Ambient Jazz’s Quiet, Forceful Return

One of the year’s most memorable melodies consists of a seven-note refrain repeated, with slight variation, for more than three quarters of an hour. Sam Shepherd’s keyboard part from Promises—a full-length collaboration between the 35-year-old British musician better known as Floating Points, the 81-year-old American jazz legend Pharoah Sanders, and the London Symphony Orchestra—is soft and silvery. With an air of unquenchable mystery, it forms the frame for Sanders’ eloquent horn lead. The unobtrusive figure is the opposite of showy, and yet it frequently slips unbidden into my thoughts—when I’m washing dishes, say, or showering, or driving in silence—and germinates there, like a seed cracking open.

Promises is an unusual piece of work: a cross-generational hybrid of lyrical jazz and electroacoustic abstraction, with a touch of classical orchestration thrown in. Shepherd and Sanders come from considerably different backgrounds, but there are clear commonalities in their approaches. Floating Points’ earliest work was devoted to groove-heavy dance beats, but since his 2015 album Elaenia, Shepherd has increasingly focused on the expressive dimension of sound-sculpting. Sanders, spiritual kin to John Coltrane and Albert Ayler, has spent decades exploring the nuances of tone: In just the first minute or so of “Astral Traveling,” from 1971’s Thembi, he proves that a held note can be as transporting as the most dazzling cadenza. What unites the two musicians on Promises is a shared interest in the ways that timbre and texture are just as crucial as melody, harmony, and even rhythm—that is, a mutual fascination with the properties of sound itself.

Usually when we talk about the kind of repetition and sonic detail that are central to Promises, we talk about minimalism. But in the case of Shepherd and Sanders’ meditative album, untethered from any sort of percussive anchor, a different genre seems more germane: ambient. Promises may have been the most high-profile ambient jazz album of 2021, but it was hardly the only one. The fusion of the two styles has been gathering steam over the last few years, culminating in a bounty of recent recordings in which music born of the American jazz tradition took on a particularly ethereal and otherworldly air. It’s a sound that feels particularly timely, given the enforced pause we’ve been forced to endure for nearly two years now, as well as the abiding feeling of strangeness that hangs over so much of modern life. But its roots run deeper—and its artistic possibilities stretch further—than the current predicament.

Much like jazz, ambient can be a vague and frustratingly open-ended term that inspires plenty of knee-jerk associations—from ’90s chill-out rooms to new-age elevator music. Brian Eno, who popularized the concept on a series of albums in the ’70s and ’80s, famously said that ambient music should be “as ignorable as it is interesting”—a potentially provocative assessment that also doomed the style, in the eyes of its detractors, as a lesser category of music, something closer to interior design than actual composition. Given the rise of mood-based streaming playlists (and the resultant rise of music created expressly for mood-based streaming playlists), there’s no shortage of aural wallpaper these days. But Promises is something different: an attempt to combine the expressive language of jazz with the atmospheric quality of ambient music, to introspective and enveloping effect.

If Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders represent the meeting of the 20th-century avant-garde with the 21st-century electronic underground, those two traditions come together in 25-year-old harpist, composer, and synth obsessive Nala Sinephro. Her debut album, Space 1.8, collects some of the leading lights of the contemporary London jazz scene—including saxophonists Nubya Garcia, James Mollison, and Ahnansé, guitarist Shirley Tetteh, and drummer Eddie Hick, of Sons of Kemet—but it seldom sounds like anything as straightforward as a group of musicians jamming together in real time.

Sinephro’s harp playing inevitably draws comparisons to Alice Coltrane, whose use of the instrument opened up heady new frontiers in jazz on albums like 1971’s Journey in Satchidananda (which features Pharoah Sanders). But it’s Sinephro’s synthesizers that really give Space 1.8 its shape-shifting dimension; several of the album’s key tracks take the melodic/harmonic language of jazz and dissolve it into a burbling stream of electronic sound. One of the most notable features of the record is its fusion of improvisation and studio-based post-production. The album’s 18-minute closing track, “Space 8,” was born as an impromptu jam session with saxophonist Ahnansé. After meditating to their recording, Sinephro began fleshing out the track, and the final version includes 10 extra layers of harp, eight more modular-synth parts, and seven tracks of guitar. Still, it sounds elemental—a vast universe of feeling distilled into a moon-colored pool of sound. That focus was intentional. “I wanted to show how the pure simplicity of one note or one chord can be really effective when it’s loaded with emotion,” Sinephro told me.

It may be tempting to see this rising tide of ambient jazz, with its soothing moods and healing frequencies—Sinephro wrote some of Space 1.8 in the wake of serious illness, and has spoken of her music in explicitly medicinal terms—as a response to the stresses of the pandemic. I’m not so sure. For one, Promises and Space 1.8 were completed long before the pandemic broke out. I’m also leery of reducing the unpredictable, alchemical process of artistic creation to mere current events or trends in self-care.

I do wonder, though, what the popularity of some of these records says about the way people are listening, and what they are listening for, at a moment like this. While concerts and festivals have begun again, the fear around new variants suggests there’s no guarantee that nightlife will return to business as usual any time soon. Will stay-at-home listening send people in search of mellower sounds? In extended periods of crisis, do more contemplative modes of listening offer a different kind of spiritual nourishment?

The pairing of ambient and jazz is not new. David Toop once wrote about the shift that occurred with Miles Davis and producer Teo Macero’s records like 1969’s In a Silent Way, in which studio sessions were spliced and rearranged into sprawling multi-track collages. In describing the sound, Toop wrote that “music that was once structured like an armadillo now took the shape of a jellyfish.” Alice Coltrane’s ’70s recordings drew on drone music and Indian classical; this year’s reissue of Kirtan: Turiya Sings, her 1981 album of devotional chanting and synthesizer music is also meant to accompany guided meditation. In the late ’90s, Pharoah Sanders himself dipped his toes into ambient waters, collaborating with the ambient-dub bassist and producer Bill Laswell on records like Save Our Children.

In Europe, Manfred Eicher’s ECM label single-handedly defined an entire realm of atmospheric jazz and post-classical composition starting in the ’70s. These days you’ll find Spotify playlists dedicated to “ECM Atmospheres,” “ECM Meditation,” and “ECM Ambient.” One of ECM’s foremost heirs is Norway’s Rune Grammofon, which since the ’90s has mapped the intersection of ambient, jazz, noise, and more on records from artists like Supersilent and Arve Henriksen.

And no discussion of the ambient-jazz canon would be complete without mentioning Jon Hassell, the avant-garde trumpet player and composer who died this year at the age of 84. Hassell’s exquisitely ethereal touch on albums like 1977’s Vernal Equinox and 1981’s Dream Theory in Malaya: Fourth World Volume Two—guided by his processed horn tones, which frequently suggest rays of light bursting into halos as they pierce heavy fog—is the lodestar for the increasing number of artists working at the intersection of ambient and jazz.

In 2021, that group also included saxophonist Bendik Giske, who delivered a literally breathtaking work of circular-breathing techniques and processed horn on Cracks. Drummer Eli Keszler twisted his electronically treated kit into spongy, amorphous shapes on Icons. Modular synthesist King Britt and drummer Tyshawn Sorey established a beachhead for rhythm on the hypnotic, post-techno duet record Tyshawn / King. Teaming up with singer-composer Rosie Lowe, the multi-disciplinary artist and pianist Duval Timothy stretched choral music into gauzy abstraction on Son. Laurel Halo joined dub-techno pioneer Moritz von Oswald’s trio, alongside ECM-signed drummer Heinrich Köbberling, on an album fusing dub, trip-hop, and ambient house.

Collaboration led to an array of striking fusions. In Los Angeles, a loose-knit group of peers—Carlos Niño, Sam Gendel, Sam Wilkes, Jamael Dean, Jamire Williams, Nate Mercereau—have spent the past few years mapping out various points along the axis between the structure of jazz and the formlessness of ambient. Between them, they racked up an impressive number of records this year, including Carlos Niño & Friends’ More Energy Fields, Current, Sam Gendel’s Fresh Bread, Gendel and Wilkes’ Music for Saxofone & Bass Guitar More Songs, Nate Mercereau’s Sundays, and more. And the Fuubutsushi quartet wrapped up a four-album series launched late last year that blends the sounds of Tortoise, Talk Talk, and ECM into low-key dreamscapes as captivating and ephemeral as afternoon light grazing worn floorboards.

Nicolás Jaar’s evolving composition Weavings is an exploration of the possibilities—formal, expressive, and maybe even spiritual—at the atmospheric end of improvisation. The title reflects its structure as a group-improv piece written for a shifting set of duos, in which players “weave” an overlapping series of collaborations. The project premiered in 2020 as part of Unsound Festival’s online-only quarantine edition, with the players all performing remotely. Then, at this year’s IRL edition of the Polish festival, Jaar and a group of 11 musicians, including Chicago multi-instrumentalist Angel Bat Dawid, Polish guitarist Raphael Roginski, Italian drummer Valentina Magaletti, and Iraqi-British oud player Khyam Allami, brought the piece to the stage for the first time.

Lasting nearly an hour and a half, Weavings is a durational work in which close listening is paramount. There are no repeated melodic or even harmonic themes; Jaar described it to me as “telling stories through waves of texture.” Sitting in the audience in October, I was struck by the way that the piece foregrounds patience—not only for the audience but for the players as well. All 11 performers were present for the entirety of the show, yet each one had only 21 minutes of total playing time. For the vast majority of their time on stage, they sat silently, just like the crowd. Given the composition’s quarantine origins, I found that collective patience profoundly moving. It made me think about the way we’ve all had to reckon with patience over the past two years, and the sacrifices required for the sake of the greater good. The restraint baked into Weavings is more than a merely aesthetic choice; it’s an expression of solidarity, empathy, and even ethics.

A few weeks after the performance, I asked Jaar about the extent to which he had thought consciously about the role of patience in the piece. “From the very beginning, it was very important that the show was as much about listening as it was about playing, so you would also be watching the musicians listening to each other,” he said. “One of the most beautiful gifts that you can have as a musician is when someone patiently listens.”

For Jaar, part of the intention behind Weavings was to create a space in which “background” sounds we might associate with passive listening not only come to the fore, they subsume us. Perhaps that enveloping quality is the best way of describing this year’s ambient-jazz renaissance: music made out of little more than amorphous shapes swimming in empty space, whose nuances are too compelling to ignore. This year in particular, hearing virtuoso players rediscover the merits of simplicity proved irresistible. As Sinephro said, “A million chords can sound impressive, but it doesn’t necessarily make you feel better.” But one chord, or even one note, played just the right way? Sometimes that’s all you need.

Listen to a playlist collecting the year’s best ambient jazz on Spotify or Apple Music.