Golden Rule

Repress in gatefold old style tip-on cover
“Music is not material, Music is Spiritual”. With this one line from what may be his earliest poem, Sun Ra sets before our minds what our ears and heart know to be true: music is a power, a force, and a mystery that can change our way of being, our way of knowing. Music is spiritual. And while the roots of jazz grew from spiritual traditions, it was the music of Sun Ra from the 1950s and especially John Coltrane’s recordings from the mid-1960s that defined spiritual jazz as we know it today. Modal, improvisational, meditative, testifying, droning, polyrhythmic and blazing, spiritual jazz opens the mind to complexity that is simple and simplicity that is complex
Spiritual jazz has a long line of master practitioners, from Coltrane’s contemporaries including Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Yusef Lateef and Pharoah Sanders, to contemporary artists like Nat Birchall and Shabaka Hutchings. Muriel Grossman’s immersion in the powers and traditions of this particular current of jazz has been developing through her last several albums and here in ‘Golden Rule’ she and her band draw deep on the musical practices that evoke the transcendent