Welcome back, music lovers. I am going to go for a change of pace this week. Depending how it goes, I might continue to mine this for a while. By this point, you have figured out that I am nothing if not eclectic in my tastes. The common thread is that I like artists who take a few chances and express themselves. There has never been a shortage in my lifetime, and for that I am grateful.
I may not be a jazzhead in any traditional sense of the term, but there is a good deal that I enjoy, and my personal collection is pretty extensive. When I did some college radio DJ work, for a while I hosted a couple hours of jazz programming each week. I’d usually do themed shows that were either free jazz, or themed shows focusing on a phenomenon of the 1970s, kozmigroov:
For a while in the 1990s there was a site called Kozmigroov Index. It eventually morphed into The Kozmigroov Connection. So what is Kozmigroov?
Kozmigroov is a transgressive improvisational music which combines elements of psychedelia, spirituality, jazz, rock, soul, funk, and African, Latin, Brazillian, Indian and Asian influences culminating into an all encompassing cosmic groove. At its most accomplished, Kozmigroov is both expansive and highly rhythmic, and simultaneously finds connections with the mind, soul and body.
The impression I get is that club DJs in the acid jazz scene in the late 1980s (and I do have some acid jazz in my collection, to probably no surprise to anyone), were going through a lot of used records bins and digging up just about anything they could from the 1970s that would give them a good groove. Thanks to those crate diggers, listeners began to explore where those sampled bass lines, etc. were coming from with the end result being a lot of stuff got reissued on CD for the duration of the 1990s and into the first few years of this century. We even got new kozmigroov artists, who were inspired by these early artists, but who offered their own very 1990s spin. The best work is not only danceable, but emotionally moving in ways I cannot even begin to describe.
Hopefully Pharoah Sanders’ “Morning Prayer” is a fair introduction to this unique jazz thread. I will have more.