Soaring above the intersection between spiritual jazz and the sort of new age background music you'd expect to find soundtracking a VHS that explains how to use new technology at the library (and I mean that in all the best ways), "Yasmeen" opens this recently reissued private press debut album from harpist, Jeff Majors, For Us All (Yoka Boka). After spending his teenage years under the musical & spiritual tutelage of Alice Coltrane, Majors moved to Washington, D.C., where he played with the cosmic jazz ensemble of Brother Ah & The Sounds of Awareness.
There's such a purity of hope in this music. Technology is seen as exciting; a doorway leading the world to a new enlightenment. Sitting squarely on the other side of that portal, the reality may feel quite a bit different, but this speaks to one of the great joys of recorded music; it's ability to not just preserve a vintage worldview, but also the very emotions that worldview elicited. We may not be able to see things that same way again, but we can still tap in to the essence of how they felt.
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