Out jazz has always had thing for lost continents. Sun Ra had Atlantis. Don Cherry had Mu. Miles gave us both Agharta and Pangaea on the same day. Even Lee Morgan’s most adventurous record has us searching for new lands. “There are,” said Sun Ra, “other worlds they have not told you of.” And jazz often obliquely advanced its social and political critique of contemporary America by conjuring secret and unknown civilizations—beneath the oceans or beyond the stars.
As such, Ontario keyboardist Pierre Chrétien and alto saxophonist Zakari Frantz had to know they were tapping into the deepest utopian imagination of the radical jazz tradition when they named their unit Atlantis Jazz Ensemble.