This week we head deep into classic jazz from the seventies presented by Cannonball Adderley featuring the Nat Adderley Sextet with narration by Rick Holmes. Next we enjoy music from dance club diva Joi Cardwell. We conclude with dazzling Brazilian vocalist Flora Purim singing the music of Milton Nascimento.
Whereas the narration of the Zodiac albums sounds a bit dated, there is nothing retro about Soul of the Bible. The whole project sounds contemporary and is a genuine classic of jazz that needs no qualification or contextualization to be appreciated. David Axelrod is a co-producer with Cannonball on all three sessions but whereas Soul Zodiac can easily be catalogued as a commercial effort that has Axelrod’s penchant for fusion rather than straight ahead jazz, there is no equivocation on Soul of the Bible. Indeed, some of the longer cuts are magnificent examples of the spiritual direction that jazz took post-Coltrane when there was a strong, strong emphasis on African rhythms and instrumentation under-girding extended vamps.
Soul of the Bible, and to a lesser extent the Zodiac recordings, are prime examples of how deep the music of the seventies was. Some of us argue that there was a strong spiritual element to the music. In this case, the spiritual orientation is not only overt, the spiritual element is also swinging.