Katalyst, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Adrian Younge

The Jazz Is Dead series finds Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad calling on a cast of collaborators to go deep on an album’s worth of contemporary jazz. Past projects have featured Jean Carn, Brian Jackson and Gary Bartz, and now it’s the turn of breakout LA collective Katalyst. Katalyst operate as a communal endeavour in the tradition of Horace Tapscott’s Pan-Afrikan People’s Arkestra, with all members pooling their compositions and ideas and helping each other grow as artists. Between them, the various players have been linked to MNDSGN, Anderson .Paak and Kendrick Lamar to name but a few, so you should have some idea of the quality at work on this latest entry in the crucial series.