(Note: This is one of an occasional and ongoing series of assessments of my favorite albums, parsed by musical genre. Click Here for a series introduction and list of all genres covered, or to be covered, therein).

Background: I was raised in both a religious and a musical household, and those two threads of my upbringing were often interwoven. We were what I’d consider to be a conventional mainstream Southern Protestant family until my early teen years, attending different churches as we moved around the country with my father’s Marine Corps career, usually ending up at United Methodist places of worship, consistent with my dad’s upbringing. My parents experienced a strong religious awakening when I was in junior high school, and generally joined more nondenominational, Bible-based congregations in the years that followed. The church music of my Methodist years was entirely shaped by The Book of Hymns, which served as the official hymnal for that denomination from 1966 to 1989; I flipped its pages often enough over the years that I’d still be able to pretty quickly find key compositions or “Acts of Praise” when the need arises. My father typically sang in church choirs, both for regular weekly services, and for holiday presentations of Handel’s Messiah, one of his favorite works. He was also a serviceable guitar player, though he tended to strum and noodle on secular works, not spiritual ones, when he took up his acoustic axe.

Attending Methodist Youth Fellowship events in the 1970s, I was exposed to a variety of nascent “Christian Rock” acts, somewhat cynically designed to present the WORD to kids in a more engaging and palatable fashion than offered by straight scripture reading or the organ-backed choral music that shaped the actual worship services. That stuff rarely appealed to or worked for me, though, as I was already musically knowledgeable and sophisticated enough to recognize that much of it was auditory pap, with various lowest common denominators in full effect, the nature of the message deemed more important than the quality of the songs and performances. It was stiff, and staid, and sub-optimal, for sure.

I was much more taken by gospel music that was outside the traditional Methodist hymnal, but had developed organically over decades (if not centuries), rather than being created by the marketing departments of various Christian publishing houses to make religion seem more hip to the youth. The term “gospel song” is first recorded in the United States in 1874, generally to describe the types of call-and-response performances, often backed only by hand claps and toe taps (or big foot stomps), of the working songs sung by enslaved Africans, which eventually drifted into the rural churches of the Southern white communities who did the enslaving. To this day, there are two primary threads in American Gospel music, nominally Black Gospel and Southern Gospel. (The latter eventually spun off what’s generally called Country Gospel these days, which puts the WORD atop the stock and glossy sorts of arrangements deployed by popular country acts, more targeted to the modern NASCAR and pick-up truck and Cowboy-wannabe circuits than to the traditional denizens of the rural South).

Gospel publishing houses emerged in force during the 1920s to fuel the demand for appealing sacred music to be broadcast over the radio waves, with the great Thomas Dorsey arising as perhaps the finest composer within the idiom, merging spiritual texts with his own blues-based professional musical experiences, writing and publishing over 3,000 songs during his working career. After World War II, leading Black Gospel composers, conductors, and choir masters began to more fully integrate blues, R&B, soul, and jazz stylings into their arrangements, typically backing large gospel choirs with featured soloists. Reverend James Cleveland was a pioneer in this space, and his work touched or shaped the careers of many gospel artists who followed him. These rich forms of gospel music provided incubator spaces for generations of performers who went on to attain titanic levels of success, making both spiritual and secular songs, and driving the souls, minds, and hips of popular music aficionados to the present day.

Southern Gospel (of the “white” variety) tended to hew to traditional acoustic instrumentation and arrangements (guitars, banjos, fiddles, and autoharps feature regularly in such fare), and many ostensibly secular country or bluegrass artists would issue occasional gospel-specific albums mixed in with their non-religious fare. They generally did good business with such approaches, keeping one foot in the sacred space, and one in the profane, which works, because that is how most people actually live their lives, whether they’d openly admit it or not. My own chosen listening over the decades has been far less focused on Southern Gospel and far more on Black Gospel, as I prefer the joyous shout approach more than I do twangy soloists. There are, of course, exceptions to that general rule, largely driven by the Southern Gospel that both sets of my grandparents favored, often to the point of excess, when I was a child.

While Gospel Music has always been a part of my listening portfolio, I found it to be particularly comforting during the dark early days of the COVID pandemic. In May 2020, I wrote a post called No Meeting Tonight, in which I explored the concept of “Comfort Music,” described thusly:

We’re all familiar with the concept of “Comfort Food,” which we can succinctly describe as “food that provides consolation or a feeling of well-being, typically any with a high sugar or other carbohydrate content and associated with childhood or home cooking.”

I’m sure a lot of folks are turning to those comfort foods in quarantine. I am, though trying to limit consumption to avoid concomitant waist-spread. But I also find myself listening to “Comfort Music,” which I suppose I could describe by adapting the definition above: “Music that provides consolation or feeling of well-being, typically any with a highly melodic or other pleasing content and associated with childhood or music played by one’s family.”

Most of my Comfort Music is classic Southern church gospel music, Rev James Cleveland a special favorite. Not sure why he grabbed my attention as a kid, but he did, and those songs take me back to (mostly) easier times whenever I hear them. The iPod playlist we spin around the house has had a bunch of Rev James stuff on it for a few weeks now, along with some other classics of the genre by Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers, The Caravans, The Violinaires, Staple Singers, Shirley Caesar and others. It hits the spot, and gets the job done.

Gospel Music remains a vital and vibrant part of my listening life to this day, secular beast that I am. In that “No Meeting Tonight” post, I shared a dozen favorite gospel songs, and my Genre Delve exploration into my favorite Gospel albums features the home discs of many of those standalone cuts. Note that many of the great Gospel works of the 1920s to the 1950s were released as singles, often by small regional labels, which have been anthologized and compiled into album length formats over the past 50 years. I’ve generally avoided featuring such compilations in my list below, preferring instead to cite records that were originally intended to be long-playing discs, not single slices of spiritual solace. My Spotify playlist at the end of the post, on the other hand, includes a lot of those older single releases, should you wish to hear some of them.

MY TEN FAVORITE GOSPEL ALBUMS EVER (IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER)

1. Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Gospel Train (1956): An extraordinarily influential record by a singer-songwriter-guitarist who had been a radio/singles favorite for 15 years when she released this masterpiece. Credible arguments have been made to name Gospel Train as the very first rock n’ roll album (Sister Rosetta is in the Rock Hall of Fame), and its fuzzy guitar blues, jazz accompaniments, and soulful shouts are truly timeless.

2. The Caravans, The Caravans Sing (1958): The Caravans were formed by Robert Anderson in 1947, and served as one of the most formidable conduits of talent within the modern Gospel idiom. The 1958 group included singers Albertina Walker, Sarah McKissick, Inez Andrews, Shirley Caesar, backed by pianist Eddie Williams (who had just replaced James Cleveland). All of them were stars, and they shine brightly here.

3. Johnny Cash, Hymns by Johnny Cash (1959): The Man in Black began his career on Sam Phillips’ Sun Records, but soon left to sign with Columbia, because Phillips wouldn’t let him record a Gospel album. Hymns by Johnny Cash is a superb collection of original and adapted spiritual songs, the first (and best) of his religious records. The Love, God, Murder compilation (2000) summed up the importance of this canon to Cash.

4. The Staple Singers, Uncloudy Day (1959): The Staple Singers (a true family affair) released a variety of 10-inch/78-rpm singles throughout the 1950s, the best bits of which were assimilated onto this masterful debut LP. The group were titans in gospel, social justice, and pop music circles until patriarch Roebuck “Pops” Staples’ death in 2000, and daughter Mavis continues on as one of the great voices of our (or any) time.

5. Blind Gary Davis, Harlem Street Singer (1960): I learned about Gary Davis via gospel/blues aficionado Jorma Kaukonen, singer-guitarist of Jefferson Airplane/Hot Tuna, who covered a pair of Davis songs on his 1974 debut solo album, Quah. Davis’ finger-picking guitar style was hugely influential for many rock/folk artists in the 1960s-70s, and his original songs are often so perfect that they seem ancient, eternal, or timeless.

6. Rev. James Cleveland, Sings Songs of Dedication (1965): James Cleveland would be my “desert island gospel artist,” and I have more of his music than any other in the idiom. I first bought this album on cassette from a record chain’s close-out sale, and it quickly became a fave, with “Wondering” and “It’s Real” as top of the heap tracks for me. The swirly organ sounds here are magical, like attending a revival at a skating rink.

7. Elvis Presley, How Great Thou Art (1967): My paternal grandfather was essentially an invalid for the entirety of the time that my life and his overlapped. He spent most of his waking hours in his easy chair, within reach of his 8-track tape player, and How Great Thou Art played incessantly through my childhood, which I liked. Elvis released three gospel-specific albums, this one the middle (and best), but all of them are outstanding.

8. Aretha Franklin, Amazing Grace (1972): A sublime live recording of the Queen of Soul singing the songs that moved her spirit, backed by James Cleveland, The Southern California Community Choir, and rhythm beasts Chuck Rainey and Bernard Purdie. Amazing Grace was the best-selling album of Aretha’s career, and the best-selling live gospel album ever. The 2018 same-named documentary film of the set is essential.

9. The Violinaires, Greatest Hits (Recorded 1965-1971?, Released 1984?): Detroit’s Violinaires were founded in 1952, and were led by Robert Blair until his death in 2000. This excellent (but poorly documented) compilation seems to feature an assortment culled from their Checker Records catalog in the 1960s. It’s funky, forceful, timely, and topical; imagine The Temptations with a more spiritual focus for the general vibe.

10. Big Freedia, Pressing Onward (2025): I’m pleased to be able to feature a new album on a list anchored in the 1950s-70s. Big Freedia is a New Orleans legend, the “Queen Diva of Bounce,” a regional hip-hop strain. On this church-centric disc, Freedia merges massed choirs with bounce beats to awesome result. A warm, joyful, inclusive, and celebratory album, from an artist intolerant churches might damn, to their discredit.

As I will do for each installment in the Genre Delve series, I’ve linked my own personally-curated, 100-song Spotify playlist related to this article, below. You can sample songs from the albums and artists cited here, and also other Gospel favorites to give them setting and context. As always, I welcome your thoughts and reactions to my list, and your recommendations or suggestions for things that I might find interesting.

(Note: This is one of an occasional and ongoing series of assessments of my favorite albums, parsed by musical genre. Click Here for a series introduction and list of all genres covered, or to be covered, therein).

Background: The first song of African origin that I can recall hearing was “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” as recorded and released in 1961 by New York doo-wop group, The Tokens. This much-loved tune (also regularly performed by Pete Seeger’s Weavers through the 1950s) was appropriated from a 1939 song called “Mbube” by South African singer-songwriter Solomon Linda, who died in 1962, never knowing that his song had become a global hit, nor receiving compensation for same. (In 2006, Linda’s heirs were awarded a significant settlement after the song appeared in Disney’s The Lion King). I liked that song (who doesn’t?), but my deeper appreciation for African music came via another unlikely source: Neil Diamond.

Neil’s 1970 album, Tap Root Manuscript, came with an A-side featuring five “typical” Diamond songs (including chart-topping hit “Cracklin’ Rosie”), while its B-side was entirely dedicated to a suite called “The African Trilogy: A Folk Ballet” (a cut from which, “Soolaimon,” also charted). I loved that album, and was fascinated by the textures of its second side, which put my antennae up for other interesting music inspired by, or from, Africa. Thing was, at that time, it wasn’t easy to find African music in the typical record shops on the military bases or suburbs where I lived for most of the 1970s. Nor most other places, really.

My next significant step toward an understanding and appreciation of African music came around 1980, when Peter Gabriel’s “Biko” single blew my mind, educating me in both the politics and the music of South Africa. Gabriel followed this up in 1982 with “The Rhythm of the Heat,” featuring the Drummers of Burundi. It was an incredibly evocative, slow-building song that climaxed with stunning concussions created by a large ensemble of percussionists. Gabriel put his money where his mouth was in terms of his appreciation for the music of Africa and other non-western cultures by founding World of Music and Dance (WOMAD), an international arts festival dedicated to celebrating the glorious diversity of international music.

WOMAD struggled in its early days, resulting in the October 1982 “Six of the Best” concert, in which Gabriel and guitarist Steve Hackett reunited with their former band, Genesis, for a charitable live performance, capitalizing on the group’s growing popularity in its Phil Collins-fronted era. The proceeds from the concert stabilized WOMAD’s financial situation, and it remains a going concern to this day. By the time that historica concert occurred, I was deep into plebe year at the Naval Academy, so I wasn’t able to listen to much music of any variety (stereos and Walkmen were forbidden contraband for plebes), even though I continued diligently reading about exciting things in Spin and Rolling Stone, and pining over what I was missing.

By the time I got my music access rights back in the summer of 1983, I had declared Political Science as my major at the Naval Academy. We were encouraged to find an area of interest and focus over the course of our studies, and I elected to pursue African Politics, eventually writing my curriculum-capping independent research paper on political conditions and possible futures in the Republic of South Africa. Beyond Peter Gabriel’s “Biko,” popular music again assisted in educating me on this front via The Special A.K.A.’s “Free Nelson Mandela” single (1984), as did a WOMAD compilation album called Raindrops Pattering On Banana Leaves And Other Tunes.

As I was studying and writing about Africa, I decided that it would be helpful, interesting, and enjoyable to collect African music to soundtrack my academic efforts. But that was still something of a tough slog, as there still wasn’t much “authentic” African music to be found in record stores in and around Annapolis. (A large Ethiopian community in Washington, DC, did provide for a nice source of tapes and records, when I was over that way on weekends). But the search and journey were rewarding in their own rights, an interesting musical hobby, in which I learned about, and learned to love, a wide variety of musical traditions from across and around the African continent.

The scarcity of African music on these shores changed a bit after 1986, when Paul Simon “discovered” South African mbaqanga music (also known as “township jive”) and shared it via his immensely popular Graceland album. (I have mixed feelings about that record and its heritage). Graceland‘s commercial success built on the international work done by the likes of Peter Gabriel and Talking Heads’ David Byrne, directly contributing to the emergence of the “World Music” genre. I also have mixed feelings about that categorization, as the cuts that emerged in that era tended to nab a lot of “lowest common denominator” fruit, packaging it into the types of easy-listening background music compilations that were sold at Starbucks coffee shops. See also the contemporaneous “New Age” movement which watered down and commercialized interesting ambient works. Phooey to both.

But, for all of its faults and problematic approaches, the emergence of World Music did bring “real” non-Western albums into much wider availability in the United States, and I have continued to collect the music of Africa with diligence and joy over the past four decades. In the digital/streaming era, a variety of labels and producers (most notably Analog Africa) have uncovered and distributed brilliant records often originally issued in the 1950s-1970s on tiny imprints or (later) via cassette tapes. The availability of such music has continued to expand in the streaming era, and I’m routinely mind-boggled at instantly being able to score songs and discs that were once incredibly rare and arcane, without leaving my home office desk. African contemporary music remains vital and exciting as well, and it’s rare for me to not have at least a couple of African records featured in my annual Best Albums reports.

I do recognize that “Music of Africa” isn’t technically a genre, in that there are immense variations in instrumentation, style, purpose, and structure of music across the rich panoply of African cultures. Tanzanian mbira orchestras are as far removed structurally from Nigerian juju music as, say, soul music is when compared to progressive rock. But because of the ways in which I was first exposed to African music, and then collected it for much of my adult life, I do group such artists together in my listening habits. So I present my ten favorite albums from the continent below, in a spirit of wonder and admiration for the works of these artists, even if they wouldn’t necessarily perceive themselves as having a lot in common, any more than people from Canada and Costa Rica would by dint of coming from the same continent.

MY TEN FAVORITE AFRICAN ALBUMS EVER (IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER)

1. Hamza El Din, Escalay: The Water Wheel (1971): Hamza El Din was a Nubian composer, singer, and oud player, from the Nilotic region near the Egypt-Sudan border. He emigrated to the United States in the 1960s, became a regular performer on the folk festival circuit, and later played with the Grateful Dead at their 1978 Egyptian performances; the Dead’s Mickey Hart produced El Din’s popular Eclipse album.

2. Hailu Mergia and the Walias, Tche Belew (1977): Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa was home to a rich local jazz scene in the 1970s. Keyboardist Hailu Mergia and his Walias Band were among the best artists of this era, famed for their decade-long residency at Addis’ Hilton Hotel. Mergia fled government repression in the 1980s for Washington, DC. After decades as a taxi driver and restaurateur, he returned to recording in 2017.

3. Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, Original Sufferhead (1982): Fela would be my “desert island disc” representative if I could only listen to one African artist. His entire catalog, and life, were extraordinary and well worth investigating. Original Sufferhead was the first album of his I acquired, when it was issued, and it remains my favorite. It is musically and lyrically trenchant, sublime, political, and ultimately extremely uplifting.

4. Juluka, Scatterlings (1982): Johnny Clegg was a white South African of English descent who (against Apartheid’s statutes) began performing as Juluka with Zulu guitarist-singer Sipho Mchunu in the 1970s. Scatterlings was their international breakthrough album, a joyful merger of Celtic and Zulu traditions. Clegg played a role in my musical relationship with Marcia, explained in my 2019 obituary for him, here.

5. Hukwe Zawose and the Master Musicians of Tanzania, Mateso (1987): I absolutely adore the buzzing lamellophone music of Tanganyika/Tanzania, truly other-wordly and magical. Hukwe Zawose was the master of the idiom, playing the ilimba, which is a large version of the better known mbira. He was also the founder of a musical dynasty, and The Zawose Queens (featuring his daughter and grand-daughter) carry his legacy on.

6. Various Artists, The Very Best of Hugh Tracey (Recorded 1950-1959, Released 2008): Hugh Tracey was a British ethnomusicologist who made ~35,000 field recordings of Central and South African folk music from the 1920s to the 1970s, releasing ~210 albums along the way. I picked this sampler as a fine introduction to his archival work; many of his site-specific albums are sublime, and well worth exploring.

7. Various Artists, Legends of Benin (Recorded 1969-1981, Released 2009): Many American musical idioms have their roots in Africa, but American music has also often then returned to Africa for a second round of adaptation and internalization. Benin in the 1970s was a hotbed of funky, R&B inflected music inspired by popular American acts of the time, and this sampler captures that amazing era, with grit, soul, and power.

8. Noura Mint Seymali, Arbina (2016): Noura Mint Seymali is a Mauritanian griot born into a prominent musical family in her home nation. She’s an amazing singer and deeply skilled on the ardin, a nine-stringed Moorish harp. Arbina is her second full-length album, where her own sublime contributions are backed by a punchy, angular drum-guitar-bass rhythm section. Seymali has a new album due later this month, hooray!

9. KOKOKO!, Fongola (2019): KOKOKO! are a Congolese arts ensemble from Kinshasa who merge modern electronics with home-made/recycled instrumentation, creating a banging and original sound guaranteed to move your hips as much as your mind. Belgian producer Débruit and singer-percussionist Makara Bianko anchor the group, which also features visual, dance, and spoken elements in live performance.

10. Mdou Moctar, Funeral for Justice (2024): Mdou Moctar is a Tuareg guitarist, songwriter and singer from Niger. His family disapproved of electric music, so he built his first guitar himself, using bicycle cables as strings. From such humble beginnings, he made himself a true master of his instrument and spokesman for his people. Funeral for Justice is a feast for those who love smart, tasteful, and soulful six-string pyrotechnics.

As will be the case for each installment in this Genre Delve series, I’ve linked my own personally-curated, 100-song Spotify playlist of African music below. You can sample songs from the albums and artists cited above, and also other favorites to give them setting and context. As always, I welcome your thoughts and reactions to my list, and your recommendations or suggestions for things that I might find interesting.

(Note: This is one of an occasional and ongoing series of assessments of my favorite albums, parsed by musical genre. Click Here for a series introduction and list of all genres covered, or to be covered, therein).

Background: Like many musically-curious young people, my earliest sonic explorations came from a mix of listening to the radio, and digging around in my parents’ record collection to see what treasures therein might intrigue.

My dad didn’t have a big catalog of albums, particularly, but he did have an eclectic mix of interests, and I distinctly remember three jazz albums from the soundtrack of my childhood: The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Time Out (1959), Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue (1959), and Stan Getz’s Jazz Samba (1962), all reasonably accessible, all popular hits, by jazz standards. I liked them all, though they weren’t top of heap sonic experiences for me, in large part because I liked lyrics and vocals more than I liked instrumental music at that point in my young musical career.

When I was in junior high school, a lot of my friends played in the school’s jazz band, so I inquired of the music teacher whether there might be a spot for me in that ensemble, as a budding guitarist. I was given an audition piece (I don’t remember what it was) that contained chords I’d never learned (nor knowingly heard) like Cm7b5 and A7b13 and D7#9b13 and such, in a time when you couldn’t just hop on the internet to figure out the chord fingerings. That was quickly the end of my jazz guitar career, as punk rock’s emergent three chord simplicity and industrial music’s deployment of processed guitar as a squealing sonic paintbrush were more appealing and suited to my skill set.

Over the course of my adult years, though, I eventually developed the ear and the technical knowledge to appreciate both the composed and improvisational aspects of jazz, live and on record. I do have some odd to quirky tastes on this front, though: I don’t much care for vocal jazz, for starters, and the trumpet is probably my least favorite lead/solo instrument among the stereotypical jazz combo configurations. Yes, I know, heresy! I’ve always been especially interested in unusual jazz instrumentation, a fascination you will see prominently reflected in my list of ten favorite jazz albums below. I also tend to favor the Hard Bop era and style, which incorporated blues, R&B, and gospel elements into the ragtime, bebop, and smooth jazz strains that came before. I like modal jazz, but generally not in its most extreme free jazz varieties. I’ve never much dug the fusion era and styles that followed Hard Bop, either.

No surprise as I compiled my album list, therefore, that my top ten platters hew to a fairly narrow temporal frame, with all ten records having been created between 1961 and 1970. Because jazz is so session based, and because a few of the records on my list were either posthumous releases, or compilations of earlier discs, I’ve noted both recording and release dates of my top ten jazz albums below. On with the list!

MY TEN FAVORITE JAZZ ALBUMS EVER (IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER)

1. Mal Waldron, The Quest (Recorded 1961, Released 1962): Mal Waldron (1925-2002) was a prolific pianist and composer, equally proficient as a band leader, an accompanist, and as the creator for film scores. The Quest features a killer ensemble (Eric Dolphy and Booker Ervin on saxes, with Ron Carter offering interesting cello stylings) on a collection of seven choice Waldron originals.

2. Eric Dolphy, Iron Man (Recorded 1963, Released 1968): Eric Dolphy (1928-1964) is one of my two favorite jazz artists (learn the other below), a man who reinvented the ways reed instruments were deployed, before being struck down before his due time. It was tough for me to decide which of his albums to cite, essentially a toss-up between Iron Man and Out to Lunch, both classic posthumous releases from a true, tragic genius.

3. John Coltrane, A Love Supreme (Recorded 1964, Released 1965): Probably the best known of my fave jazz albums, from another artist tragically taken from us too soon. Coltrane (1926-1967) was a pioneer of modal jazz, and A Love Supreme is hailed as his “definitive tone poem.” There’s a beautiful closing sequence in Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues scored to its opening movement, “Acknowledgement,” well worth watching.

4. Stan Tracey Quartet, Jazz Suite Inspired by Dylan Thomas’ “Under Milk Wood” (Recorded and Released 1965): The only disc in my top ten birthed outside the United States, Under Milk Wood was English pianist Stan Tracey’s (1926-2013) sonic response to a 1953 radio performance of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas’ finest work. It’s an evocative, melodic, percussive composed work, a perfect muso-literary amalgam.

5. Rufus Harley, Courage: The Atlantic Recordings (Recorded 1965-1970, Released 2006): In keeping with my tastes for odd jazz instrumentation, I present Rufus Harley (1936-2006), an American musician who mainly performed on the Scottish Highland Bagpipes. Harley released four albums in the late ’60s, all part of this excellent compilation. His take on the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High” is an epic merger of idioms.

6. Yusef Lateef, The Complete Yusef Lateef (Recorded 1967, Released 1968): If I could only take the works of but one jazz artist to the proverbial Desert Isle, I’d pick Yusef Lateef (1920-2013), a brilliant, prolific multi-instrumentalist, composer, and educator. Despite its title, this is not a compilation, but rather an expression of the totality of what Lateef wrote, played, and believed circa 1967. Lots of turf covered, with aplomb.

7. Dorothy Ashby, Afro-Harping (Recorded and Released 1968): Dorothy Ashby (1932-1986) moved the harp from being a big band coloring texture into the forefront of jazz improvisation and soloing, a true pioneer on her instrument. Afro-Harping is her clear masterpiece work, a wonderful and accessible collection of original compositions and jazz/pop standards, with some of the kickiest grooves to be found on this list.

8. Pharoah Sanders, Karma (Recorded and Released 1970): There are two songs on this album by sax great Pharoah Sanders (1940-2022), but the 33-minute long “The Creator Has A Master Plan,” comprises ~85% of the disc. It’s a harrowing sonic journey, evolving from a beautiful vocal melody (sung by Leon Thomas) into screaming, over-driven chaos and back again, multiple times. Extreme and exhausting, yet sublime.

9. Alice Coltrane, Journey in Satchidananda (Feat. Pharoah Sanders) (Recorded 1970, Released 1971): John Coltrane’s widow, Alice (1937-2007), was another jazz harpist, and a pioneer of spiritual jazz. Journey in Satchidananda was her fourth album, a revelatory mixture of Eastern and Western sounds and styles, documenting her emerging creative/religious philosophy. The title track is truly magical and timeless.

10. Bobby Hutcherson, San Francisco (Feat. Harold Land) (Recorded 1970, Released 1971): Vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson (1941-2016) was highly prolific as a leader and sideman throughout the 1960s; he appears on Eric Dolphy’s Iron Man, discussed above. He had a unique sonic partnership with tenor sax man Harold Land (1928-2001), and San Francisco marks their finest and most fully formed work together.

Rather than putting in links to selected songs from each album album as I’ve done with prior series of this variety (and then ended up having to spend time maintaining a mountain of broken links as time passed), for each installment in the Genre Delve series, I’m going to link to the applicable personally-curated playlists of each genre on our home Spotify account. You can sample multiple songs from the albums and artists cited above, and also other favorites to give them setting and context, via this 150-song, all-day jazz roster. As always, I welcome your thoughts and reactions to my list, and your recommendations or suggestions for things that I might find interesting. You know where to find the comment section!

As mentioned in my prior article here at the website, this post marks the first, introductory installment in a new recurring series, which I’m calling “Genre Delve.”

This new approach to parsing my musical musings was primarily inspired by the ways we listen to tunes around our house these days, with me having caved to streaming some years back. When I first started putting streaming playlists together, we had one for new stuff, and one for mellow mornings, and one for party evenings, thematic, cross-genre approaches like that. But then I started developing a variety of all-day genre-specific playlists to diversify our home jukebox.

We tend to put one of those playlists on each morning and that’s what we listen to for most of that day. There are currently 35 playlists on our Spotify account, ranging from 50 to 150 songs each (for the most part), and you can see (and spin) them all at our Spotify account page, here. About a third of the playlists are genre specific, so those will be my starting points on this series. I do spend a fair amount of intellectual energy and time curating these sets, adding, subtracting, tweaking, keeping them fresh and engaging, so this seems a good way to externalize and share that proclivity in what will hopefully be an interesting fashion.

Each article that follows in this series will contain a brief introduction to my history with that genre, and then a listing of my ten favorite albums within the genre, with some brief explanatory background for further exploration. I will not post more than one album per artist, so each list will contain ten distinct performers.

Note well that these will be favorite albums within a genre, and I’m not making any efforts to capture any sort of “these are the best [your genre here] records ever” vibe. I like what I like, and I think most of it is good, but I’m realistic enough to know that in some cases, my tastes tend toward the arcane edges of a genre, so that many titanic or iconic Sacred Cow-type releases may not appear on my own personal lists. And even within the ten albums that I pick, I will list them in chronological order of release, not trying to pick a #1 album, and a #10 album, and labeling all points between.

I’ve listed the genres below that I will plan to cover, in alphabetical order, to keep this page as the central repository for the project. I will add links as I complete articles. I probably won’t do them in the order they’re listed below, and the list will probably morph as I work through it and missing genres emerge, or existing genres require sub-categorization. Watch out for the first proper installment in the next couple of days.

ROSTER OF ALL GENRE DELVE ARTICLES

(To be updated and linked as articles are complete). 

#2. JAZZ

#3. AFRICA

#4. GOSPEL

#5. PROG

#6. AMERICANA

#7. METAL/HARD ROCK

#8. BRITISH FOLK ROCK

#9. HIP-HOP/RAP

#10. REGGAE

#11. HARDCORE/POST-PUNK

#12. FUNK/SOUL

#13. AOR/CLASSIC ROCK