James Holden & The Animal Spirits at Smida Jazz Festival at Smida Park

James Holden has a Maths Bachelor at Oxford, but he devoted his life to music. A personality with a lot of talent, he reinvented himself as Dj, producer and guru of electronic music. Over the past decade, he focused on the growth of a live group that mixes astral jazz, minimal with rhythms of North African music. This combination, attractive to the consumers of the genre, is described by Holden as “folk-trance”.

“Folk-Trance” because it involves a ritualist abandonment in music and matches their constant concern for spiritual jazz albums, such as those of Don Cherry or Pharoah Sanders....

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James Holden has a Maths Bachelor at Oxford, but he devoted his life to music. A personality with a lot of talent, he reinvented himself as Dj, producer and guru of electronic music. Over the past decade, he focused on the growth of a live group that mixes astral jazz, minimal with rhythms of North African music. This combination, attractive to the consumers of the genre, is described by Holden as “folk-trance”.

“Folk-Trance” because it involves a ritualist abandonment in music and matches their constant concern for spiritual jazz albums, such as those of Don Cherry or Pharoah Sanders.

From The Pitchfork we also found the process through which The Spirit Animals album appeared: it was recorded live in a single room at Holden’s Sacred Walls Studio in London, one take, with no editing whatsoever. It seems that Holden assumes more of an organizer role in the band than the frontman, mostly putting a stage at the disposal of his collaborators where they can experiment and unlock their imagination.

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