Malachi Favors Maghostut - 1978 - Natural & the Spiritual

Malachi Favors Maghostut

1978

Natural & the Spiritual

01. Natural And The Spiritual (Working On The Buildings) 8:35

02. Peace Be Unto You 10:33

03. Natural And The Spiritual 7:08

04. Black Man Tripover / Womens Takeover 4:00

05. If' Fin You No's De Way-Sho Us 10:53

Acoustic Bass, Percussion: Brother Malachi Favors Magoustous

Recorded on April 23, 1977, live at The University of Chicago. Bass is unamplified.

There are albums that introduce themselves politely. And then there’s Natural & Spiritual, which doesn’t knock so much as drift through the walls like incense, already halfway into a ritual before you’ve even found a chair.

Malachi Favors, later styling himself Malachi Favors Maghostut, was not merely a bassist; he was a sonic sculptor with a fondness for turning rhythm into something almost mythological. Born in Mississippi in 1927, he came up through the bebop trenches before helping found the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in the mid-1960s, a collective that treated jazz less like a genre and more like an open frontier.

He is most widely known as a cornerstone of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, where he doubled on bass, percussion, and a small museum’s worth of instruments. His playing could be earthy, ceremonial, mischievous, or thunderous, sometimes all within the same minute. If jazz has a deep root system, Favors was one of the hands digging in the soil.

Recorded in 1977 and released the following year, Natural & Spiritual is essentially a solo document, though “solo” feels like a technicality. Favors surrounds himself with bass, percussion, voice, and assorted sonic curiosities, creating what feels less like a performance and more like a gathering of invisible collaborators.

The album was taped live, and you can sense the room breathing along with him. Applause flickers in and out like fireflies, reminding you this isn’t studio sterilization but a living moment caught mid-flight.

From a purely technical standpoint, Favors treats the double bass as if it were several instruments sharing the same body. His pizzicato lines are thick and deliberate, like footsteps in wet clay, while his arco passages stretch into long, vocal-like cries.

But technique here is never about virtuosity for its own sake. Instead, it’s about texture and ritual. Tracks like “Peace Be Unto You” unfold as extended meditations, layering bells, chimes, and hand percussion over the bass’s resonant core. The result is rhythm that doesn’t march forward so much as spiral, like a dance around an unseen center.

Vocals appear, sometimes chant-like, sometimes playful, occasionally veering into humor that feels half improvised and half ancestral memory. The title pieces themselves act as thematic anchors, revisited like familiar landmarks in a shifting landscape.

What’s striking is the balance between structure and freedom. There are motifs, recurring gestures, even hints of blues phrasing, but they’re constantly being bent, stretched, and reassembled. It’s free jazz, yes, but with a pulse that feels older than the genre itself.

In 1978, this was not exactly the kind of record that stormed the charts or even the jazz mainstream. Released on AECO, the Art Ensemble’s own label, it circulated more like a treasured secret than a commercial product.

Critically, works like this were often appreciated within avant-garde circles but remained elusive to broader audiences. The album’s intimacy and lack of conventional structure meant it didn’t slot neatly into the expectations of jazz listeners who still wanted heads, solos, and tidy conclusions.

In other words, Natural & Spiritual was less “reviewed” and more “encountered,” usually by people already wandering the outer edges of jazz.

Over time, the album has taken on a kind of quiet gravitas. It stands as one of the clearest examples of what the AACM ethos could produce when stripped to its essence: individuality, experimentation, and a deep connection to cultural roots.

Later bassists in the avant-garde and creative music scenes, from the likes of William Parker onward, have explored similar territory, treating the bass as a total instrument rather than a supporting one. The idea that a bassist could carry an entire narrative alone, weaving rhythm, melody, and ritual into a single thread, owes something to records like this.

It also helped solidify Favors’ reputation as more than just the grounding force of the Art Ensemble. Here, he is the whole architecture: foundation, walls, ceiling, and the occasional gust of wind rattling the windows.

Listening to Natural & Spiritual is a bit like stepping into a room where time has been rearranged. You don’t follow songs so much as inhabit them. The bass hums, rattles, whispers, and occasionally laughs under its breath.

It may not be the easiest album to approach, but it rewards patience with something rare: a sense that music is not just being played, but summoned. And once it’s there, it lingers, like the last curl of smoke after a ceremony you didn’t fully understand but somehow felt anyway.