Yet historic record labels, from Blue Note and Impulse! to Prestige and Steeplechase, have also featured because their catalogues are musical treasure troves that could not be more relevant to Spiritual Jazz, even though they issued vast amounts of music between the late ‘30s and present day, that have not been confined to any one school.
Spiritual Jazz 16 is a focus on Riverside and its associated sister labels. Riverside itself was founded in 1953 by Orrin Keepnews and Bill Grauer, and became an important purveyor in that decade and beyond of what would be marketed as of modern jazz. That coinage was itself an amorphous, umbrella term that essentially created a demarcation from the vocabulary of pre-war classic jazz and inter-war big band swing, thus recognizing that improvising artists were breaking new creative ground that would subsequently give rise to a flurry of sub-genres, for example bebop, hard bop, cool, modal and Latin jazz. And it's from this multiplicity of sub-genres that we choose the deepest, most vibrant selections that the vast, pan-generational catalogue of Keepnews & Grauer has to offer.
1. James Clay - New Delhi
2. Werner-Rosengren Swedish Jazz Quartet - Bombastica
3. Sal Nistico Quintet - Ariscene
4. Frank Strozier - The Crystal Ball
5. Cannonball Adderley - Primitivo
6. Blue Mitchell - Turquoise
7. Sonny Red - The Mode
8. Clifford Jordan - Sunrise in Mexico
9. Lee Konitz Quintet - Thumb Under
10. McCoy Tyner - Valley of Life
11. Joe Henderson - Earth (feat. Alice Coltrane)
