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Classic Recordings: Kirk Whalum – The Gospel According to Jazz (Selected Hits)

Fifteen tracks from a saxophonist who decided that the church and the jazz club were the same building. Kirk Whalum's Gospel According to Jazz is a genuine project, not a genre exercise.

The Gospel According to Jazz

Kirk Whalum is from Memphis, the son and grandson of Baptist ministers, and his uncle was the gospel singer Hugh "Peanuts" Whalum — who appears on this playlist. That lineage is the whole point of the series he began in 1998 and has continued across multiple volumes: a deliberate attempt to bring jazz improvisation and gospel worship into the same room, recorded live in churches with a full band and congregation.

Whalum is better known to most listeners as the saxophone solo on Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" — one of the most-heard instrumental performances in pop history. He has also worked extensively with Bob James, Luther Vandross and Quincy Jones, and won a Grammy for a later volume of this series.

What to listen for

The live recordings are the heart of it. "Thy Kingdom Come" was recorded at West Angeles Cathedral in Los Angeles, one of the great gospel churches, and the room is audible throughout.

The Smile Medley is the emotional centre — Charlie Chaplin's "Smile" running into the spiritual "God Has Smiled on Me," with his uncle Peanuts Whalum singing. It is a family document as much as a musical one.

"Make Me a Believer" and "It's What I Do" feature Lalah Hathaway, and hearing her in a church setting with a live band is worth the price of admission on its own.

"Because You Loved Me" with George Duke is the jazz summit, and "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" and "Wade In the Water" are the spirituals — both songs that carry coded histories of escape, and both treated with the seriousness that implies.

"Avé Maria" is the outlier and shows the classical training.

Go deeper

The later volumes of the series — particularly The Gospel According to Jazz, Chapter III, which won a Grammy — are worth hearing in sequence.

For the tradition of jazz musicians engaging seriously with the church: Duke Ellington's Sacred Concerts, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, Mary Lou Williams' masses, and Charles Mingus. This is one of the deepest seams in American music and it is routinely overlooked.

And for Memphis: the city's musical history — Stax, Sun, Hi Records, and the churches that fed all three — is inseparable from what Whalum does.

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