Let the Sky Open Under Your Feet is the fourth studio album from Skyjack, the borderless quintet stretched between South Africa and Switzerland, and it captures the band in full, panoramic bloom. Recorded in December 2025 at a secluded studio outside Stellenbosch, the record bottles the intensity of a group that has lived on the road and onstage, channeling that experience into music that feels both carefully sculpted and gloriously volatile. Across twelve tracks, Skyjack draw together free improvisation, South African jazz lineages, chamber‑music sensitivity, kinetic groove and ecstatic collective interplay into a body of work that refuses to sit still.
Bassist Shane Cooper describes the record as “a very articulate representation of our sound, having grown deep roots into the earth with high branches reaching upward and outward,” and that image is woven into every piece. The rhythm section of Cooper and drummer Jonno Sweetman lays down foundations that can be at once earthy and ambiguous: loping township‑inflected patterns, slow‑burning ostinatos, sudden pivots into free time where pulse becomes a shared intuition rather than a strict grid. Above and within this, pianist Kyle Shepherd threads harmonies and motifs that move easily from hymn‑like simplicity to prickly clusters and open, suspended voicings, while Andreas Tschopp’s trombone and Marc Stucki’s saxophones alternately blend into a warm brass‑reed choir and break off into fiercely individual voices.
The album’s title is borrowed from a line by 13th‑century Persian poet Rumi, and it neatly encapsulates the band’s balance of groundedness and lift‑off. Much of Let the Sky Open Under Your Feet operates in that threshold where groove and abstraction meet: a piece might begin in meditative rubato, a hushed dialogue between piano and horns, then gradually gather rhythm until the whole band locks into a rolling pattern that feels less like a beat being played than like a landscape moving underneath you. Lush passages of ensemble writing - tight voicings, counter‑melodies, unison themes exploding into harmony - sit alongside stretches of open improvisation where form is discovered in real time. The music’s “cosmic” quality comes not from retro signifiers but from this sense of continual expansion and recombination.
The road to the studio was short but intense. Arriving just over a year after 2024’s Light Cycle, the album reflects the momentum Skyjack built on tour. Sketches were traded remotely between Europe and South Africa, but the crucial work happened once the band reunited in Johannesburg in late 2025. New material was stress‑tested onstage across South Africa, stretched, broken and rewired in front of live audiences. When the group finally decamped to the countryside near Stellenbosch, they brought that looseness and risk‑taking into the room. Many of the album’s takes are first passes, captured live with minimal overdubs. You can hear that immediacy in the way sections tip from tight unison into free blowing without a seam, in the small imperfections that signal real bodies sharing air and making decisions on the fly.
Skyjack’s collective history gives this music its particular charge. Formed in Cape Town in 2013, during a fertile surge in South African jazz where a new generation pushed beyond rigid genre lines, the band quickly developed a sound that drew equally from “warm, menacing African grooves” and European improvisational strategies. Shepherd, Cooper, Sweetman, Tschopp and Stucki each maintain far‑ranging practices that cross jazz, electronic music, film scoring, rock, hip‑hop and experimental composition. Their individual collaborations - with artists like William Parker, Lionel Loueke, Zim Ngqawana, Ben LaMar Gay, Jorge Rossy, Shabaka Hutchings, William Kentridge, Makaya McCraven and Sylvie Courvoisier - seep into Skyjack’s language, not as name‑drops but as traces of different rhythmic logics, timbral ideas and ensemble models.
Since their self‑titled debut in 2015, followed by The Hunter (2019) and Light Cycle (2024), Skyjack have earned a reputation for live sets where pieces mutate nightly and structures are treated as launchpads rather than fences. Let the Sky Open Under Your Feet folds that ethos into the studio without taming it. It’s an album that feels like a single, long breath: in through grounded, groove‑heavy passages rooted in South African soil; out through soaring, exploratory flights that stretch toward more abstract horizons. The result is a record that stands comfortably within today’s global jazz landscape while sounding entirely like itself - five musicians who have learned, over more than a decade together, how to make the earth move and the sky give way at the same time.
