Jeff Majors - Yoka Boka (For Us All) (ICE 015)
Newly remastered limited pressing with new artwork from Tom Henry. Includes 8 page booklet with a detailed new interview with Majors by Prince Language.
Invisible City Editions reissues a highly sought after and impossibly rare 1986 private-press spiritual jazz LP from Washington D.C. harpist Jeff Majors. Majors was a devoted personal student of Alice Coltrane’s for three years as a teenager, taking harp and spiritual instruction at her home in the Bay Area just before she established her renowned ashram in Huntington, California. Following his tutelage with Coltrane, he returned to the East Coast, joining Sun Ra acolyte Brother Ah's ensemble The Sounds Of Awareness, playing on their classic spiritual jazz LP Key To Nowhere.
Inspired by a trip to West Africa’s Gambia, For Us All (Yoka Boka) and its title track finds Majors coming fully into his own as an artist, fusing the lofty sensibilities he absorbed from the cosmic jazz masters Coltrane and Brother Ah with an accessible sonic palette drawn from the synth-driven electronic sounds of 1980’s soul music, as well as traditional African instruments. Each song on this album is an inspired vision of the personal and the devotional via the harp’s universal glistening tones, shimmering synths, LinnDrum machine and African percussion. The album opener “Yasmeen” is a pulsing, arpeggiated journey that is genre-defying and absolutely transcendent in its glissando-driven momentum, setting the stage for the album’s unique nexus of sounds, all led by the refined virtuosity of Majors’ harp playing. The rest of the album’s originals and covers (check the sublime arrangement of the Gershwins’ “Summertime”) are equally as unique and compelling.
Side A
A1 Yasmeen
A2 Chant
A3 Let It Be
A4 (If I Can) Help Somebody
Side B
B1 Summertime
B2 Nomad
B3 Baby Daughter
B4 Room 400
B5 For Us All (Yoka Boka)
©℗ Invisible City Editions
ICE 015TP