[The Future] – ‘Old Souls Part IX – Instrumental’ (2016-2020)

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Stream the mix while you read; download at the bottom of this post.

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Sometimes, music can speak most directly to us when it’s made without words, seeming to tap directly into our emotions, our body, our heart; hitting us before our incessant brains can do quite as much conscious processing.  The ‘Old Souls‘ series has regularly featured “instrumental” tracks over its first eight wide-ranging volumes, but this installment is the first to focus on the (almost) wholly instrumental musics being made today. Most of the tracks on this mix have roots firmly planted in the eternally fertile soil of spiritual and cosmic jazz in the late 1960s and 1970s–John and Alice Coltrane, Sonny Sharrock, Don Cherry, Pharoah Sanders, Brother Ah, Dorothy Ashby, John DeJohnette, Eddie Gale, Herbie Hancock a la ‘Sextant’ and Miles a la ‘Jack Johnson’.  But it is deeply informed by many other forms, too: traditional African folk and African popular musics, decades of electronic dance and ambient music, classic “boom-bap” and avant-garde hip-hop, sophisticated library and soul and pop, modern compositional musical traditions, and beyond.  The fusions don’t need to call much attention to themselves as fusion-qua-fusion.  It all holds together remarkably seamlessly–the conversations between these sounds make it all feel like it belong together. Warm, cosmic, funky, mournful, joyous, serious, playful, cinematic, intimate, complex, accessible: ‘Old Souls Part IX – Instrumental‘ paints a vivid picture of the vitality of the living traditions of African and Afrodiasporic music in this new golden age of music.

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Download/stream the mix below the tracklist. As with all the volumes in the ‘Old Souls,’ series, this music is made by working artists who all deserve your financial support.  These are unprecedented days in our lifetime at least, and musicians–normally reliant on live performance in this age of Spotify (aka corporate theft)–are being hit as hard or harder than anyone. So whatever your situation allows: please, please, buy music and merch, go to shows when shows are a thing again, and propagate the art to everyone who needs to hear it. I’ve included links to pages where you can buy the music in the tracklist below. Thank you for listening, and please pass it on.

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Various – ‘Old Souls – Part IX – Instrumental’
2016-2020
01 [00:00] Kamasi Washington – “Street Fighter Mas” (‘Heaven & Earth’ 2018)
02 [05:55] Kokoroko – “Adwa” (‘Kokoroko’ 2019)
03 [11:45] Hama – “Terroir” (‘Houmeissa’ 2019)
04 [15:20] Ali Shaheed Muhammad & Adrian Younge – “But The Tape” (‘Run This Town’ 2020)
05 [19:25] The Comet Is Coming – “Journey Through the Asteroid Belt” (‘Channel the Spirits’ 2016)
06 [24:45] Tensei – “Spero” (‘Constellate (Instrumentals)’ 2019)
07 [28:20] Hprizm – “Philly Bull” (‘Blue Nile’ 2019)
08 [32:00] Lamin Fofana – “Dawn” (‘Black Metamorphosis’ 2019)
09 [34:45] Irreversible Entanglements – “No Mas” (‘Who Sent You?’ 2020)
10 [42:40] Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah – “Before” (‘Ancestral Recall’ 2019)
11 [48:45] Moses Boyd – “Stranger Than Fiction” (‘Dark Matter’ 2020)
12 [53:20] Arca – “Saunter (Reprise)” (‘Arca’ 2017)
13 [57:55] Loraine James – “For You And I” (‘For You and I’ 2019)
14 [63:05] Ash Walker – “I Need Money” (‘Aquamarine’ 2019)
15 [66:30] Tomeka Reid Quartet – “Old New” (‘Old New’ 2019)
16 [70:35] Beauty Pill – “So Dark Blinking Makes No Difference” (‘Sorry You’re Here’ 2020)
17 [74:00] Sons of Kemet – “My Queen is Yaa Asantewaa” (‘Your Queen is a Reptile’ 2018)
18 [80:50] Jeff Parker – “Gnarciss” (‘Suite for Max Brown’ 2020)
19 [83:05] Jlin – “Second Interlude (The Choosing)” (‘Autobiorgraphy’ 2018)
20 [89:20] Makaya McCraven – “Mantra” (‘Universal Beings’ 2018)
21 [92:40] Ambrose Akinmusire – “Americana/The Garden Waits…” (‘Origami Harvest’ 2019)

[Total Time: 1:43:15]

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Download ‘Old Souls Part IX – Instrumental’ Here (240 MB)

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Stream here:

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