When the World Was One is an album title that reflects Mancunian trumpeter Matthew Halsall's deep interest in the ‘spiritual jazz’ popularised by the likes of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders during the late 1960s to early 1970s. While it's hard to separate the cosmic love vibe around that period of jazz from the rawer, freer elements, Halsall is a man of his time, preferring to give his music a neat contemporary twist via post-1990 downbeat grooves – it's brought him a loyal following with his 2012 CD On the Go making influential radio broadcaster Gilles Peterson's BBC Worldwide Jazz Album of the Year. Cinematic Orchestra is a major inspiration in this respect and the band's drummer Luke Flowers is a regular band member. The material was written at the same time as previous album Fletcher Moss Park in 2012 but this is the debut of his Gondwana Orchestra – more gamelan than symphony – in which Halsall explores further his fascination with Japanese culture (adding koto player Keiko Kitamura) and Indian classical music with the tracks featuring Lisa Mallett on flute occasionally recalling the early work of Yusef Lateef. As with the previous CD, the saxophonist and Coltrane disciple Nat Birchall takes more of a backseat, but Halsall fans are likely to find some compensation in the freshened-up, transcendental sounds arriving from the east.

Jazzwise spoke to Matthew Halsall about the album

Can you tell me something about the influence of both Japanese and Indian cultures that's gone into this recording?

I spent a lot of time in Japan around 2005 and I actually had a rental flat in Osaka. I went to all the Buddhist temples and was very influenced by a lot of the music I heard out there. I've been writing stuff like this for years. I actually wrote this music at the same time as Fletcher Moss Park but it was a darker mood of music. It was stuff that I would write at home in the darkness late at night and it was a bit deeper and moodier than the stuff on Fletcher Moss Park that I actually wrote in that park in Manchester. It's just a case of grabbing onto different moods and catching different sides to my personality. I've studied Maharishi and Buddhist meditation. I'm a fan of that whole philosophy and lifestyle. It comes through in that music that's influenced by that, stuff like Tony Scott and people who are into meditation, such as Alice and John Coltrane.

What came first: the music or the spirituality?

It's quite funny really because when I was growing up I actually started playing in jazz big bands, playing music like Buddy Rich, Count Basie, Glenn Miller and Duke Ellington. It was only when I was about 17, 18 that I was in a club in Manchester where Mr Scruff plays and I heard, ‘You've Got to Have Freedom’ by Pharoah Sanders. I was immediately blown away and bought that album and on it there's some really beautiful spiritual ambient tracks as well as the upbeat jazz dance tracks. I went on delving in everything that Pharoah Sanders has ever done and that led me to Alice Coltrane. That was where it all started this crossover of spiritual music and lifestyles, it locked together perfectly.

At the same time the ‘spiritual jazz’ influence is given a contemporary twist with the influence of the dance/beats era of the previous two decades.

Absolutely. In a lot of ways I still like the band to be quite tight and a little bit more sounding as if it's been looped as a multi-track so I spend quite a lot of time finding the right groove and then letting the groove keep growing and evolving, almost like a sample and let other musicians take more creative, floatier solos. I do try and keep it like a pulse that keeps going through the music and that's definitely influenced by Cinematic Orchestra and Nostalgia 77 and people like that.