Afro-Spiritual

Afro-Spiritual names the current of jazz and related Black music that grounds its search for transcendence specifically in African spirituality: ancestral veneration, healing ritual, chant and the cosmologies of peoples such as the Zulu, rather than in Eastern religion or the church alone. Emerging from the spiritual jazz of *John Coltrane* and *Pharoah Sanders*, it took distinct shape in post-apartheid South Africa, where players such as *Nduduzo Makhathini* and *Sibusile Xaba* fused modal improvisation with indigenous ceremony, and it extends to diasporic singers and electronic producers who treat the ancestors as active collaborators in the music.