Category: The Sorcerers

The Leeds, UK group The Sorcerers have long excelled at making an irresistible brand of action exotica, cooked up from Sun Ra records, Ethio-jazz, Moondog minimalism and funky library grooves. The return of original keyboardist Johnny Richards, bringing with him a battery of vintage synths, gives their fourth album Other Worlds and Habitats an eerie, sci-fi glow and sprinkles everything in moondust. The result is an album of thick spacey global jams made up of vibes, horns, flutes, synths and one of the most rock solid rhythm sections out there.

Not unlike Greg Foat or the Natural Yogurt Band, the Sorcerers are another purveyor of what we recently called pulp jazz, effortlessly funky stuff trussed up with all kinds of less-reputable genre signifiers, drawn from library grooves, exotica, lounge music, kung fu movie soundtracks, instro-hipster canned psychedelia. What we love about this style is the way it hearkens back to a time when jazz was a global pop form, when its permutations, high and low, still belonged to night clubs and film scores and radio waves. At their best, the Sorcerers remind us of when jazz was genuinely a world music. The language was spoken everywhere.