If you grew up on John Coltrane's later records or Alice Coltrane's harp-and-strings albums, Matthew Halsall's music will feel instantly familiar and also completely its own thing. He's a trumpeter from Manchester who fell hard for spiritual jazz — the modal, incense-and-meditation strand of the music that Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane pioneered in the late sixties and seventies — and then built a whole career, and eventually a label, around keeping that sound alive without just copying it.

What he actually sounds like: soft-edged trumpet lines floating over harp, gentle hand percussion, double bass that walks rather than runs, and a real patience about letting a groove breathe instead of rushing to the next idea. Albums like Fletcher Moss Park (2012) and When the World Was One (2014) are named after actual places in Manchester, which is a nice detail — this is music that sounds like it could have come from India or the Ethiopian highlands, but it was made by a guy from the north of England thinking about his local park.

Halsall's not a flashy player. He's never chasing the kind of technical fireworks that get trumpeters written up in magazines for their chops. His trumpet tone is warm and a little understated, closer in spirit to Don Cherry than to Freddie Hubbard. The interest is in the writing and the arranging — how the harp and saxophone wrap around each other, how a tune sits in one mood for six or seven minutes without getting restless. It's music built for listening in full, not for picking out a killer solo.

The other half of the story is Gondwana Records, the label he started in 2008, initially just to get his own music out, which grew into a home for a whole scene of UK jazz that doesn't get talked about as much as the London scene around Shabaka Hutchings and friends. Bands like GoGo Penguin and Mammal Hands came up through Gondwana, and saxophonist Nat Birchall, another Alice Coltrane devotee, has been a close collaborator for years. Halsall didn't just make records — he built a small ecosystem for a very specific, very unfashionable (at the time) kind of jazz, and stuck with it long enough that it stopped being unfashionable.