Doug Carn Featuring The Voice Of Jean Carn - Spirit Of The New Land (2025 Real Gone / Black Jazz Reissue, Blue & Black Swirl Vinyl LP)

Doug Carn Featuring The Voice Of Jean Carn - Spirit Of The New Land | Vinyl LP - 2025 Real Gone Music / Black Jazz reissue (RGM-1082, limited blue-and-black swirl vinyl, one of 750)

Black Jazz Records was a Black-owned label founded in 1971 by the pianist Gene Russell, part of the same wave of self-determination that produced Tribe in Detroit and Strata-East in New York. Its signature artist was the keyboardist Doug Carn, and Spirit of the New Land, from 1972, is one of his finest for the label. Carn's idea was to put words to jazz. He wrote his own spiritual, Afrocentric lyrics and set them to instrumental pieces, and his wife Jean Carn sang them in a clear, soaring voice that lifts the whole record. Here she sings Carn's words to Miles Davis's "Blue In Green" and Lee Morgan's "Search For The New Land" alongside originals like "Arise And Shine" and "My Spirit". The band is strong: Charles Tolliver, who co-founded Strata-East, on flugelhorn, Garnett Brown on trombone, George Harper on reeds and Alphonse Mouzon on drums.

Carn's run of Black Jazz albums became touchstones of vocal spiritual jazz, records that later got dug back up by rare-groove collectors and sampled by hip-hop producers, while Jean Carn went on to a career as a soul star at Philadelphia International. Original Black Jazz pressings have long been collector's items. This is the 2025 reissue on Real Gone Music, licensed from Black Jazz, remastered and pressed on blue-and-black swirl vinyl in a limited run of 750 copies, with a new Doug Carn interview included.