June 2026

There is a particular kind of silence that exists only in the seconds after a piece of music ends — when the last note has dissolved and the room hasn't yet remembered itself. I felt that silence last week, sitting with Aroha Ngata's newest record Tides of Red Ochre, a quietly astonishing album that weaves together taonga pūoro (traditional Māori instruments) with sparse modern electronics.

The opening track arrives like something half-remembered from a dream. The pōrutu flute carries a line so deceptively simple you almost dismiss it — until you notice your breathing has slowed to match its rhythm. Ngata doesn't demand your attention so much as gradually become the air you're breathing.

What I find most remarkable is how she handles contrast. The fourth track layers a haka-inspired percussion foundation beneath a synthesizer that sounds genuinely glacial — cold and ancient simultaneously. It shouldn't work. It absolutely works. This is the gift of an artist who trusts their instincts more than they trust convention.

There's a tendency in Western critical circles to frame indigenous music through the lens of "preservation" — as if the only valid posture is archival. Ngata refuses this entirely. Her work isn't a museum; it's a living conversation between ancestors and futures. The instruments speak in their original voices while the production situates them firmly in 2026. Both are true at once.

I've been returning to the seventh track repeatedly. It features nothing but breath, a low drone, and what sounds like rain on corrugated iron. It asks nothing of you except presence. In an era of perpetual sonic stimulation, that restraint feels radical.

If you haven't encountered taonga pūoro before, this is the most generous possible entry point. Allow yourself the full 47 minutes without interruption. The silence at the end is part of it.

#music #indigenousart #soundscapes #newmusic

There is a moment in John Coltrane's A Love Supreme — roughly four minutes into "Resolution" — where the saxophone doesn't so much play as breathe. The tone swells and bends at the edges, and suddenly you're not listening to music anymore. You're inside something that has no name.

I've returned to this record dozens of times over the years, and every listen reveals a different geography. That's the mark of truly transcendent art: it changes as you do. When I first heard it at nineteen, I heard grief. At thirty, I heard searching. Now I hear arrival — a man pressing himself against the limits of what sound can carry, and discovering that those limits keep moving.

What Coltrane accomplished in those four sessions in December 1964 wasn't just a jazz masterpiece. It was a document of devotion. The suite — four movements: Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance, and Psalm — carries a spiritual weight that doesn't require belief to feel. The saxophone is a confessional. Elvin Jones's drums are a heartbeat that refuses to stay steady, because real hearts don't, and McCoy Tyner's piano fills the silences with everything language can't say.

There's an accessibility to A Love Supreme that gets lost when people hear "jazz" and assume distance. This record leans toward you. The opening four-note motif — a love supreme, a love supreme — becomes a mantra, chanted by the bass, scattered across the melody, rebuilt from nothing. By the time you reach "Psalm," Coltrane is singing the handwritten prayer from the liner notes through his horn. No words needed.

If you haven't sat with this record alone in a dark room and let it do what it does, I genuinely envy you the first time still ahead.

#jazz #JohnColtrane #ALoveSupreme #music

There's a moment on Kamasi Washington's Heaven and Earth — somewhere deep in the track "Truth" — where the horns swell into something that feels less like music and more like a physical pressure against your chest. It stopped me cold the first time I heard it. I sat in the dark, headphones on, genuinely unsure whether I was still breathing.

Washington first arrived in 2015 with The Epic like a declaration: jazz was not just alive but radically, defiantly expansive. Here was a saxophonist who had played on Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly and trained under jazz masters, synthesizing gospel, funk, and free jazz without a single apology. No justification offered for the three-disc runtime, the full orchestra, the choir. Just the vision, uncompromised and enormous.

Heaven and Earth doubles down on that ambition. Split between two worlds — the inner and the outer — Washington takes the concept with complete seriousness. The "Earth" disc feels grounded and cinematic, drawing on soul and gospel as inherited language rather than borrowed reference. The "Heaven" disc pushes into stranger territory: freer, more searching, unconcerned with easy resolution or familiar comfort.

What Washington grasps — standing in the lineage of Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, of Alice Coltrane and Don Cherry — is that jazz at its greatest is spiritual work. Not background music. Not ambient texture. Music that reaches into the room and rearranges the air around you, that asks something of you in return.

If you've written jazz off as noise for coffee shops, Heaven and Earth is your corrective. Give it one honest listen — headphones on, lights low, phone face-down. Start with the title track. Let it do what it does. You may not come out the other side unchanged.

This is what art is supposed to do.

#jazz #KamasiWashington #music #creativity