The roots of spiritual jazz run through the whole history of African American music — gospel, field hollers, the church — but the genre crystallized in the early 1960s when modal jazz opened up enough harmonic space for musicians to actually go somewhere without the chord changes dragging them back. John Coltrane is the obvious starting point. A Love Supreme (1965) is the album most people point to, and for good reason: it is a suite explicitly dedicated to God, complete with a written prayer in the liner notes, and Coltrane plays it like every phrase is an act of gratitude. But the album works not just because of its intent — it works because the quartet, with McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums, had spent years building the telepathy to hold that kind of long-form emotional arc together.

Coltrane opened a door and a lot of musicians walked through it. Pharoah Sanders took the energy further outward, into longer collective improvisations and howling overtones that made some listeners uncomfortable and others feel like they were being wrung clean. Karma (1969) is the key Sanders record — Leon Thomas singing and yodeling over dense group improvisation, the whole thing feeling more like a ritual than a concert. Around the same time, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians was doing similar work in Chicago. Sun Ra had been doing it since the 1950s, building an entire mythology around music as cosmic mission. These weren't just artistic statements; they were responses to what was happening in the streets, to the civil rights movement, to the question of what African American culture could claim as its own.

The genre's other great strand is quieter. Alice Coltrane — who replaced Tyner in John Coltrane's band and outlived her husband by decades — made records in the early 1970s that drew on Vedantic philosophy, Indian classical music, and jazz in roughly equal measure. Journey in Satchidananda (1971) puts harp, tambura, and bass clarinet together in a way that shouldn't work but absolutely does. Alice Coltrane isn't a footnote to her husband's story; she's a major figure in her own right who spent decades running an ashram in California and recording music that most of the jazz world largely ignored until recently. Her late recordings, made for her ashram community and not commercially released until after her death, have introduced her to a whole new generation of listeners.

Spiritual jazz never really went away, but it spent a long time at the margins. The reissue boom of the 2000s and 2010s — particularly through labels like Luaka Bop and BBE, and through Floating Points's championing of records that had been largely forgotten — brought a new audience to the music. Younger musicians today, from Kamasi Washington to Shabaka Hutchings, have picked up the thread explicitly, making music that is just as interested in collective meaning as it is in individual virtuosity. What holds all of this together across sixty-plus years is a refusal to treat music as mere entertainment. These musicians thought jazz could do something — could heal, uplift, connect people to each other and to something larger. Whether you share that belief or not, the conviction behind the playing is hard to fake.