creator Hrishikesh Hirway tells GRAMMY.com.

GRAMMY.com chatted with Hrishikesh Hirway about the human connection behind his new "Song Exploder" Netflix series and how he hopes the show will inspire others to create their own art.

You have an endless supply of songs from which to choose for any given "Song Exploder" episode, podcast and show. What needs to stand out in a song in order for you to develop it for "Song Exploder"?

The first step in the process is really identifying the artists before even getting to the song, because, frankly, I don't know necessarily which songs might have the best stories. The most famous songs don't necessarily have the most interesting stories, and the people who know that better than anyone are the people who made the songs.

But what I can try and determine is which artists seem really interesting and thoughtful, good storytellers, and who are also beloved by a lot of people. That's kind of where I start. And once I can get an artist onboard to talk about a song in this way, then I start the process of trying to narrow down which song it's going to be with them.

I feel like I don't know what the story [of the song] is all the time. There are a lot of songs that haven't necessarily been delved into, and frankly, I'm always interested in something like that ... where the backstory [of a song] hasn't been canonized and "Song Exploder" can be a place to tell it for the first time. So I really am relying on input from the artists ... The question that I ask them, frankly, is: Which of your songs do you feel the most emotional attachment to?

Ultimately, the most interesting stories, I think, when it comes to making songs or really making any kind of art, are about people and their feelings and the things that inspire them to make something at all. Even though the show is about music, it's also a portrait of each of these artists. In order to tell you something insightful, especially for it to be something that could be interesting to people who aren't people who make music themselves and also aren't necessarily even familiar with the artist or the song, it has to be something that connects to something in the human experience that feels significant.

I always try to make "Song Exploder" a show that reflected a broad range of genres and artists and backgrounds. So there's kind of almost a guarantee that you couldn't just get people hooked on the show based on who the artists were and what the songs were; I want everybody to watch every episode and listen to every episode of the podcast because I think that it's a worthwhile conversation to have. I think the creative process is something that's really fascinating in and of itself. It's an example of how people react to their own experience, to actually decide to make something based on their ideas, what they lived through, what they love ... The thing that I'm actually most interested in is that kind of emotional experience: the emotional attachment to the act of creating a piece of music.

Michael Stipe of R.E.M. in "Song Exploder" | Photo: Courtesy of Netflix/Netflix

There's a moment in the R.E.M. episode where frontman Michael Stipe gets almost emotional listening to his own voice on the band's classic, "Losing My Religion," and hearing the song elements broken down and presented to him in such an intimate manner, even after so many years since the song's release. How do you go about getting artists to open up to you and dive into their art so deeply?

I think one thing that helps is that I'm not really approaching [the interview process] head-on, certainly not right away. The questions don't start off front and center in like an emotionally investigative way. I think I have to earn their trust first, and part of that is from talking about the mechanics of the process first. That's the entry point in all these conversations. One of the reasons why having the [song's] stems is important, not just in terms of letting the listeners know what's going on in the song, but in terms of being able to facilitate that conversation with the artist.

Of all of the questions, the hardest one to answer is probably, "Why?" "Why did you decide to make the song this way? Why did you write this lyric? Why did you choose this chord progression?" That's the hardest [question], but it's also the one that I'm most interested in. But it's a little easier to start off with, first of all, "What?" "What are we listening to?" And then to ask them, "OK, how did you make it? And when did you make it?" All those basic factual questions are a way to just let them and me submerge ourselves into the memories of making that song.

Once they're there and able to relive some of the experience of it by hearing the actual evidence of the stuff that they did on that day—hearing their voice, hearing the instrument, hearing the actual track that they recorded around that time—it's a lot easier to ask them to then dig a few layers deeper and ask what was going on in their lives and how that might've fed into some of those creative decisions.

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You're now juggling the show and the podcast. How do you decide what songs go on the podcast format and what goes in video format?

Well, the podcast is a lot of work for a podcast, but that means that I'm still able to turn around an episode in a few weeks, whereas the TV show takes a much longer time to put together. There are just so many more components to it, and it's so much more work.

Part of the pitch for doing the television show is that I was trying to ask these artists to take a leap of faith, [like,] "This is something that's going to take a while to make, so you can't tie it to your promotional calendar, necessarily. I can't guarantee that it'll come out on such and such date to coincide with your single release or something like that." It was really more like, "Would you like to participate in this thing where there'll be this really meticulously crafted mini-documentary about this work that you did, and it's sort of evergreen."

That's a different pitch than with the podcast. Although with the podcast, I say all those things, too. I say it's evergreen and it's always better when it's not necessarily tied to your release schedule and more like when people have had a chance to live with the song a little bit. But one of the advantages of the podcast is it can be a little more nimble because it's a little easier to put together.

So this is a long way of saying that a lot of times that question is answered by the artists themselves or their publicists or managers, who are looking for a very specific outcome or timing, or they have something in mind, and that could be a matter of scale. It really depends on the circumstances of the artist and what works for them.

Fans who've been following the podcast for a while will find a totally different experience when they come to the show. There are two types of storytelling when I hear "Song Exploder," the podcast, and when I watch "Song Exploder," the docuseries. The podcast is very audio-heavy: You get to really hear all of the isolated bits and pieces of the song. The show has a lot more historical and cultural context, sort of like a mini-documentary for a song, and you also hear from a lot more voices beyond just the recording artist. Beyond the visual element, what do you gain in terms of storytelling through the show?

I think one of the things that you mentioned is absolutely key to the TV show, which is that often on the podcast, it's just a single voice or maybe two voices together … But with the TV show, because the timeline was so different, there was a chance to stop and say, "OK, who do we really want? Who are all the voices that are involved in the creation of the song?" Maybe not just the artist, but also the collaborators that were essential to making the song.

Having that kind of breadth and depth, it isn't always afforded to the shorter turnaround time and the scale of the podcast. But here, to really immerse the audience and give a really full picture of what the song was, having those other voices in there was really important. For [the] Alicia Keys episode [about the song "3 Hour Drive,"] we traveled to London to film with [the song's guest vocalist and co-writer/co-producer] Sampha and the [song's] co-writer/co-producer Jimmy Napes because we knew that they were going to only expand and flesh out the story.

I think a part of it is also a matter of craft, too. When you're working in audio, you're kind of only working in one dimension, which is time. You're just relying on one sense, hearing, and you're just basing everything on how long things take; the rhythm comes from just that one sense. But with TV, you have to also give a rhythm and complexity visually, too. You can't just transliterate the podcast into a TV format, where it's just one person talking, mixed with the isolated stems, because it wouldn't work; it would get very boring very quickly. So in order to have that kind of texture and nuance, we wanted to involve all those different people and try and give a little bit bigger of a picture than maybe what comes out in the podcast.

Do you see the podcast and the show as separate entities or related in the same family? Do you need to engage with both formats to fully appreciate or understand what "Song Exploder" is trying to do?

Oh, I don't think you have to engage with both. Of course, I would love it if people did, just because they're both things that I've put a lot of work into, and you want people to enjoy the stuff that you've worked on. This is not a great analogy, but I think it's sort of like reading a book or watching a movie that's been adapted of that book. I don't think you need to read the book to enjoy the movie, and vice versa, you don't need to have seen the movie to have full enjoyment of the book. But maybe you'll get something out of the experience of taking both in. Maybe it changes the way you feel about both.

This is, of course, a little bit different, because it's not even the same story that's being told. It's really just taking the core concept, which is an intimate portrait of an artist telling the story of how their artistic mind worked through creating one of their songs, and taking that concept and expressing it in these two different media. So it's much looser even than something like an adaptation of a book to a movie.

What artist or what song is your holy grail for the podcast or the show or both?

I don't have one holy grail—I think I probably have about a thousand. Anytime I start listening to music, I start wondering about it. That's not new since I started "Song Exploder"; it's the other way around. That's always been the way I listen to music. When I fall in love with a song, I want to hear it from the inside out. I want to hear what the individual tracks, what the individual stems sound like. I want to know what the ideas were that inspired all of these things that I'm falling in love with. "Song Exploder" was just a way of me being able to actually make that happen for myself. So anytime I'm listening to music and I hear something great, you could put it on the list.

Ty Dolla $ign in "Song Exploder" | Photo: Courtesy of Netflix/Netflix

What is your ultimate goal with "Song Exploder"?

I wish people would either watch the show or listen to the podcast and come away with a feeling that they want to make something themselves. Part of my aim with the show is to democratize the act of creation a little bit. I think it's easy to look at very successful artists or very successful songs or any kind of art in any format, where it has reached a certain level of success, and think that there's some uncrossable boundary for everyday people that keeps them from making something as great as those songs …

I think the best feeling that I always get from finishing working on an episode is something akin to that. That like, I just want to go make something, and it doesn't just have to be music. I think that anybody who is interested in making anything at all, to get something from the show, just the idea of going from nothing but an idea and following that all the way through to a finished piece of art, I hope that might be inspiring to everyone.

Glen Ballard On How His Netflix Show "The Eddy" Puts Music, Jazz And Performance First

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Rufus Wainwright

Photo: Barbara FG (Cleared for any usage with credit)

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Sacred Spaces: Rufus Wainwright, YUNGBLUD, Keb' Mo' And Others Reflect On The Independent Venues And Clubs That Changed Their Lives

As the majority of the live concert industry across the world remains on pause, GRAMMY.com chatted with a handful of artists about their cherished concert memories at some of their favorite clubs and venues

David McPherson

GRAMMYs

Aug 3, 2020 - 6:00 am

Though it's been more than 50 years since Café Au Go Go closed, Blood, Sweat & Tears frontman David Clayton-Thomas still recalls the cultural significance of this famed NYC basement bar. Formerly located at 152 Bleecker St. and operating from 1964-1969, the Greenwich Village hotspot hosted everyone from Cream, with Eric Clapton, to Jimi Hendrix.

"It was the place to be in those days," Clayton-Thomas reflects. "That is where Blood, Sweat & Tears started. We became the house band for a couple of months while recording our first album at CBS Studios on 52nd Street. We would work the club at night and record during the day. It's hard to forget a club like that. It will always be a part of my wonderful memories of New York."

It's not a stretch to say that the resulting Blood, Sweat & Tears self-titled 1968 album, which has sold 10 million copies worldwide and won the GRAMMY for Album Of The Year in 1970, would exist today without the band's experience at this small yet renowned club.

Clayton-Thomas' story illustrates exactly how independent music venues are more than four walls. Within the confines of these cramped clubs is a shared cultural history and community: collective stories of unforgettable nights watching your favorite bands and artists perform. The spirits of these artists—some long gone—are forever etched in the wood and ingrained in the stain-filled dance floors.

Exterior of Café Au Go Go in NYC in 1965 | Photo: Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the live music ecosystem, already hit hard by rising real estate prices, gentrification and urban sprawl, entered crisis mode. Seminal clubs across North America, from L.A.'s historic Troubadour to Toronto's legendary Horseshoe Tavern, lie silent.

Like concertgoers, club and venue owners, too, are eagerly awaiting the return of live music. In the interim, these entrepreneurs do what they can to keep their businesses afloat: Some launched GoFundMe fundraisers, while others turned to social media, patrons and local and federal government for financial support. The politicians are starting to hear these pleas.

Earlier this month, the U.K. government announced a £1.57 billion (approximately $2 billion) aid package for the arts, culture and heritage industries. In the U.S., a pair of senators introduced a relief bill: the Save Our Stages Act. The Recording Academy is also endorsing a pair of solutions: the RESTART Act and the Mixed Earner Pandemic Unemployment Assistance Act.

The sad reality: Without the leniency of landlords and the passing of stimulus acts by governments, many iconic clubs and independent venues will not survive the financial fallout caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Even with these lifelines, the outlook could be grim. According to a survey from the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) last month, which surveyed nearly 2,000 music professionals across the U.S., 90 percent of independent venue owners, promoters and bookers said they will have to close permanently within the next few months if they do not receive financial relief from the government.

As the majority of the live concert industry across the world remains on pause, GRAMMY.com chatted with a handful of artists, including Rufus Wainwright, YUNGBLUD, Keb' Mo' and others, about their cherished concert memories at some of their favorite clubs and venues.

Rufus Wainwright

Venue(s): The Troubadour and Coronet Theatre in Los Angeles, Calif.; McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, Calif.; The Town Crier in Beacon, N.Y.; Ursa, owned by his sister Martha Wainwright, in Montreal, Quebec

Rufus Wainwright performs in Austin, Texas | Photo: Barbara FG (Cleared for any usage with credit)

Self-isolating these days at his home in Los Angeles finds GRAMMY-nominated singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright spending time practicing more, especially the piano. "I've been able to dive into the technical forest," he tells GRAMMY.com. Before the pandemic hit, he was on tour and starting the promotion cycle for his newest album, Unfollow The Rules, which he released last month via BMG. He booked gigs at many clubs, including The Troubadour, to promote the record. Then he had to cancel them.

"The Troubadour, for me, is especially poignant," Wainwright says. "I performed there a couple of times over the years, and I've seen many shows there. We were set to play there at the beginning of this tour. This album is very much influenced by the history of Laurel Canyon [in Los Angeles], songwriting and Hollywood, and we had this symbolic show booked at The Troubadour to emulate some of the grand history that occurred in that venue. Sadly, that opportunity got ripped away when the pandemic struck."

Read: Beginnings And Endings With Rufus Wainwright

Other touchstone venues for Wainwright in the L.A. area include: The Coronet Theatre, now Largo At The Coronet, where he regularly performed early in his career and McCabe's Guitar Shop on Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica, where the artist played a series of shows before the pandemic hit.

"I am familiar with the smaller-venue situation mainly because my parents started out playing in coffeehouses in the 1960s and '70s," Wainwright says. "Places like the Caffè Lena in Saratoga Springs, [N.Y.], and The Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton, Mass., are all part of the really vital, socially important folk music movement my parents [Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle] were a part of in the 1960s. For a lot of artists, these venues are like a trampoline that can catch your fall when you aren't necessarily the flavor of the month. I grew up witnessing this dynamic, and I started out in smaller venues. To dominate that dynamic is really important and harder than you think. A lot of big artists cannot play a small venue … it's too scary and too intimate, but I love them!"

YUNGBLUD

Venue(s): The Crowndale in Camden Town, London, England; The Lock Tavern in London, England; The Electric Ballroom in Camden Town, London, England

YUNGBLUD performs at the Electric Ballroom in 2019 | Photo: Matthew Baker/Getty Images

Born in Doncaster, Yorkshire, British rocker YUNGBLUD left home at 16 and moved to London. "I ran away because the north of England is not a place for a kid in lipstick playing rock 'n' roll," he says. Once settled in the south, he discovered the live music mecca of Camden Town, north of England's capital.

"These venues shaped what I am as an artist today," he says. "I remember walking into Camden Town for the first time and my mind exploded; it was everything I ever wanted. It was Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory. I had a golden ticket to everything I read about: The Libertines, Amy Winehouse, etc. I used to skive off work to get coffees and go to Camden for hours, telling my dad I had been mugged!

Read: Yungblud Talks Turning His Tour Postponement Into An Online Rock & Roll Variety Show

"Camden was really a big turning point in my career," he continues. "I've played every tiny venue in Camden, from The Crowndale for 10 people to a sold-out show at The Lock Tavern where Amy Winehouse played early in her career and who is a massive inspiration to me. She taught me being you is good enough. Later, I played the Electric Ballroom to 1,500 people. The Camden Assembly, formerly The Barfly, is where my guitar player [Adam Warrington] and I really connected and when we figured out we were going to play music together for the rest of our lives, bonding over our love of Joy Division, Blur, N.W.A, Foo Fighters and David Bowie.

"When I think about Camden, that spirit, and every show I've played in the clubs there, I remember why I'm here and what I'm doing it for … it's all about the passion!"

Colin Linden

Venue: The Legendary Horseshoe Tavern
City: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Opened: 1947

Colin Linden (R) with Robbie Robertson (L) performing at the Legendary Horseshoe Tavern in approximately 1989 | Courtesy Photo: Colin Linden

These days, Canadian blues artist Colin Linden lives in Nashville, Tenn., but Toronto is where he cut his teeth. The GRAMMY-nominated songwriter and producer grew up fast, sitting in as an underage teen with local legends like Willie P. Bennett and David Wilcox at small clubs around town. Today, Linden figures this is the longest time he has gone without a gig in his 48-year career. "I feel a real need to connect with people," Linden says.

Toronto's legendary Horseshoe Tavern is Linden's seminal venue. He still has a scar on his forehead from a time he played The Shoe in the mid-1980s and bounded off the stage a little too recklessly. And in the early 1990s, he played there frequently with a secret band, which included Bruce Cockburn, called Bambi And The Deer Hunters.

"It is the place where I started playing as a kid and kept on playing over many years," Linden recalls. "It was an important venue long before I ever set foot in there. It's a place where I've had a lot of laughter and a lot of tears. When I think about the Horseshoe Tavern, I think about so many things. I remember sitting in the back alley in booker Peter Graham's car, playing him my demo and talking over my mistakes. I really wanted a gig there."

The most memorable night for Linden at this venue happened on March 13, 1989, when he shared the stage with The Band members Rick Danko, Garth Hudson and Robbie Robertson. "That was such an amazing night," Linden thinks back. "I remember Robbie getting offstage and asking me, 'How can you guys hear anything?' I realized he had not been on a stage in more than 10 years and forgot how loud it gets in a club!"

Keb' Mo'

Venue: Harvelle's
City: Santa Monica, CA
Opened: 1931

Harvelle's | Photo: John M. Heller/Getty Images

Harvelle's, a popular West Coast blues club with a long history, is where Kevin Roosevelt Moore started playing in 1992 before he was known as Keb' Mo' and before he had a record deal. His first audition to play the historic venue failed. Later, he landed a gig at the club through a friend who needed a guitarist. After that, Moore played the venue regularly for years. One Tuesday, Moore was performing when television producer and composer Chuck Lorre was in the audience; an introduction led Moore to land the theme song for the popular CBS sitcom, "Mike & Molly."

"It's very important to maintain the local watering holes of our country," Moore, who this year took home a GRAMMY for Best Americana Album for his 2019 album, Oklahoma, explains. "For me, Harvelle's is the place where I figured out who I was. Harvelle's is where I became 'Keb' Mo'.' If not for Harvelle's, I, and many other artists I know, would not be where we are today. It's so important to make sure these local places that feed the community—socially, culturally, and artfully in a musical way—remain open. When you take away the starting point for musicians, you take away the connection. It's the local pubs and the local dives that make us who we are.

Watch: Keb' Mo' Reflects On The Journey To His 'TajMo' GRAMMY Nomination

"Even today, Lady Gaga, Bruce Springsteen, etc., all want to do a dive [bar] tour because the dives are what's happening," he continues. "It's about connecting to the people. It's raw, it's honest and it's genuine. The place you have to be most genuine of any place is in a dive, because when you play a fancy theater, everyone comes to see you and is expecting something. In a dive, no one gives a crap about you, so you have to go to them and figure out how to connect and reach them. In a way, playing a dive is way more difficult than playing a concert. Harvelle's and all the dives, coffee shops [and] restaurants of the world are very important to creating that connection and community within the music business."

Sarah Jarosz

Venue: The Cactus Café
City: Austin, Texas
Opened: 1979

Sarah Jarosz performs at The Cactus Café in approximately 2006 | Photo: Steve Oleson

At 29, New York City-based American Roots singer-songwriter Sarah Jarosz has already won three GRAMMYs. (Her newest album, World On The Ground, released in June, features production from five-time GRAMMY winner John Leventhal.) Jarosz shares her love for The Cactus Café, one of the storied music clubs situated on the campus of the University Of Texas At Austin in her hometown. The venue has hosted a who's who of Texas songwriting legends and bands over the years, from Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark to The Chicks and Nickel Creek.

Read: Sarah Jarosz Graduates to GRAMMY Winner with 'Undercurrent'

"Since I'm not able to play shows on the road right now, I've naturally turned my thoughts to some of the first venues I began playing in," Jarosz says. "I have a particular fondness for The Cactus Café. That's the first club I remember my parents taking me to as a little kid, even when it was way past my bedtime. I remember the smell of the coffee brewing, the clinking of the glasses at the bar tucked into the back corner, the warmth of being surrounded by kindred spirits and music-lovers.

"Venues like The Cactus are sacred spaces," she adds. "For the hour or two that you're inside them, the outside world disappears, and musicians and listeners alike find solace in the energy and the sounds."

Jane Bunnett

Venue: Jazz Showcase
City: Chicago, Ill.
Opened: 1947

Jane Bunnett performs at Jazz Showcase in Chicago, Ill. | Photo: Jim Funk

Jane Bunnett, 63, is a soprano saxophonist, bandleader and three-time GRAMMY nominee. The most recent ensemble the Toronto artist assembled is the all-female, GRAMMY-nominated Afro-Cuban jazz group, Jane Bunnett & Maqueque.

She holds a special place in her heart for Chicago's Jazz Showcase, started by Joe Segal in 1947. Legends from John Coltrane to Miles Davis have played this historic club. Today, you'll still find the 94-year-old NEA Jazz Master Segal hanging around, but his son, Wayne, runs the day-to-day operations.

The first time Bunnett tried to sit in and play at Jazz Showcase in the late 1980s, Joe refused to let her play. Flash ahead a decade. Bunnett was back in the Windy City for the Chicago Jazz Festival. After her set, musician Ira Sullivan introduced her to Joe, who didn't recall the incident. Amends were made. In the last five years, the club has become a regular anticipated stop for Bunnett & Maqueque; they were scheduled for another gig there this spring before the pandemic hit.

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

"I've got incredible memories of playing that room," Bunnett says. "Right behind the bandstand is a beautiful 10-by-12-foot photograph of Charlie Parker. I remember the first night I'm up on that stage, it was such a joyous moment. Joe sat right in front of my percussionist and just stared. I looked around the room at all the paraphernalia and history and just soaked it in. There I was with a bunch of young Cuban kids in their early 20s who didn't have a clue of who many of the artists pictured on the walls were."

Sierra Hull

Venue: The Station Inn
City: Nashville, Tenn.
Opened: 1974

Sierra Hull (R) performs with Justin Moses (L) at The Station Inn in Nashville, Tenn. | Courtesy Photo: Sierra Hull

At 28, bluegrass/roots artist Sierra Hull has already released four full-length albums. Her most recent, 25 Trips, released in February on Rounder Records, is the follow-up to her GRAMMY-nominated 2016 album, Weighted Mind.

"It's easy to take for granted that a venue like The Station Inn will always be there," she says. "It's a staple of the Nashville community and a musical home for so many of us. I've been deeply inspired by the concerts I've seen by both legends and peers there, and have played the stage myself countless times over the years. It's the type of venue that is perfectly small and intimate yet with a history that makes it feel larger than life.

Read: Sierra Hull Takes Her Place In Bluegrass History, Talks Legacy & New Music At Wide Open Bluegrass

"It really breaks my heart to know that venues we all love are struggling and could potentially go under during this pandemic. I hope and pray they can survive this for the sake of our community and the need we all have to gather together in places with so much history and meaning."

Ondara

Venue: Cedar Cultural Center
City: Minneapolis, Minn.
Opened: 1989

Cedar Cultural Center | Photo: Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Ondara, previously known as J.S. Ondara, grew up in Nairobi, Kenya, listening to a lot of rock music before moving to the U.S. in 2013. His debut album, Tales Of America, released in 2019, received a nomination for Best Americana Album at the 2020 GRAMMYs. In May, the singer-songwriter released his follow-up, Folk N' Roll, Vol 1: Tales Of Isolation, an 11-song collection written and recorded by Ondara, in less than a week, while in lockdown in Minneapolis. The compositions speak to our times and collective quarantined experience. A direct response to the global pandemic, the album serves as therapy for Ondara.

Before moving from Africa to America, Ondara had never been to a concert. His first show was at the Cedar Cultural Center, a Twin Cities live music hot spot for the past 30 years. It changed his life.

Read: Kenyan Singer/Songwriter J.S. Ondara On Telling His Own 'Tales Of America' With Debut LP

"I was new to America, and I had spent some time with music unsuccessfully," he recalls. "Nothing was working out, so I decided to go to school. Halfway through my second semester, a friend invited me to a show to see Seattle singer-songwriter Noah Gundersen. I had a completely spiritual experience at that concert. I dropped out of school the following day and went back to focusing on my music and making my debut record. It was life-changing. The novelty of [it] being my first concert, along with my internal turmoil of my desires to be a musician being stifled, all played a part in the experience. It left a lasting impression. I honestly can't wait until I can be in a room full of people again and sing right in their faces."

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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

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 | 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 | 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."

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