What is Jazz And Soul Influences?
Jazz And Soul Influences describes the intersection of musical forms—particularly jazz improvisation and soul music’s gospel-rooted emotionality—with explicit spiritual inquiry, transcendence practices, and consciousness exploration. Spiritual jazz is a sub-genre of jazz that originated in the United States during the 1960s, drawing from free, avant-garde and modal jazz while thematically focusing on transcendence and spirituality. Soul music has its roots in African-American gospel music and rhythm and blues, and primarily combines elements of gospel, R&B and jazz. Both traditions employ music not merely as entertainment but as a vehicle for heightened states of awareness, healing, and what practitioners describe as divine encounter.
Spiritual jazz is music that tries to invoke ecstatic, higher states of consciousness, whether it accesses them through religion or spirituality or in the music itself. Soul music carries similar intent: its etymology is inextricably linked with spirituality, and the call and response structure, emotional vocal delivery, and the themes of faith and hope found in gospel songs have become integral elements of Soul music. The phrase “jazz and soul influences” recognizes that these genres—and the spiritual practices surrounding them—inform contemporary conscious music, meditation gatherings, sound healing sessions, and embodied spiritual practice.
Origins & Lineage
During the 1960s in the United States, the civil rights movement was occurring, causing societal change and political movements. As a result, African-American people gained more freedom to celebrate their culture and to express themselves religiously. This led to a desire to push the conventions of jazz, with some artists choosing to search for transcendence and spirituality in their music.
John Coltrane’s 1965 album A Love Supreme is considered a landmark in the genre and is generally considered the genesis of spiritual jazz. John Coltrane’s landmark 1965 album A Love Supreme, which Coltrane called his “humble offering to God.” Coltrane’s Love Supreme was a representation of his own spiritual quest, as he explored Mysticism, Hinduism, Sufism, the Kabbalah, African history, and the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. Coltrane’s wife Alice Coltrane recalled him meditating for a week before creating the suite, coming down and saying, “I have a whole new music!”… “He was like Moses coming down from the mountain”.
After John Coltrane’s death in 1967, his wife Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders—both who had previously played with Coltrane—were some of the first to continue the sound of the genre. Coltrane’s 1971 album Journey in Satchidananda combined spiritual jazz with influences from Hindustani classical music, after her journey into spirituality with help from Swami Satchidananda. Pharoah Sanders took inspiration from Arabic, Indian, and Afro-Cuban music to create early spiritual jazz albums, including Tauhid (1967) and Karma (1969). Prevalent artists of this era of spiritual jazz included Lonnie Liston Smith, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, and Don Cherry.
Soul music’s spiritual lineage reaches back earlier. Gospel music has its origins in the African American religious experience and has been a vital component of worship in Black churches for generations. Ray Charles, often dubbed the “Genius,” played a pivotal role in the birth of soul music with his fusion of gospel, blues, and jazz. There is no soul music without the Black church. Figures like Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, Curtis Mayfield, and Al Green brought sacred vocal intensity into secular contexts, maintaining what soul is the interpretation, not the song; the man, not the music; the feeling, not the title.
Sacred jazz emerged earlier than the 1960s spiritual jazz movement. For composers such as Duke Ellington and Mary Lou Williams, it was a natural way of expressing their spiritual beliefs. Duke Ellington’s three sacred-jazz concerts from 1965, 1968 and 1973 were artistic and spiritual priorities for Ellington. He had delved into religious-themed jazz as early as 1935.
How It’s Practiced
Spiritual jazz does not follow a strictly defined musical style but generally features elements of free jazz, avant-garde jazz and modal jazz with influences from Asian and African music. Quartal harmonies, the Dorian mode, meditative sounds as well as the musical language of blues and bebop are often employed. Musicians frequently play instruments not traditionally used in jazz or western music, electric keyboards and utilise the recording studio as an instrument.
The practice itself is participatory. Jazz meditation refers to guided meditation practice that incorporates live instrumental jazz music. During a typical jazz meditation performance, a meditation guide or teacher is accompanied by one or more musicians, and musical improvisation is used as an anchor for mindfulness techniques. An audience of seated participants meditate in response to live music and the teacher’s spoken instructions.
For musicians, the state cultivated resembles deep contemplative absorption. Jazz improvisation is a combination of deep meditation and complex analytical problem solving — all done in real time. The improviser is confronting an almost mathematical challenge: create melodies that conform structurally, rhythmically, and harmonically to the given composition — simultaneously drawing from one’s inner creativity, from music that one has practiced, and from what the other musicians are playing. Jazz musicians are forced to pay attention and keep their awareness at a high level by listening to how the other musicians handle a passage and by constantly creating new melodies and harmonies as they improvise. That mindfulness comes from improvisation, but also contributes to it.
Soul music practice centers on embodied vocal delivery. Gospel music is known for its emotionally charged vocal delivery. Singers are encouraged to pour their hearts into their performances, conveying the depth of their faith and the intensity of their spirituality. Call-and-response structures create communal resonance between performer and listener.
Jazz And Soul Influences Today
Spiritual jazz was primarily present during the 1960s and 1970s, although the genre is still currently created to a lesser extent. Examples of spiritual jazz albums from the 2010s and 2020s include The Epic by Kamasi Washington (2015), Wisdom of Elders by Shabaka & The Ancestors (2016), There is a Place by Maisha (2019), Reverence by Muriel Grossman (2019), and Cosmic Transitions by Isaiah Collier & The Chosen Few (2021). According to Treblezine, “Kamasi Washington brought spiritual jazz back to popular consciousness on a wider scale in 2015 with the release of [The Epic]”.
Contemporary seekers encounter these influences in yoga studios, sound baths, ecstatic dance gatherings, and mindfulness retreats where live or recorded spiritual jazz provides sonic backdrop. The albums Alice Coltrane recorded for Impulse Records in the 1960s and 1970s—notably Ptah, the El Daoud, Journey in Satchidananda, and Universal Consciousness—are recognized as classic expressions of “spiritual jazz” and widely sampled. Her religious music, once confined to ashrams and yoga studios, has been commercially released in the last decade. Jazz meditation classes now appear at contemplative centers, and academic institutions like Berklee School of Music offer curricula linking contemplative practice with jazz.
Soul’s gospel-rooted emotional intensity pervades contemporary R&B, neo-soul, and conscious hip-hop. Artists cite the lineage explicitly; listeners describe the music as “healing” or “church” without denominational affiliation. The influence operates less as genre replication than as embodied principle: music as prayer, improvisation as surrender, voice as spirit vehicle.
Common Misconceptions
This is not synonymous with “relaxing background music.” Spiritual jazz fused the searching soul of gospel, the improvisational fire of free jazz, and the cosmic consciousness of Eastern philosophy, creating a sound that was meditative, ecstatic, and politically charged all at once. Much spiritual jazz is dissonant, turbulent, or rhythmically complex—designed to provoke transcendence, not tranquilize.
It is not exclusively religious. Jazz masters found their aspiration by looking to the divine, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they subscribe to traditional religion. Its players tend to have an eclectic conception of the divine. When the Coltranes spoke about God, they didn’t mean the God of a particular religion, but a spiritual universality that encompasses all world religions.
It is not a recent invention rebranded for wellness markets. The roots of spiritual jazz come up even before the sixties. More than sixty years since jazz legend Yusef Lateef came up with his iconic album, Other Sounds.
Finally, jazz and soul influences do not require passive listening. Mindfulness has in many ways always been at the core of jazz. It is possible to listen to jazz as background music, but jazz, when listened to with even a smidgen of care, creates participatory engagement, demanding presence from listener and performer alike.
How to Begin
Start with John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme (1965) and Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananda (1971). Listen with intentionality—seated, eyes closed, attending to breath and bodily sensation as sound unfolds. For soul influences, explore Aretha Franklin’s gospel recordings or Al Green’s Call Me (1973).
Seek live jazz meditation sessions or jazz vespers services offered by contemplative centers and progressive religious communities. Attend concerts by contemporary spiritual jazz artists like Kamasi Washington, Shabaka Hutchings, or Muriel Grossman with the intention of deep listening rather than entertainment.
For practitioners: explore Edward Sarath’s Improvisation, Creativity, and Consciousness (2013), which bridges jazz pedagogy and meditation practice. Consider learning an instrument not for performance but for improvisational meditation—allowing sound to arise without self-judgment, mirroring seated contemplative practice. Notice the parallels between letting thoughts pass in meditation and letting musical phrases arise and dissolve in improvisation.