“I like the idea of putting my headphones on in rainy Manchester, closing my eyes and transporting myself to a tropical, exotic environment,” Matthew Halsall tells Apple Music. “That’s the journey I wanted to go on with this record.” The composer, trumpeter and label head spent 12 years building up to the recording of Salute to the Sun quietly formulating his own British jazz renaissance—taking cues from the spiritual leanings of American luminaries such as Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders over the course of his five albums, and championing new talent by releasing music from groups GoGo Penguin and Portico Quartet on his label Gondwana Records. For his first album as a bandleader since 2015’s Into Forever, Halsall has filtered an otherworldly sense of inspiration through his particularly Mancunian lens. Putting together a new, young band of local musicians in 2019 and rehearsing during a series of monthly gigs at the small-capacity Manchester venue YES, Halsall merged this improvisatory energy with found field recordings of lush tropical landscapes and rain-laden foliage to create seven transportive tracks. Taking in everything from his formative years spent practising transcendental meditation at the Maharishi School to the works of Cameroonian composer Francis Bebey, the songs are a beguiling and immersive mix of spiritual jazz, undulating polyrhythm and earthy melodic textures, all anchored by Halsall’s soaring trumpet playing. Read on for his in-depth thoughts on the album, track by track. Harmony with Nature “This track is the most collectively written piece as a band on the album. I had become obsessed with this compilation record, Tropical Drums of Deutschland [by Jan Schulte], and I wanted to make something where we would all play quite freely to capture its dreamy, ambient energy. My percussionist, Jack McCarthy, was coming up with bird noises and all sorts of textures created by whistling through his flute mouthpiece. It’s this playful, refreshing track to start with, like you’re walking into a tropical zone. I really love hearing these musicians at their most free, letting them open up and understanding how they react to each other.” Joyful Spirits of the Universe “The opposite of ‘Harmony with Nature’. Even though it’s got four solos, it was very much written and planned out, as opposed to Harmony’s freedom. We were all in separate rooms with headphones on while recording and I was conducting this DJ-esque process where I’m orchestrating the sequence and trying to make sure it stays dynamic. This track has the kalimba on it also, which just fitted really nicely and was a way of me throwing some curveballs for the instrumentalists.” Canopy & Stars “There’s an album by the multi-instrumentalist Francis Bebey, Psychedelic Sanza, and I was really interested in the earthy, tribal elements of his playing and how it matched up with how I was feeling when I was listening to the field recordings of tropical sounds in the rainforest. That was the starting point of this track and, when I was playing, I hit in between Don Cherry and a slight Afrobeat feel. It really came together when we were recording it and it was just a very special moment where everyone got into a beautiful energy and rhythm.” Mindfulness Meditations “I’ve studied quite a lot of different meditations, since I went for the last two years of my GCSEs to study at the Maharishi School in Skelmersdale [Lancashire, England]. Now, as I’ve grown older, I’ve gotten more into Buddhist philosophies. So this title comes from that experience and it is quite an improvised track where the trumpet is very free and leads. I started playing and everyone filled in the gaps around it. I wanted something that was free-flowing, rather than densely rhythmical like some of the other tracks. It is an open, relaxing moment before the rest of the record takes flight.” Tropical Landscapes “I’m a big fan of impressionist artists and I was looking at a lot of paintings by Peter Doig, Gauguin and Henri Rousseau when we were recording. I loved how they managed to create these magical, immersive visions of the landscapes they were in, even if they are exaggerated compared to real life. With this composition, I drew a lot of colour and inspiration from those settings and that was a place I wanted to go to musically.” Salute to the Sun “When I was at the Maharishi School, at the beginning of the day we would do a yoga sun salutation and then we would meditate. It was quite a mind-blowing experience to me since I came from a pretty working-class area and this was a whole different world. My mum encouraged me to get into because I wasn’t doing well at school previously and had fallen in with a bad bunch. I felt quite low about myself from an academic perspective but the Maharishi School was such a privileged and important experience for me. That was when my friends got me into music like Alice Coltrane and really changed the direction of my playing. I always try and nod to that time in my music ever since.” The Energy of Life “The band and I set up a monthly residency in Manchester, in this small basement called Yes, where we could really get to know each other and grow in our confidence while we were recording. ‘The Energy of Life’ came from doing lots of those gigs and me wanting something quite heavy and dark to get our teeth into and for the audiences to engage with. There’s another three or four tracks we recorded from those sessions that we might put out as an EP, or maybe even another album in 2021.”