Intersteller Jazz

When it comes to excavating history in the traditionally under-reported world of avant-garde music, Andy Beta is one of America’s most probing critics. As part of the Pitchfork Essentials series, he put together “Astral Traveling,” a hybrid sociocultural survey and annotated playlist charting the evolution of spiritual jazz in the ’60s and ’70s. Beta—who also has logged considerable time as a deejay—pulls off what is a tricky balancing act. Through words, he successfully weaves selections from John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Sonny Sharrock, et al., into a cogent historical narrative. At the same time, he ensures that his playlist—as a listening experience in its own right—heaves, swells, and testifies with a sense ecstatic ritual that honors spiritual jazz’s sacred ethos. That’s elegant curation.

John Coltrane went insane sometime around 1960. Once he hit that perfect balance of drugs, free jazz, and ingenious sidemen, it was game over for vintage hard bop. The Village Vanguard concerts of November 1961 saw the beginnings of the classic quartet—Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones—and their search for visionary new sounds and modes. In many ways, Coltrane revolutionized the concert experience through his visceral and spiritual engagement with his music of that period. Through these live performances, ranging from Coltrane Live in Paris to his essential contributions to Miles Davis’ 1960 tour, Coltrane delivered, through both his saxophone and his leadership, some of the most potent expressions of the post-war existential crisis that would ever be heard.

John Coltrane went insane sometime around 1960. Once he hit that perfect balance of drugs, free jazz, and ingenious sidemen, it was game over for vintage hard bop. The Village Vanguard concerts of November 1961 saw the beginnings of the classic quartet—Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones—and their search for visionary new sounds and modes. In many ways, Coltrane revolutionized the concert experience through his visceral and spiritual engagement with his music of that period. Through these live performances, ranging from Coltrane Live in Paris to his essential contributions to Miles Davis’ 1960 tour, Coltrane delivered, through both his saxophone and his leadership, some of the most potent expressions of the post-war existential crisis that would ever be heard.

In the two plus years since Kamasi Washington dropped The Epic, his appropriately titled three-CD bonanza of Afrocentric post-bop sound, there has been a revolution in the world of jazz—and some of it was televised. Its no longer uncommon for a jazz musician to play sold-out rock arenas and headline major festivals. And its no longer odd to see jazz on hip-hop playlists, be it tracks by Washingtons West Coast Get Down associates like Josef Leimberg, Miles Mosley, or Terrace Martin, or by hip, think-outside-the-box jazz players like Robert Glasper, Makaya McCraven, or Jeff Parker. Washingtons first release since The Epic—the new six-part EP, Harmony of Difference—arrives to a different scene.Harmony of Difference is the soundtrack to a film by A.G. Rojas that premiered during the Biennial at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in March 2017, and it shows the growth and diversification of Washingtons sound. He already draws heavily from the often overlooked glory days of the early 70s when musicians extended the jazz tradition into rock, funk, and African music. Deeper grooves power some of the tracks on Harmony, and the solos are more concise—where The Epics definitive tracks clocked in at longer than 10 minutes, the best music here often comes in under six. All of Washington’s stylistic advances are represented on “Truth,” which also provides a nifty recapitulation of what made The Epic so special, with its robust rhythms, a choir carrying a soaring melody, and a solo that would do John Coltrane proud. Its jazz eclecticism at its best—music that is both inclusive and deeply artful.But while his music can seem otherworldly, Washingtons bold new sound didnt land from outer space. The tracks on this playlist take you through his roots and influences, the current jazz movement he helped create, and the genre’s future.

Check out Kamasi’s new tracks in the playlist above, which captures his best alongside the artists and songs that influenced his career. We’ll keep it updated as new joints drop. Subscribe to the playlist here. In 2018, it’s difficult to figure out how we want pop culture -- and music in particular -- to deal with our larger, societal malaise. Really, it’s hard to get a handle on what’s going on with society at the moment. From data harvesting and the upward mobility of neo-Fascism, to environmental collapse, the #metoo movement and transhumanism, a larger narrative seems elusive. But one thing does seem clear: things are changing, and they’re changing very quickly. It could go one way or another, but, regardless, we will be radically different once we get out the other side.In this atmosphere of deep uncertainty, it feels silly to expect musicians (of all people) to have answers, and, as with previous generations, the art that best captures these times has been ambiguous and slippery. Think of Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. We all know the nature of our condition -- we’re living under a President that lies, steals, conjules, bullies and demeans every single fucking day -- and Lamar acknowledges that, but offers up few solution. Instead, the album feels powerful because it relays something more primal and honest: anger, confusion, distrust, and uncertainty. The two new tracks from modern jazz great Kamasi Washington engage with this dark, blurry zeitgeist. Appropriately, it’s difficult to think of any modern musician who contains as many multitudes as Kamasi Washington. He’s collaborated extensively with Kendrick Lamar, releases music through Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder imprint, and plays in front of tens of thousands at Coachella, but his music doesn’t owe that much to hip-hop, electronic or modern pop traditions. Instead, it mines a broad spectrum of classic jazz, from the big band compositions of Charles Mingus to the free jazz spiritual quests of mid-’60s Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders and on to the smoother, R&B-inflected of Roy Ayers. Washington recently released two tracks in support of his upcoming album, Heaven and Earth, and, of the two new tracks, “Fists of Fury” is the most immediate and the most explicitly political. It’s ostensibly a cover of the theme song from the classic Bruce Lee movie, but it’s a fairly dramatic departure (the lyrics have changed, for one thing). It’s a beautiful, startling track -- spacious and intricately composed, full of nuanced movements that swerve in and out of its in its nearly 10-minute runtime. Tinkling piano solos flow out of rumbling bongos, while the track’s string arrangement give a stately color to Washington’s warm tenor saxophone tones. Patrice Quinn and Dwight Trible provide aggrieved and aggravated vocals that telegraph the songs’s #woke themes of racial retribution and justice, “Our time as victims is over/ We will no longer ask for justice/ Instead we will take our retribution.” It’s great, but it feels like an outlier in Washington’s catalog. It’s not only a cover, but it’s Washington’s first explicitly political track, which is something that Washington has shied away from in the past. “Someone like Donald Trump cant control the way I show love to my brother,” Washington recently told Rolling Stone. “He cant control the way I feel about my neighbors. Im trying to make the music bigger than the politics. If you get caught up in the day-to-day, youll get lost in that." Of course, this doesn’t mean that Washington’s previous music hasn’t been engaged with the larger socio-political conversation; they have, just not in obvious ways. His 2017 EP Harmony of Difference -- and, in particular, its centerpiece, “Truth” -- was a slow, simmering burn, full of melancholic phrasing and delicate passages that gripped at the hems of the sublime. It was the perfect salve -- a perfect refuge -- to the reigning socio-culture shitshow. Washington’s other new track, “The Space Travelers Lullaby,” lives in a similar space. It’s wiry and ethereal, building off a wistful string arrangement and a spritely piano figure. It feels like a Sunday morning jog through the cosmos, or a brief sojourn to a beatific foreign world. It’s easy to put it in the lineage of afrofutustist forefather Sun Ra, but, with its cooing vocals and tickling cymbals, the song is more stately, measured, and baroque. It’s a soundtrack of itself, a cosmic journey through an endlessly dense, placid innerspace. In this ways, “The Space Travelers Lullaby” feels more appropriate for these times than the more explicitly political “Fists of Fury.” Maybe it’s because of the track’s sonic maximalism, but, “First of Fury” feels disjointed from our pop culture timeline, despite all the BLM sloganeering. It could easily exist in 1972, 2005, or 2018. “The Space Travelers Lullaby” feels both sad and celebratory in a way that is very 2018. It draws its light from the dense darkness outside, and it feels as if it’s offering an answer of sorts, or at least a pretty good suggestion, about how to proceed in a world where we, as individuals, have no control.

Subscribe to our "Best of Pharoah Sanders" playlist here, and follow us on Spotify here.Pharoah Sanders music is a place you can get lost in. It’s noisy and transcendent, carving out universes in tinkling vibes and jumpy blues grooves that are upturned by Sander’s trademark squawking, primal tenor saxophone. The music feels timeless. They frequently last for more than 20 minutes. But even beyond that, they seem to exist beyond our more pedestrian concepts of temporal matters. But there’s also a cultural context for all this ecstasy and upheaval, one rooted in a very specific cultural and political milieu. The New York-by-way-of-Arkansas free jazz icon had a coming out party of sorts on John Coltrane’s 1965 album Ascension. That album consists of one, 40-minute track (Spotify breaks up the track into two parts, for some reason) and marks Coltrane’s complete abandonment of post-bop for free jazz. The cascading, squealing interplay between Coltrane and Sanders sounds bracing even today, but the key to understand it is that it’s a product of a particular time and place. The Vietnam War was dramatically escalating, the social norms of post-war America were quickly being overturned, and, perhaps more importantly, the civil rights movement was splintering and turning increasingly militant: Malcolm X had been assassinated four months prior; the Black Panthers would form a year afterwards.But this isn’t nihilistic music. It’s the sound of confusion and propulsion, of being angry in a dark room, of taking a dive into a deep, unknowable abyss. In two years, Coltrane was dead, and Sanders would strike out on his own, becoming a band leader while employing the sonic template that Coltrane had forged. The 11 albums that he would release on Impulse Records over the course of the next either years -- starting with 1966’s Tauhid and ending with 1974’s Love in Us All -- serve as a high water mark or sorts for free jazz.Free Jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman once said that Sanders was "probably the best tenor player in the world,” while Albert Ayler famously quipped, "Trane was the Father, Pharoah was the Son, I am the Holy Ghost.” It’s easy to understand why when listening to tracks such as “Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah-Hum-Allah” or “The Creator Has A Master Plan.” The tracks capture the uncertainty and chaos of creation, they sound like either the big bang or the apocalypse. You have to destroy to build, and Sanders did plenty of both.

At the risk of sounding horribly reductive (and perhaps a bit factually vague), Sun Ra was a nut. He claimed he was born on Saturn (Wikipedia puts his birthplace at Birmingham, Alabama), developed his own brand of cosmic mysticism (later dubbed afro-futurism and adopted by everyone from George Clinton to Janelle Monae) and made a headdress and flowing robe a cornerstone of his wardrobe. He also released dozens of albums, all of which were idiosyncratic and none of which was particularly canonical, so Jason Heller’s attempt to provide a beginner’s guide are valiant and valuable. The playlist itself is understandably all over the map, but it provides a nice glance at the many stylistic shifts Sun Ra would make.

It could be argued that Colemans greatest influence was beyond the borders of jazz. Generations of rock and experimental musicians have internalized the lessons of Coleman, understanding that oftentimes some of the most beautiful music first sounds ugly and random. You can hear Ornettes jagged, screeching stabs in everyone from the Grateful Dead to Television, but more than just a style or type of playing, Coleman taught musicians a new way to approach music -- an improvisational and at times confrontational method that was akin to a primal scream. Of course, Ornette could pull that off because he had chops, and the head-first style would later generate a lot of really bad noise, but weve tried to collect some of the better examples here. Some of these artist are explicitly indebted to Ornette. Thurston Moore has sited him as an influence; Nation of Ulysses named their song after him; and both the Grateful Dead and Lou Reed played with the man.