Nat Birchall goes back to the source. Not Coltrane this time, but the record that led him to Coltrane in the first place.
In 1973 a schoolboy in Lancashire ordered a triple LP from his local record shop after reading about it in Black Music magazine. It was Grounation, by Count Ossie & The Mystic Revelation of Rastafari - hand drums, chanting, poetry, and the tenor saxophone of Cedric 'Im' Brooks, soulful and untamed, heard years before Birchall ever put on a John Coltrane record. When he finally bought Blue Train a few years later he recognised the sound at once. It was already there in Brooks, and in Tommy McCook. The line between Kingston and Impulse! runs in both directions, and Birchall has spent a career walking it.
Peace & Blessings is his Nyabinghi record. Seven pieces built on the drum language of the Rastafari camps in the hills above Kingston: the bass drum struck on the heartbeat, the funde holding time, the repeater speaking over the top. This is music made to be sat inside rather than followed, a pulse that fills the room the way a good sound system does - not loud, just big. Birchall has said that if he were not a saxophonist he would be a drummer, and that the first instrument he ever bought was a pair of African drums, played along to Count Ossie records in his bedroom. The maracas he bought soon after, Mexican gourds bought in the mid-70s, are on this recording.
Over the drums, the tenor. Birchall's tone has always carried the Jamaican horn tradition inside it - the long devotional lines of Brooks and McCook as much as the Coltrane of A Love Supreme - and here that lineage is not a reference but the whole subject. Meditation for 'Im' Cedric Brooks names it outright. One for Ras Sam II and African Lullaby extend it. The saxophone does not solo in the jazz sense; it chants, repeats, breathes with the drums, and lets the modal centre do the work. Anyone who has followed Birchall's one-man recordings of the last few years - Dimension of the Drums, Drums in Dub, Afro Trane - will recognise the method: everything played, recorded and mixed by Birchall himself, with the warmth and slight rawness of early 70s Jamaican studios as the model rather than modern polish.
Birchall admits he hesitated before making this album, aware of what Nyabinghi means to the community that created it. He went ahead because the music is, quite literally, where he comes from - the road that led a teenager from Chorley to the saxophone and to everything since. That awareness is audible. Nothing here is borrowed for effect. Fifty years after Grounation, Peace & Blessings closes a circle. It is the most personal record Birchall has made and, in its own quiet way, one of the most radical: a British spiritual jazz musician of the first rank setting aside the Coltrane frame to honour the Jamaican one that came before it. Released on Ancient Archive of Sound, 13 November 2026. Hand-made, unhurried, and deeply rooted. Do not let it pass.
