Music Monday: Immanuel Wilkins, Jothan Callins, and Sam Rivers

This weekend involved a bit of juggling between putting the final touches on a new book from The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, reading for a chapter that I’m revising in my book, and limping around the house with a hurt knee. Fortunately, the book is nearly done, the reading I did was inspiring, and my knee feels 50% better thanks to some time on the stationary bike, some stretching, and some ice. 

Fortunately, this hectic weekend had an invigorating soundtrack. First, Friday saw the release of Immanuel Wilkins’s second album as a leader: The 7th Hand. I really like it and in many ways it feels more mature and confident than his first offering Omega. In particular, I appreciated his ability to move through the registers of spiritual jazz with attention to the soulful, the introspective, the modal, and the melodic as well as to tracks driven forward by the improvisational ecstatic of the spiritual experience. In fact, the final 26-minute long “Lift” is to my ears a spiritual jazz masterpiece worthy of the most imposing ESP’ Disk freak outs or Archie Shepp and Pharoah Sanders in their most agitated and expressive. You can get the album here or listen to his tiny desk concert here.

Wilkins is from the Philadelphia area and no thinking about Philadelphia’s jazz legacy is complete without the acknowledgement of Sun Ra. It was nice timing then that Mad About Records re-released Jothan Callins and The Sounds Of Togetherness, Winds Of Change (1975) late last week as well. Callins is a bit of a shadowy figure in the jazz world but spent some time with Sun Ra and his Arkestra in the late 1960s and 1970s. Maybe the two connected because they both hailed from Birmingham, Alabama or perhaps their paths cross when Sun Ra and the Nigerian drummer Olatunji were exploring the mystical potential of Afrocentrism in 1960s New York.  

Winds of Change was one of those great 1970s albums that explores the space between spiritual jazz and soul jazz. Equal measure sweeping and propulsive, the title track blends African-style percussion with driving piano to push forward and to sweep Callins trumpet before it and giving the momentum to just occasionally escape the song’s gravity to skip across the rhythms. You can listen to the album here or buy it here. 

At around the time Callins recorded Winds of Change, he also performed with the iconic avant garde sax player Sam Rivers in his incredibly ambitious 1974 outing for Impulse! that produced Crystals. Crystals is an icon of mid-1970s big band jazz and its melding of funk, improvisation, and post-bop sensibilities connects it to contemporary work by Sun Ra, for example, or Horace Tapscott or Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra (I blogged about these bands here). It’s not clear that Callins played on the final recorded version of the album (Rivers lists some 65 musicians as contributing to the albums production!), but his presence in the room may well capture a bit of the spirit of the age. 

My favorite track from Crystals is undoubtedly the most approachable and the one that captures the one particular strand of 1970s improvised jazz. Check out “Tranquility” from Crystals. It’ll not only get you going on a Monday morning, but provide a groovy window in the kaleidoscopic world of 1970s spiritual jazz.