"I love the South African jazz reissue label Matsuli Music. Everything they release is worth a listen, but this album is in a league of its own for me. ‘Anishilabi’ and ‘Lishonile’ are absolute masterpieces, if you ask me—very much in the vein of spiritual jazz that I love, but unique in so many ways. Both are club bangers too… at the right club."

"It's this live, spiritual thing from '66 - Alice Coltrane, his wife, and Pharoah Sanders is on it. It's just a really spiritual performance. At one point, he starts beating his chest and making Tarzan noises. This was one of the things I burned - that's more obscure, the others are more influential, but yeah, Temple University is in Philadelphia, so it was very close to home in that regard. There's a writer from Philadelphia, Francis Davis, I read one of his jazz books, I'm intrigued by that guy. I haven't met him but I really love his writing and he was there back then, he was going to Temple, he was at the concert, and he wrote a review that came in there. That's a great, intense live performance. I've always sort of been into the improv thing of feeling it in the moment spiritually, but yeah, I was listening to a lot of jazz records and it really opens your mind, just because they're all such real players. It's all live, it's not overdubs, it's just capturing a real moment of true feeling, especially when you've got the greats, like John Coltrane, or in this case, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Rashied Ali and they're all just such heavy people, you know? It's unreal."

"Again, her whole catalogue is amazing. I love her music back to front. This is her hit record, as it were, not that it was a proper hit unfortunately. It's been with me for a while and I love it so much. We brought a few pieces of music to listen to while my wife was giving birth to our daughter and this was one of them. That gives an indication of how embedded in my life it is. The tone and mood it sets... She was deep into that sense of spiritual connectedness and universal love. I understand how people who aren't necessarily spiritual might see it as a foolish hippy diversion, but for me, this unlocks the potential of what music can do. At the time it was married to a political agenda, same for all these spiritual free jazz records, and I feel that it's a really unfortunate thing that people don't seem to be able to articulate that so well in the contemporary music world. This is an analysis and that's not why I love it, that's because when I put it on it's my favourite thing to be listening to. But it also stands up to analysis - there's so many reasons to love this music."

"If this list was only five albums long, this would definitely be on there. It's so incomparably good. I think spiritual jazz coming out of America in the late 60s and early 70s is my favourite music in the world. It has everything - big melodies, big production ideas, a heavy kind of rhythm, a really wide palette of sound, so you get that kaleidoscopic playground kind of feel because the texture is so dense and interesting… I guess it's funny how much it shouldn't connect with me because I'm an atheist, but so much of the music on this list is explicitly spiritual music. There was a Brian Eno Red Bull lecture, and Kieran was there and he asked him this very question: ""Why is it that so much of my favourite music is spiritual music?"" and Brian Eno's answer was pretty good. It's about that sense of release, disposing of your ego, and opening yourself up to be more receptive to different musical ideas. I don't mean that you're receiving some kind of spiritual energy - at least that's not my take on it - I just mean you push aside considerations of ego and being cool, maybe that's what it is. This record just seems elemental. It seems to have come from somewhere deep down and really says something about being human. Music means so much to me, it's so central to my life, and the music of Pharoah Sanders is so committed to the potential of music - what music can do, what it can say and how it can communicate with people. It's in no way cynical. It's inevitably going to resonate with me, because I believe in music so much."

"Again, Jesse turned me onto that record, years ago. We revisited that when we were in the desert at Rancho De La Luna, we were playing lots of good stuff on YouTube through the mixing board. The house was so cool. David Catching, who lives there, he was out on tour - great guy, but we had the whole house to ourselves. Just that record - throw it on in the daytime and then the sun starts coming and you're in this chill house and you're just cranking this record and then eventually when the sun starts going down, that's just super psychedelic. It was a good companion piece. That record has Leon Thomas singing ""the creator has a master plan"" over and over again. Never thought about this at the time, but repeating lines in a spiritual way - there's a title track to b'lieve i'm goin down…, which isn't on the album, which is just the same line over and over again - something about that spiritual vibe. Eventually Leon Thomas just does this spiritual yodelling! The record's so melodic. Pharoah Sanders does this cool thing - it's like pop, but it's like spiritual pop, mixed with jazz, where it's a relatively simple line, just a couple of chords, usually. It just puts you in this zone, it's so beautiful. It's simple, but not at all; nobody could touch it. Pharoah Sanders comes in eventually and plays the sweetest emotional sax and eventually it turns into insanity, noise, skronking and screeching. Honestly, he's known for that, but it's my least favourite part of him. I understand why he does it, because it reaches this climax and then all of a sudden, you come out and go back to this thing and it just goes all the way to the limit; it's just like life, it goes from zero to 60 and then you come back out of it. That's the beauty of him."

"I’m cautious of musical dynasties. It seems to treat musical ability as some kind of spiritual magic, passed from soul to soul. I don’t get “Only Giles Martin can mix the Beatles because only he has the aura”. Nevertheless, everyone in the Haden family has such a gentle, intelligent, soulful talent that I find it hard to pull out a favourite. Father Charlie Haden is a beautiful, sensitive bass player who has played alongside Ornette Colman, Keith Jarrett and Pat Metheny. He created political, instrumental, jazz with Carla Bley and Don Cherry in the Liberation Music Orchestra. His parents were also singers and performed on the radio as The Haden Family. His son Josh is a bass player and singer with the band Spain and writes the tensest, poised, songs of heartbreak. Petra, Tanya and Rachel are Josh’s sisters and Charlie’s daughters, and although they have been singing for years, it took until 2014 to record their debut album of country songs. Previously Petra and Rachel had been That Dog and Petra had made an acapella version of ‘The Who Sell Out’. They have that synchronicity and intonation that only siblings can have. The three voices move as one. It’s the most straightforward, emotional music. There is no re-inventing of the wheel. It’s just music that lifts the spirits."

"I ended up with this record because it was at that point in my teenage years when I was swapping records with my mates at school. We were all a long-haired, Afghan coat-wearing gang into Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and all those classic rock guitar bands. And Santana were almost amongst that; even when you go to albums like Abraxas and the early albums, they have a quite exotic kind of quality about them, so when Welcome came out, it was really rejected by the gang. It was like, ""Whoah! They've gone too far! What is this nonsense? We don't understand it!"" I got someone else's copy of it and I really started to sink into it. There are so many signposts in this record to the jazz world that has sustained me through the years. The first time I heard the words ""John Coltrane"" was through this record. Alice Coltrane is on the first track, which is this version of Dvořák's 'Going Home', which is adapted from his New World Symphony. It's like a classical piece played on a Mellotron. It's very dramatic and it's got nothing to do with rock music and more to do with that spiritual jazz that Alice Coltrane was knocking about. At that point, you couldn't give Alice Coltrane records away, and it's interesting that they didn't really gain currency until the late 90s. And then you've got people like Leon Thomas on the record, the guy who did the yodeling on Pharoah Sanders' records, which would lead you to his records. And John McLaughlin is on there, which would then lead you to The Mahavishnu Orchestra. Back then, you'd find these names on records and then when you were in the record shop, you'd find these names again and it all connected up like dot-to-dots. The concept of ""fusion"" throws up so many bad images because there's a load of shit there, but there's also so much good stuff as well. With this album, I opened the door expecting that rock guitar thing, but the sound of this record is fascinating: it has so much air in it and you can hear the sound of the room being pushed around. To me, this record is like audio sunshine and it transports me to some transcendental place."

"That one was quite deep for me because again, growing up in church and being a believer; my family being from the West Indies - my mum’s side from Jamaica, my dad’s side from Dominica - I remember going to church and it was authentic West Indians there in their 40s, 50s that now live in the UK but have kept these traditions, they were singing these songs just without the drums. So when I first heard this, something just went - ‘Hang on?’ I remember being four and hearing this person sing that song but swap Selassie for this or that. It had that same spiritual element I was so used to, just in a very different form. It was like a weird full circle thing for me. It was almost like going back home. These drums are taking me somewhere, but also I'm being carried by these songs I know. It was beautiful to check out more of what Count Ossie was doing and people that were part of his band like Cedric Brooks. He was infusing a lot of the jazz elements that he's hearing from Coltrane or Ornette Coleman. That's deep, you’re deep in the heels of Kingston, aware of Ornette and them man. Like Duke Ellington had to come and visit him, you know, there’s a photo of him and Duke Ellington in the bush. You know he's got something that's important, not only important for culture but it's spiritually important for the Nyabinghi tradition. For me when I heard that record, particularly Grounation, where they’re going through loops for 20 minutes, it’s that thing again with soundsystems where you ‘wheel up a riddim’ or at church when the tune would just keep going. It was something I’d never heard but I also felt like it wasn’t foreign, those experiences are so wicked and that influenced the whole fascination with drum culture and drum languages, spirituality connected to drums, music orientated around the drums. I got into Batá and music for the Orishas and things that are all over the Diaspora in West Africa, the Caribbean, South America. And when you listen to it, the recording’s so rags but it just couldn't work if you put it in Abbey Road. It gave me a bit more confidence when I was doing my record that if I go to someone’s house and I show up with a handheld recorder, as long as it feels right it doesn't matter. Big studio, small studio, my phone as long as it’s got that feeling that I was going for."

"They famously reformed last year and I've seen them a couple of times and played on the same bill with them. One of my great regrets was that I came to this album a couple of years after it came out and my friends had all been to the show when they came through town and I missed it. It felt like a concert I should have been at. Part of it was that I hated guitar bands. In high school I was into terrible progressive rock like Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Yes, while all my friends were into Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth. I always thought I was in the right and it was them who was barking up the wrong tree, which subsequently has made me a little bit embarrassed, because it was the 90s - I should've been listening to Sonic Youth. But I was firmly committed against guitar music and it was the same friends, like Ryan [Smith] - who's in my band now playing guitar and keyboards and other stuff, and who's been my friend since I was 11 or 12 - who was the guy in the Dinosaur Jr. T-shirt trying to get me to play organ chords in the background for his band, and I was grumbling away, ""When the fuck do I get my solo?"" And he introduced me to Neutral Milk Hotel. It's kind of an obvious way in for me, because it very much has that sound - the spiritual free jazz and the horns and the power and the instruments from around the world, different bagpipe kind of instruments - for me, it has that same spirit and wildness. It's also one of those albums, like the Pharoah Sanders, where the songs are all essentially the same song. And I don't mean that to diminish the achievement of this record because I think it's amazing, but when you have a record where you listen to the first song and the melody is so elemental to me - it's like it existed before this album was written - and then later on you hear another song and it's the same melody but inverted. Not in a technical sense, but you get the impression that these songs all come from the same tree and I love that. That's one of the things that the album format can do - tie things together like that. I've done that myself consciously on my records in the past - reprised a melody. On Our Love there are two songs that are essentially the same song revisited - 'All I Ever Need' and 'Your Love Will Set You Free'. Not the melody, but the underlying riff and the harmony."