To the Edge and Back: Space Jazz | Fresh Vibe
The term “Space Jazz” has been thrown around quite lousily in the past couple of decades, so let’s take this opportunity to lock down the term and turn the page.
Does the music make you feel like you’ve touched the monolith and are now transcending time and space at the speed of light? Space Jazz.
Does the speed of the notes being spat out of the sax make your heart jump (causing you to have mild hallucinations like looking at stars being born)? Space Jazz.
Is it the perfect soundtrack to watching your favorite childhood cartoons with the TV way down and the music up to 10 (like watching Alice in Wonderland with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon back in your high school experimental phase)? You best know that’s Space Jazz.
To help you out, these are my Top 5 Space Jazz tracks that are best listened to not with the lights on or off, but surrounded by lava-lamps and glow-in-the-dark posters.
Listen to mind-blowing space jazz now.
The Comet is Coming – Journey Through the Asteroid Belt
At ease, Space Cadet! Time to take off your moon boots, lean back, and relax to the most intense tune to have come out of the UK since Alpha Centaury 9 aligned with the celestial body of Aldering 7. With this trio, droned out bass and hard-driven sax await you at every turn.
The Greg Foat Group – The Hunt
With tracks like “Girl and Robot with Flower”, “Have Spacesuit Will Travel”, and “Solaris pts. 1 & 2”, you kind of get the feeling that the Greg Foat Group has an underlying theme binding together everything they do. This track has all you’d expect from space travel road music. It starts smooth and ambient, like you’re starting the engines, then the initial kick of lift off, but it’s when they get to cruising altitudes that the ride really starts to get wild.
The Ezra Collective – Space is the Place
Conjuring the grand-daddy of all that is intersidereal musical odysseys, Ezra Collective dropped a major cut with this cover of Sun Ra’s “Space is the Place”. With its gravity centered on the chugga-chugga beat of the drum, the instruments surround it like the makings of a new galaxy. A bit of chaos, a bit of merging, everything eventually comes together at the end, and the universe finally finds its balanced state, forever expanding until the next event.
Ross McHenry – 3 Month Vortex
I’m putting this one in a sealed wax container to be found 5 generations from now when my great-great-great grandson or daughter will go on their first voyage of interplanetary exploration. I could not think of a better soundtrack than Ross McHenry’s OEUVRE to discover the dangerous beauty of Alcamik-3Kz2’s flesh-eating white roses.
The Breathing Effect - Cold Meteor Showers
You can have your pool lounge and your kitschy-but-hip remakes of 1950s beach combing classics, but I’m sticking with this when I’m getting my complexion altered by the gamma rays. Blaring out of my headphones as I slowly get up from my long-chair to slowly swagger across the beach to find a refreshing beverage. I suggest the Venus Daiquiri or the Vodka Mars-tini.
For more of these gems, check out the “To the Edge and Back” channel, available now on the Stingray Music mobile app!
