VA - Spiritual Jazz 5: The World (2014)

Until it was swept aside by the pop explosion of the 1960s, jazz was the most popular modern sound on earth. From the New World and the Caribbean to Africa, across the Soviet Bloc and the British Empire to the Far East, jazz music was embraced, adopted, played and enjoyed.

Having examined spiritual jazz as it was expressed in the US, and followed its messengers and influences in Europe, this fifth installment of our Spiritual Jazz series presents jazz from the rest of the world: a collection of jazz messages hailing from the four corners of the world that are united in their diverse treatment of the jazz idiom. Jazz might have been the music of America, but in its beginnings it was not a purely American creation.

The long story of its development stretches across the Atlantic, from Africa to the crucibles of slavery in the Caribbean and the Americas, both North and South. It was a music that ultimately emerged from the varied and resilient cultural achievements of Africans brought to the New World in bondage, and who brought with them a multiplicity of musical traditions.

Evolution and development continued and, like a dandelion dispersing its airborne seeds via the wind, the sounds of jazz were carried around the world on the airwaves, record sales and by travelling musicians. In whichever continent the form took root, the individual, ethnic and cultural circumstances of the musicians decided the flavours and nuances of the jazz they created.

This volume of Spiritual Jazz presents some of the rarest and most extraordinary global jazz recordings. We have covered some of the wider world's best known yet still underexposed jazz scenes - places such as Argentina and South Africa, as well as some of the world's most obscure. There are recordings here made for major labels, and recordings issued privately.

Very few of them have seen any release outside of their country of original prior to this collection. But all of them speak of a period when jazz was a global musical lingua franca, spoken with ease by musicians who headed out into the night to produce their own distinctly local translations.

This is esoteric jazz, modal jazz, spiritual jazz - as played by musicians from around the World.