A note of transparency first: this is a Groovilla Books title. This note presents it without pretending to critical distance — we list it for what it contains, not to talk anyone into it.
Spiritual Jazz: The Sound of Black Faith traces the history of African American spiritual jazz from 1965 to 2026: from John Coltrane's A Love Supreme to the contemporary revival in London, Los Angeles and Chicago. Its subtitle — "A History of African American Jazz, Its Records and Collectors" — names the three planes the book works on: the music, the records as objects, and the collecting that kept them alive.
The structure is chronological: an introduction, seven chapters in order of time (Coltrane's revelation; Impulse! and the temple built around Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp; Strata-East and cooperative jazz; Tribe and the conscience of Detroit; Black Jazz and the California way; the long winter; the contemporary awakening), an epilogue, and then the material written for collectors.
That is where the book becomes more than a history of the music. A technical appendix explains how to tell an original pressing from a reissue — catalogue numbers, run-out matrices, labels, sleeves, condition. A closing section presents thirty essential records with their catalogue numbers and current market valuations, from the affordable to the four-figure rarities. These are the tools that make it a reference to consult with a record in hand.
The book appears in two distinct editions, Italian and English, each written as an autonomous text rather than a translation of the other. This note concerns the English edition, credited to Lawrence Sutton.
