It sounds bleak, but the facts are hard to ignore: the autocrats are rising, the machines too, sea levels are climbing, and cultural standards seem to be sinking. Around us, the feeling has settled that reality is both fully mapped and — fatally — without alternatives.

In 2025, what we call the present feels strangely total. This “no-alternative present”, helped along by the flattened terrain of the internet, reaches into the future. Its shadow falls ahead of it. Deviation or change feels impossible — and if anything should shift, everyone in the West assumes it will be for the worse.

The possibility of a goodness not yet known, not yet imagined, barely enters the conversation anymore; in our secular world, many have simply lost the sense of how to tap into the beyond.

At a concert in Hamburg during the Über Jazz Festival, Kahil El Zabar plays one of the pieces from his forthcoming live album, due in December. It’s called »From Your Heart«, a plea for collective stillness. When the final tones of his kalimba fade, Zabar turns to the audience and urges us not to forget how to dream. It sounds like a wall decal, perhaps — yet in November 2025 it becomes a profound reminder: a reminder that one can indeed believe in the existence of something unknown, something larger than the measly condition of things. Belief — not necessarily in the religious sense, but as the practice of insisting, without evidence, that something good might exist beyond the horizon of present experience.

El Zabar offered that reminder once again that night — as he does with every one of his albums. He is, after all, jazz’s great tapper-into-the-source. And it is thanks in no small part to the label Spiritmuse — on which the new live album will also appear — that the now 71-year-old member of the legendary Chicago Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians is touring Europe at all.

The possibility of other experiences

Spiritmuse was founded by Mark Gallagher and Thea Ioannou, both passionate record collectors driven by the desire to lift the collective spirit, so to speak.

“Music that creates a moment of pause, that allows you to breathe, and lets listeners feel something higher, deeper” — that, they explain in interview, is their entire vision. They see a “human need for emotional resonance, transcendence and communal experience.”

Anyone who has ever seen that old footage of Spiritual Jazz pioneer Don Cherry sitting in a Swedish farmhouse, improvising with friends, will know exactly what Gallagher and Ioannou are after. El Zabar calls Cherry “the essential, iconic, urban shaman” — and not without reason: Cherry is the spiritual patron of the London-based label.

Listening connects

Gallagher and Ioannou have spent the past twenty years pursuing what they call “spiritual presence”, and the music that conveys it.

For a decade they ran parties in South London; from 2013 onward, through their radio show MADONJAZZ, they explored what “spiritual music” could be: jazz, folk traditions from across the world, any music born from a sense of connection — to community, to the cosmos. Spiritmuse was founded in 2018.

As long-standing fans of El Zabar, one of their first moves was to reach out to the master to reissue some of his earlier work. Six albums by Kahil El Zabar and his various collaborators have since appeared. El Zabar has been instrumental in carrying the label’s name into the world.

There is a human need for emotional resonance, transcendence and communal experience.

Mark Gallagher und Thea Ioannou

But Spiritmuse is far from being a one-artist endeavour. Keyboardist and composer Surya Botofasina has released three albums with the label. His music follows the tradition of Alice Coltrane, in whose Californian ashram he actually grew up — Botofasina creates meditative, spiritual jazz for deep listening.

Then there is Angel Bat Dawid. Her artistic name alone signals her orientation. Here too it is about going higher, deeper — beyond. Angel Bat Dawid is unquestionably one of the central figures in Spiritual Jazz gaining broader visibility. Her Spiritmuse release Journey To Nabta Playa — featuring Naima Nefertari, niece of David Ornette Cherry (!) — unfolds as meditative dialogue, prayer and jazz-trap all at once.

Human-made change

Spiritmuse, say Gallagher and Ioannou, is something you can feel — a space where “the spiritual and the musical” meet.

One could now digress into a discussion of the term spirit itself, or into the reasons why the development of Spiritual Jazz in Europe was held back for so long. But let’s stay with a simpler move: placing whatever we loosely mean by “spirit” next to the defining phenomenon of our present — artificial intelligence. And then stating the obvious conclusion that urgently needs to be made explicit: the ensouled is, of course, the exact opposite of AI.

And so is the music that Spiritmuse stands for — a counter-offer to slop, to the interchangeable, to the dominance of the algorithm. Music that asks for and nurtures devotion — and in return rewards with feelings of belonging and inner expansion.

Anyone who has ever woken up the morning after a Kahil El Zabar concert will understand: healing was not a joke before it was televised. A Zabar concert soothes and uplifts — and shifts one’s relationship to the present. You feel once again that other dimensions are possible; that they are, in fact, already there, and distinctly human in origin. Human-made change. It could go in a very different direction. Here is a label whose principle is to keep that belief alive.