Matthew Halsall & The Gondwana Orchestra - When the World Was One

Matthew Halsall is a trumpeter, producer and composer who is redefining spiritual jazz for the next generation. Over the course of nine albums, numerous accolades and his taste-making label, Gondwana Records, he’s become a vital voice in UK music with his lithe, limitless blend of jazz and deeply meditative influences that’s in tune with the natural world. His thoughtful and refined style draws on the foundations laid by greats like Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, but adds the sample-fuelled electronica that he first heard in clubs, as well as global percussive influences and his signature – what you might call – sparkle.

When The World Was One was his fifth album and represented something of a companion piece to Fletcher Moss Park (much of the music was written at the same time) but drew more explicitly on Halsall’s love of spiritual jazz and Eastern music as well as his own studies in meditation and travels in Japan. Beautifully recorded at 80 Hertz in Manchester, it featured the recording debut of Halsall’s large ensemble, The Gondwana Orchestra, which utilised the exotic flavours of harp, koto and bansuri flute and Eastern scales to create a global palate for Halsall’s life-affirming sounds.