This music deserves a home.
A listening room for spiritual jazz: one record, one true story, one track to start with.
Somewhere along the way, the algorithms decided which jazz you were allowed to discover. The same twenty albums, rotated forever, while a whole universe sat one shelf over: Alice Coltrane's harp, Pharoah Sanders's tenor, Sun Ra's space chords, records made as prayer and meditation. We kept meeting people who loved one of these records and had no idea the rest existed.
Spiritual Jazz Universe is the home we wished someone else had built. It is a page and a listening-room group on Facebook, an Instagram, a YouTube channel of short documentary films, and now this website and its weekly email. Everywhere it lives, the idea is the same: one record, one true story, one track to press play on.
Who's behind this
I'm Matt Sibert. My dad, John Sibert, played bebop piano at local events around Chicago. He never recorded, but he was a devoted fan, and he put Thelonious Monk and the other bebop pioneers in my ears as a kid. He also played a lot of John Coltrane. Then A Love Supreme opened my world, and the spiritual side of jazz took over.
I worked as a music producer in Chicago, with Grammy Award-winning jazz musicians such as Rob Amster and internationally known players such as Jeff Parker, Rob Mazurek and Ted Sirota, among many others. I also became a record collector, built a huge collection of spiritual jazz, and in the early 2000s owned a record store in Seattle.
Seeing artists like Gary Bartz and Billy Harper play live made me love this music even more. Today I'm simply a fan with a mission: to share these records and their stories with the world.
What we fight for
This music deserves context and reverence, not background noise. The people who made it were reaching for something higher, and knowing that changes how you hear every note. So we tell the stories carefully. We check the facts before we tell them, we use real photographs with real credits, and we never generate fake images of the artists. When we do not know something, we say so.
Why trust us
We are collectors and researchers first. The same crew runs the Spiritual Jazz community on Facebook, makes the documentary films with verified archival research, and writes the Deep Listen stories on this site. If we tell you to press play on something, it is because it earned it.
Where to start
The free guide: 10 Spiritual Jazz Albums to Start With. Ten records, the story of each, and the exact track to begin with. Then one true story a week in your inbox.