The sub-genre of spiritual or cosmic jazz springs largely from the epochal well of John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, and this well selected compilation shows just how far and wide the related musical streams have flowed. To a certain extent the arrival of ‘21st century cosmic messenger’ Kamasi Washington provides an obvious premise for this release, but the music stands up very well in its own right without that topical hook, strong as it is. In the early 1970s, the period that the record covers, the likes of Joe Henderson and Alice Coltrane, Azar Lawrence, Joe Chambers and Gary Batz were brilliant exponents of a ‘post-Coltrane’ aesthetic that embraced anything from the new timbres of electric instruments to funk backbeats to Asian and African music to create a sound that felt very much in tune with an age of assertions of African-American identity and anti-establishment sentiment. However, the expression of an idealism, a desire to ‘get closer to the essence of life’, all the while being aware that it takes ‘courage and strife’, words sung so beautifully by Andy Bey on Bartz's title track of the album, are as rapturously life-enhancing as ever.