Featured Artist

    Gospel is for those times when we want to rise above the tribulations of the world. “If you want to get to heaven I’ll tell you how, keep your hand on the gospel plow,” says one of the tracks on Go Down Moses by Chicago A Cappella. No music speaks of transcending the cares of the material world as powerfully as does Gospel.
    Blues are about the search for hidden sweetness in an otherwise bitter reality. The words tell of bitter experience but the rhythms, tones and inflections reflect a search for the bittersweet, as in Damn Right, I've Got The Blues by Buddy Guy.
    Word are finite but the aspiration in gospel, blues and jazz is for the infinite; and sometimes in listening to jazz we come as close as we can to having it. Why? It all has to do with the relationship between rhythm and reality, material reality that is.
    Sustained rhythmic stimulation can alter our consciousness of the material world (It can even alter our DNA). It is the sustained rhythm in gospel, the sustained and more complex rhythm in blues and the even more complex rhythm in jazz that draws us into the blending of spirit with the material reality creating our soul’s vibrations.
    Central to the blending is the drum. Gospel, blues and jazz come from America’s African roots; and nowhere in the world is there a greater variety of drums than in Africa. These include the hour-glass shaped (talking) drums that slide and glide endlessly never finding a definite pitch, timber, inflection, tone, or nuance.
    In jazz other instruments (like John Coltrane’s saxophone in Nutty) slide and glide like the “talking drum” recreating an infinite number of tonal frequencies and inflections with the ability to say more than finite words can ever say.

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