Hyperituals Vol. 1 - Soul Note

One of the foibles of a century-old musical form is that at times audiences (and artists) can become beholden to its many-splendored past, to the point of ignoring its vital present. So even as a young listener to jazz in the 1990s, I found myself ignoring the many familiar names to be found releasing new music on the Italian imprint Soul Note so as to focus on totemic American jazz imprints like Impulse and Blue Note from decades prior. Started in 1979 as a sister label to Giacomo Pellicciotti’s Black Saint imprint, Soul Note was a haven for jazz artists who kept up their creative vitality even while stateside labels perceived them as being “not commercially viable.”

Soul Note released some 350 albums, a daunting catalog for any jazz label, so Hyperituals Volume 1 (as curated by Italian selector Khalab) presents a thrilling deep dive that also reveals the many wonders of the form during the neglected decades of the 1980s and ’90s, when smooth jazz and Marsalis-brand narrowness obscured such sounds. There’s Adam Rudolph’s opening statement, which suggests that spiritual jazz can also be full of childlike wonder rather than fire. Rhythm is the focus throughout, rooted by the presence and drive of drum legends like Max Roach, Dannie Richmond, Andrew Cyrille, Beaver Harris, and Paul Motian, with the latter’s “Hide and Go Seek” predicting the cyclical mesmerism of Chicago bands like Tortoise by a good decade. Such epiphanies can be had on almost every performance here.