During the first few weeks of the Covid outbreak, in March 2020, the Manchester-based trumpeter, composer, bandleader and record-label owner Matthew Halsall put up a playlist on Spotify. Entitled Weekly Meditations, it was a carefully chosen selection of “super-chilled vibes” and “soulful healing music”, all of which had a strong connection to the generous if sometimes slippery subgenre of “spiritual jazz”, a style with which Halsall has become closely associated.
“First and foremost, I am a listener, and those songs genuinely helped me have a better hour, day or week,” Halsall says. Since the pandemic, he has continued to add to the playlist, now simply called Meditations, its cosmic range and remit expanded to almost 400 tracks “for relaxation, meditation and astral travelling”.
He adds: “Not only is it a beautiful exploration in sharing music, but listening to those songs just gives me a deep feeling of happiness and comfort and peace.”
If this sounds excessively earnest and overly sincere, then it should also be said that over the past 15 years Halsall’s strain of numinous musical energy has proved surprisingly popular. Fusing the modal and incantatory late-1960s and early-1970s jazz of African-American experimentalists Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders – all swirling harp glissandos and soaring flute and saxophone solos – with the more contemporary electronic, dance, ambient and trip-hop beats and samples of English indie labels like Ninja Tune and Warp, Halsall has hit upon a winning formula.
The result is jazz that is both energising and becalming, blissful and ruminative. It is contemplative music to immerse yourself in, sounds for the body and soul as much as for the head and mind, a salve for our troubled times. Lyrical and often limpidly beautiful, Halsall’s music has something winningly mind-altering about it.
“Spiritual jazz is meditative music that’s inspired by spiritual philosophies and sounds, and by nature and humanity,” the 40-year-old says when I ask what the term means to him. “When I’m making this music it’s like a therapy process or mindfulness exercise. It has a mantralike quality.”
They are attributes that have increasingly chimed with Halsall’s audience, especially live. He has progressed from playing small clubs and halls to headlining major London venues, such as the Barbican and Roundhouse; in September, he performed to 3,500 people at the Royal Albert Hall as part of a 31-date European tour. Halsall lands at Guinness Cork Jazz Festival for two dates this weekend.
At the same time the trumpeter’s record label, Gondwana, has become a vital if quietly revolutionary force in British jazz. Founded in 2008 on a budget of just £1,000, the label has advanced from shoestring cottage industry, in which Halsall’s brother Daniel designed the album covers and Gondwana was dedicated to Halsall’s music alone, to a current roster of 16 international artists, seven staff and nearly 80 releases.
Along the way Halsall and Gondwana have launched debut albums by the acoustic-electronic trio GoGo Penguin, who were subsequently signed to the storied Blue Note jazz label, and the folk-jazz minimalists Mammal Hands. Other leading modern jazz and progressive electronica acts on the label include Portico Quartet, Hania Rani, Dwight Trible and Jasmine Myra. This month’s Jazzwise magazine described Gondwana as “an internationally thriving Northern powerhouse”. It’s like a jazz version of Factory Records circa 1988.
Halsall grew up in the small industrial town of Leigh, near Wigan in Greater Manchester. “It was very much a run-down mill town, a bit sad, kind of a forgotten land,” he says. His father was a secondary-school art teacher, and his mother “a bit of a hippy” who also found time to teach dressmaking and vegetarian cookery (Halsall has never eaten meat), work as an interior designer and run a series of shops that sold clothing and furniture imported from Asia. One was called Gondwana. Halsall later adopted the name and his mother’s entrepreneurial spirit.
When he was six, his parents took him to a jazz festival in Wigan, and he was immediately hooked, especially by the explosive energy of the Wigan Youth Jazz Orchestra and its trumpet section. He started lessons on a more manageable cornet, graduating to the trumpet as he got older, and by 13 Halsall was playing in that very same orchestra. In his later teens he became a regular member of professional big bands that toured internationally; he was often the youngest musician by four or five years. “It was exciting, fun and social – the community side of music is still really important to me,” he says.
If I try and replicate some sophisticated jazz from the past, it’s not true to who I am, it is not my personality. I’m seeking the purest and most honest form of me as an artist and an individual
Another world, both musical and personal, also opened up to him around this time. Severely dyslexic and, he says, “possibly autistic”, by 14 traditional education had both failed him and made him deeply unhappy. In a somewhat radical move, his parents enrolled him in the “consciousness-based” Maharishi School in nearby Skelmersdale, where he could focus on the subjects he loved – music, art and design – and take classes in such disciplines as yoga, transcendental meditation, Indian philosophy, Buddhism and chanting. He thrived.
Soon after, he discovered Manchester’s celebrated club culture and “DJ eclecticism”; “DJs were almost bigger and more influential than musicians when I was growing up,” says Halsall. At one venue, Planet K, at the age of just 15 (he was sneaked in by a friend’s parents), he heard a long and playfully wide-ranging set by the DJ Andy Carthy, better known as Mr Scruff.
“He’d play trip-hop, hip-hop and all kinds of jazz, and at one point he put on You’ve Got to Have Freedom by Pharoah Sanders,” says Halsall. “The fire, heart, soul and passion of that track blew my mind. And it unlocked the door. I went out and bought everything I could find by Pharoah Sanders, and that led me to people like Alice Coltrane, Yusef Lateef and Don Cherry. Meditating and listening to that music was the perfect cocktail of inspirations.”
Halsall studied music technology, sound engineering, DJing and turntablism at Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. Back in Manchester, in his early 20s he began to hang out at Matt & Phred’s, a jazz club where he met players who shared a similarly widescreen perspective. Gondwana grew out of that scene and still champions many of the musicians, including the saxophonists Chip Wickham and Nat Birchall, who were integral to it.
Halsall’s own catalogue now stretches to nine albums, ranging from On the Go, a homage to the cool jazz and French new-wave cinema of Paris in the 1950s and 1960s; to Fletcher Moss Park, his celebration of the Manchester botanical garden of the same name; and to When the World Was One, inspired by Halsall’s time living in Osaka and travelling in Japan (the record features his expanded Gondwana Orchestra, which adds strings, eastern instruments and guest vocalists).
When I’m making this music, it’s like a therapy process or mindfulness exercise. It has a mantra-like quality
These releases are deftly augmented by the trumpeter’s bright, direct and sometimes plaintive tone: Halsall’s music is about texture rather than velocity. Like many musicians, he plays as he speaks, in his case slowly, deliberately, modestly, a little internally. His compositions and ensemble sound have the same elegant simplicity and calm control. “With jazz, the possibilities are so broad and overwhelming that I often want to go the opposite way, and restrict the process,” he told Jazzwise.
Halsall’s approach has led to criticism that his music lacks ambition, especially melodically and harmonically; that it is too genteel and refined; that, as one critic argued, “the clatter of jazz has almost been surgically removed”, leaving only “vestigial, homeopathic traces”.
“If I try and replicate some sophisticated jazz from the past, it’s not true to who I am; it is not my personality,” Halsall says in response. “I’m seeking the purest and most honest form of me as an artist and an individual, and trying to share that with people. Maybe the chord structures and melodic movements aren’t complex – and I’m okay with that. But there are lots of other complexities, in the layers of percussion, production and mixing, for example, especially on the new album.”
Released last month, An Ever Changing View is perhaps Halsall’s strongest record yet. Composed during periods spent in striking houses and spectacular locations in Northumberland and north Wales, and with a palette deepened by Halsall’s additional playing of instruments such as glockenspiel, celeste, kalimba and custom-made triangular gongs, and by field recordings of birdsong, it is supremely visual, evocative, even elevating music.
“I think society at the moment is in a really unhealthy place, politically, environmentally, everything,” he says, taking a beat. We are talking just a few days after the Hamas atrocities at the Supernova music festival and elsewhere in southern Israel.
“I wanted to paint through sound and transport the listener to landscapes and special places that I found beautiful; they are like breathing spaces or an escape. A lot of people send me messages saying, ‘Your music’s got me through really difficult times,’ or, ‘It’s helped with my mental health.’ Music is this magic portal.”
Matthew Halsall plays the Everyman, as part of Guinness Cork Jazz Festival, on Friday, October 27th, and Saturday, October 28th
