The Return of Spiritual Jazz: A History of the Genre and Its Contemporary Revival
There is a moment on John Coltrane's A Love Supreme — the opening bass figure of "Acknowledgement," four notes rising from silence — that sounds less like music beginning than like something being summoned. That quality, the sense that what you are hearing is not merely entertainment but an act of invocation, is as good a definition of spiritual jazz as any. It is music that reaches for something beyond itself.
Spiritual jazz is back. Or rather, it never left. But in the decade since 2015, it has found new audiences, new practitioners, new labels, and a new critical vocabulary. The question of what that means — whether it represents a genuine continuation of one of jazz's most radical traditions or simply a rebranding of its aesthetics for an era of wellness playlists and pour-over coffee — is one the music itself keeps posing.
What Is Spiritual Jazz?
"Spiritual jazz" is a descriptor more than a genre. It names music that explicitly pursues transcendence through sound, ritual, community and cosmology rather than adhering to fixed musical rules. Jazz histories rarely define the term clearly, and for good reason: it is deliberately slippery, covering territory that ranges from ambient, dreamy and meditative to guttural, free forms of jazz improvisation. It can incorporate Asian, African, Latin American and Western instruments and methods. Its spirituality might draw on Hindu, Christian, African or any number of other traditions. It can be a vehicle for deep profundity or complete chaos, and frequently both at once.
What ties this music together is an approach. Spiritual jazz tends to prioritise the transcendent over the technical, the communal over the individual, the extended improvisation over the three-minute statement. Modal harmony, extended form, chant-like themes, percussion-heavy grooves and non-Western instrumentation are common features. But the most important characteristic is intent. As Bandcamp's Joe Muggs wrote, spiritual jazz "was always an approach, not a sound — and even that approach was multifarious." Above all, it was about what Muggs called "flesh-and-blood community — the kind of connection that can only take place when like minds that are tuned into the same ideas and ethos are interacting in the same room."
Saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, one of the most prominent figures in its contemporary revival, offered a sharper critique of the term. Writing for The Vinyl Factory, he argued: "The problem with labelling a genre 'spiritual' is that in commodifying a process of artistic self-discovery we limit its scope for growth outside the pre-determined definitions of the onlooker. External signifiers become emphasised and marketed to the fan who develops a sense that the artist has quantifiable attributes which we feel are necessary or admirable in our time. These attributes, which feed into preconceived ideas of spirituality, become more important than the inner journey embarked upon by the artist who wears this label. The journey becomes reduced to the symbolism."
That tension — between spiritual jazz as lived practice and spiritual jazz as marketable aesthetic — is the defining tension of the current moment.
The Roots: Sacred Jazz and the Path to Coltrane
To understand where spiritual jazz came from, you have to start earlier than the 1960s. A lineage of explicitly sacred jazz predates the familiar late-sixties peak. Duke Ellington composed three Sacred Concerts (1965, 1968, 1973). Mary Lou Williams converted to Catholicism in 1954 and spent years writing liturgical jazz for the church. These artists established the idea that jazz could function as religious music, not just music about religion.
The more immediate preconditions were modal jazz and free jazz. Miles Davis's Kind of Blue (1959) expanded the harmonic palette available to improvisers by centering performances on modes rather than rapid chord changes. Ornette Coleman's arrival in New York in 1959, documented on records like The Shape of Jazz to Come and Free Jazz (1960), pushed further, abandoning fixed metre, tonal centres and conventional song forms entirely.
John Coltrane absorbed both developments and took them somewhere else entirely. A Love Supreme (1964, Impulse!) is the canonical touchstone: a four-part suite described by Coltrane in the accompanying poem as a musical offering to God, a direct expression of spiritual gratitude following his recovery from addiction. The album is at the centre of his classic period and it is a deeply personal record reflecting his religious commitment. That framing was not retrospective — it was Coltrane's own. He and his second wife Alice Coltrane were both committed spiritual seekers who framed their music explicitly in those terms throughout the 1960s.
After John's death in 1967, Alice Coltrane continued and deepened this work, recording albums that synthesised jazz with Indian classical music, Hinduism and Vedantic philosophy. She is central to any account of spiritual jazz's history — and, as we will see, central to its revival as well.
Alongside the Coltranes, the early 1970s crystallised what many listeners think of as the classic spiritual jazz sound: extended modal vamps, ecstatic horn timbres, chant-like themes, heavy percussion and global instrumentation linked to diasporic identity. Pharoah Sanders was its most visceral practitioner, releasing records like Karma (1969) and Thembi (1971) on Impulse! that pushed collective improvisation to the edge of ceremony. Sun Ra and his Arkestra, operating since the 1950s, had already made cosmic displacement central to an Afrofuturist musical project that was equal parts spectacle, philosophy and spiritual exercise.
Record labels were essential infrastructure. Impulse! Records provided institutional support for experimental, spiritually ambitious jazz throughout the late sixties and early seventies. Strata-East Records, founded in 1971 by Charles Tolliver and Stanley Cowell, operated on a more radical model. Its catalogue became a cornerstone of the crate-digging culture that would feed the revival decades later.
Why Spiritual Jazz Never Actually Died
It is tempting to narrate spiritual jazz as a phenomenon that peaked in the early seventies and then faded, preserved only on hard-to-find private press records until a recent rediscovery. That story is largely wrong.
Pharoah Sanders played until 2022. The Sun Ra Arkestra, led since Ra's death in 1993 by alto saxophonist Marshall Allen, has continued performing and recording into the 2020s. New players emerged throughout the 1980s and 1990s — bassist William Parker, drummer Hamid Drake, pianist Geri Allen — who carried the tradition forward in smaller venues and on independent labels.
What changed from the mid-1990s was circulation. Crate-digging DJs and sample culture brought the most obscure recordings to new ears. The West Coast beat scene of the 2000s incorporated spiritual jazz textures into psychedelic hip-hop, breaking the music out of strict jazz contexts. By the mid-2010s, conditions were right for something broader.
The Contemporary Revival: Key Milestones from 2015
The moment usually cited as the revival's starting gun is 2015, for reasons that had as much to do with hip-hop as with jazz.
Kamasi Washington's appearance on Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly introduced his sound to an audience far beyond jazz's existing listeners. Washington, a Los Angeles saxophonist who had spent years working as a session player (on records by Snoop Dogg, Herbie Hancock and many others), had been booked by producer Terrace Martin to score the final skit on Lamar's album. After hearing the full record three times in a row, he ended up contributing to four or five tracks. His own debut, The Epic — a three-disc, 172-minute statement on Flying Lotus's Brainfeeder label — dropped the same week in May 2015.
Assertive, unrelenting spiritual jazz, The Epic was widely celebrated and provided a way into this music for many. The albums's scale — choir, strings, extended suites, movement-style architecture — functioned as a spiritual statement in itself. It was music that said jazz could still think big.
Washington was direct about where this came from. He told Dazed in 2018: "Spiritual jazz was my dad’s thing – he was into (John) Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, Eric Dolphy and Horace Tapscott. When I started saxophone, my dad took me to my uncle’s church and I started playing there too. At its best, music serves a greater purpose and that showed me a whole other side to spiritual jazz, one which you can hear in the music – the gospel and blues feel, the soul that’s embedded into the more avant-garde records. A lot of people don’t register that, but it’s there and it’s heavy."
While Washington was making noise in Los Angeles, London was producing its own convergence. A generation of musicians who had come up through Tomorrow's Warriors began recording and performing together with an intensity that attracted significant media attention from around 2016.
Shabaka Hutchings was the organising figure, leading three concurrent projects: Sons of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming, and Shabaka and the Ancestors (the last being his most direct engagement with spiritual jazz traditions, drawing on South African roots). Around him were saxophonist Nubya Garcia, drummer Moses Boyd, tuba player Theon Cross, and dozens of others.
Moses Boyd identified the cultural moment precisely. He told Trench Magazine: "More musicians are turning towards jazz influences, but the two real standout moments in bringing the culture to a mainstream audience were Kendrick’s To Pimp A Butterfly and David Bowie’s Blackstar. Both of these albums came about whilst I and so many others in the UK scene were just starting to put music out, so things just fell into place perfectly. It was out of our hands. Jazz has always had a scene for the last century, in almost every corner, but if it wasn’t for those two LPs I don’t know if it would’ve turned out like it has now. I’d like to think so, but sometimes it comes down solely to being in the right place at the right time."
A parallel, canonical contribution came not from a new artist but from an archive. In 2017, Luaka Bop released World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, compiling recordings made between 1982 and 1995 at Alice Coltrane's Sai Anantam Ashram in Agoura Hills, California. These cassettes had previously circulated only within her spiritual community; by 2017 they had become collector's items. Yale Evelev, Luaka Bop's co-owner, told Cool Hunting: "Fully hearing the music Alice invented, a mixture of the gospel she grew up with, jazz, her traveling to India, her entire life and all of what that entails when it comes to her, made me realize what a complete world she had created—and how extraordinary, and beautiful, that is." The album was hugely popular and repositioned Alice Coltrane as a foundational figure in the revival's understanding of itself.
The Labels Doing the Work
No discussion of the contemporary scene is complete without International Anthem Recording Company. Founded in Chicago in 2014 by Scottie McNiece and David Allen, the label has become one of the most significant independent jazz labels of the past decade. Its roster includes Makaya McCraven, Angel Bat Dawid, Jaimie Branch, Jeff Parker and Rob Mazurek. McNiece told HHV Mag: "We're less concerned with whether an artist's music fits, and more concerned with whether the artist's humanity and personality fits." The label wants "to serve artists who channel truth, to share their musical gifts with the world for the betterment of humanity, to facilitate, and amplify their unique messages of Love into a world that needs them now more than ever."
In London, Brownswood Recordings — Gilles Peterson's label, founded in 2006 — served as an institutional anchor, releasing We Out Here in 2018, the compilation that documented a young jazz scene on the verge of breaking out into the open. Peterson's faith in the London generation was absolute. He told DownBeat: "A lot of people in this country haven’t really heard jazz music, or they just think it’s shit, because of how it’s been perceived by the generations of NME editors who were always pushing other kinds of music. So, there was always a stereotype to it, and in a way that’s helped because people are coming to everything fresh now. That’s why this current scene has taken off."
Gondwana Records and Warp Records have both released records that sit in the spiritual jazz conversation with Warp signing Nala Sinephro being perhaps the most striking example of a major independent betting on music that is resolutely uncommercial in the conventional sense.
10 Records That Defined the Resurgence
1. Kamasi Washington, The Epic (2015, Brainfeeder)
The album that announced the revival to a mainstream audience. Three discs, a 32-piece orchestra, a choir, extended suites drawing on Coltrane, Curtis Mayfield and 1970s soul-jazz. Its scale alone was a statement: that jazz still had the right to think in epic terms.
2. Makaya McCraven, Universal Beings (2018, International Anthem)
Recorded across four cities with different ensembles in each location, then cut and re-composed in post-production. McCraven told VICE: "It’s a crazy time to be alive. There’s a craving for something visceral, something honest, something vulnerable from art." And this record delivered all of that. The London session, recorded at Total Refreshment Centre with Shabaka Hutchings and Nubya Garcia, directly bridged the Chicago and London scenes.
3. Maisha, There Is a Place (2018, Brownswood Recordings)
Led by drummer Jake Long and featuring Nubya Garcia on saxophone, this debut placed the Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane lineage inside a contemporary London context. Gilles Peterson told Bandcamp that what he loved "was the fact they were capturing a Black Jazz, Strata-East, sort of Billy Bang, Michael White cosmic nous I wasn’t hearing anywhere else.
4. Angel Bat Dawid, The Oracle (2019, International Anthem)
Recorded entirely on Dawid's phone using a multitrack app, over several years in Chicago, London and South Africa. Nearly every instrument was played by Dawid herself. She told It's Psychedelic Baby Magazine: "When I play music I trance out quite often. Something will even take over my body... These altered states are fascinating and places I like to explore. Music isn’t just entertainment, it’s INNERattainment for me."
5. Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra, Promises (2021, Luaka Bop)
The album that proved spiritual jazz could reach entirely new audiences. Recorded over ten days in the summer of 2019 at Sargent Recorders in LA, it comprises a single 46-minute piece built around a seven-note repeating figure. Sam Shepherd (Floating Points) described Sanders' method to Billboard: "He knows it so well that he's embodied it. It's not like he's searching while he's playing, he's done all that. He doesn't need to search on his instrument, he's done the searching within himself." It was Sanders' final studio album before his death in September 2022.
6. Nala Sinephro, Space 1.8 (2021, Warp Records)
A solo statement conceived, composed, produced, performed, engineered and mixed by a single artist, at the time largely unknown. Sinephro told The Guardian: "When I produce this type of music, I have to be very open and surrender to the sound. I reach a trance-inducing state where I might play a note for 10 minutes straight, if that’s what I’m feeling. While my hands are doing their job, I’m almost sleepwalking." The harp-centred record established a quieter, more inward vocabulary within the revival, and demonstrated that the music's future was not exclusively big ensemble and righteous noise.
7. Isaiah Collier and the Chosen Few, Cosmic Transitions (2021, Division 81 Records)
Recorded on what would have been John Coltrane's 94th birthday, at the Rudy Van Gelder Studio in New Jersey, on the same equipment Coltrane used to record A Love Supreme. A five-part suite structured around Mercury's retrograde. Collier told PostGenre: "I don’t see spiritual jazz as just an elusive term. It has a basis and a place and is actually a structured cultural art." He was 23 at the time of recording.
8. GODTET , +Strings (2023, La Sape Records)
The Sydney-based collective led by guitarist and producer Dave Rodriguez has built one of the most singular sounds in contemporary spiritual jazz, drawing on post-rock, dub, Caribbean music and free improvisation across a run of self-titled albums. +Strings is a different proposition entirely: a live recording where the band performed alongside violinist and string arranger Novak Manojlovic. Their debut attracted the attention of Gilles Peterson and became, as the label put it, "a rare and sought after piece of Australian jazz music history."
9. André 3000, New Blue Sun (2023, Epic Records)
One of the most unexpected albums of the decade, and one of the most genuinely spiritual. Released in November 2023 after a 17-year hiatus from new material, New Blue Sun is an 87-minute, eight-track instrumental record built entirely around flutes, woodwinds and improvisation, co-produced with Los Angeles percussionist and multi-instrumentalist Carlos Niño. The ensemble includes keyboardist Surya Botofasina, who was raised at Alice Coltrane's Sai Anantam Ashram and had previously performed on the recordings that became the landmark 2017 Luaka Bop release — a lineage the album carries openly. The album was nominated for Album of the Year and Best Alternative Jazz Album at the 67th Grammy Awards. Whether or not you call it jazz, it is unmistakably spiritual.
10. ganavya, Daughter of a Temple (2024, LEITER)
The most ambitious record in this list, and possibly the most important spiritual jazz album of recent years. New York-born, Tamil Nadu-raised vocalist and multi-instrumentalist ganavya invited over 30 musicians to a ritual gathering in Houston, opening the sessions by presenting each participant with prayer beads and washing their feet with honey, turmeric and warm water before improvising around Coltrane's A Love Supreme. The resulting album, released on Nils Frahm's LEITER label, features esperanza spalding, Vijay Iyer, Immanuel Wilkins, Shabaka Hutchings and Wayne Shorter — whose contribution, a prayer recorded with his wife Carolina at their home, is among his final documented recordings before his death in March 2023. It is as complete a statement of what spiritual jazz can be in the 21st century as any record made in the genre's first wave.
It doesn't take much analysis to explain the timing of this revival. Spiritual jazz first emerged during the Civil Rights era, the Vietnam War, and a sustained crisis of social institutions. The present moment has its own version of that pressure.
But the revival is also more than just a cultural reaction. It reflects genuine artistic continuity. The musicians at the centre of it — Washington, Hutchings, Sinephro, Collier, Angel Bat Dawid — are not revivalists in traditional sense. They grew up with this music, studied it, absorbed it as part of their own formation. They are not dressing up in period clothes. They are continuing a conversation.
The risk, as always, is commodification. Can Alice Coltrane soundtrack the modern world without losing something essential? It's a fair concern. Spiritual jazz as lifestyle product, as ambient wallpaper for the hipster urban professional, is a real phenomenon.
The music itself tends to resist that fate. Promises is not background music. The Oracle was recorded on a phone in a South Side apartment and it sounds like it, in the best possible way. Cosmic Transitions begins with a singing bowl and chanting and builds to something that will wake the neighbours.
As Bandcamp's Joe Muggs put it, spiritual jazz "was always an approach, not a sound." That is why it keeps returning. Not because nostalgia demands it, but because the approach — serious, communal, transcendence-seeking — answers a need that does not go away.
The music is still reaching for something beyond itself. It still sounds like something being summoned.