“Orange and black. Fire and ebony. Fury and pride. From 1961 through 1976, Impulse! Records wore its signature colors proudly and raised its exclamation point high…The sound in its grooves bristled with the spirit of The ’60s, swinging with the musical experimentation and political outrage of the day,” wrote Ashley Kahn in the opening to The House That Trane Built: The Story of Impulse Records.

It was Virginia raised trumpeter turned producer Creed Taylor who had the vision for a label to represent what he termed “The New Wave in Jazz” when, in 1960 he founded Impulse! as a progressive subsidiary of ABC-Paramount, the parent company he had joined in 1956. 

Debuting with J.J. Johnson & Kai Winding’s “The Great Kai & J. J”, Taylor planted the seeds of the label with beautifully packaged gatefold albums by giants like Ray Charles and Gil Evans. After signing John Coltrane to Impulse! for the album “Africa/Brass” Taylor left for Verve Records to be replaced by a streetwise New Yorker from Brooklyn by the name of Bob Thiele. 

Having founded his Signature label at the age of just 17 as a home for artists like Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, Thiele was handed the reins at Impulse! after becoming an in house producer at ABC-Paramount. 

John Coltrane – Setting the Tone

In his first years at Impulse!, Thiele oversaw such socially conscious records as John Coltrane’s “Alabama” (from “Live at Birdland”), Max Roach’s “Percussion Bitter Sweet” (inc. “Man From South Africa” and “Prayer for a Martyr”) and Shirley Scott Trio’s “For Members Only” (inc. “Marchin’ to Riverside” and “Freedom Dance”). But it was the recordings that followed John Coltrane’s monumental Quartet album from 1965 ”A Love Supreme” that really positioned Impulse! as a revolutionary jazz label responding to the turmoil of the times with music that reached a new generation eager for change. 

As Ashley Kahn wrote in The House That Trane Built; by the mid sixties “on both sides of the racial divide, ears began to search out music charged with the outrage and outcry of the day.” And it was to the orange and black spines of Impulse! albums that these new listeners and subsequent generations were drawn. 

“These LPs from Impulse! were the first records I heard that sounded like the musicians were creating something bigger than what they all knew,” Shabaka Hutchings told me in 2018 after signing to Impulse!. “These were players who had a very specific aesthetic and they were going into the studio in a search for an accurate portrayal of what they were going through at the time and what was happening around them.”

From the ‘Fire Music’ and spiritually charged avant garde outpourings of John Coltrane’s followers Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler, to the cosmic transcendence of Alice Coltrane and the afro-futurism of Sun Ra, artists at Impulse! sought liberation through different means. But what bonded them was a belief that music should be used both as a weapon against injustice and a transformative tool of empowerment – a fight that continues today through a new generation of artists at Impulse! 

Here are just a few of our favourites from the Impulse! catalogue:

Archie Shepp – Fire Music (1965)

Riots in Watts that left 34 people dead, the assassination of Malcolm X, the Selma Freedom March to Montgomery, Alabama. 1965 was a momentous year for the Civil Rights and Black Power movement. It was also the year Archie Shepp released “Fire Music”, his third LP for Impulse!. On this pivotal Bob Thiele produced LP was “Malcolm, Malcolm Semper Malcolm” a spoken word dedication to Malcolm X. While Archie Shepp certainly earned his reputation as an angry firebrand allied with the counter culture and black nationalism “Fire Music” illustrates how he was always a multifaceted musician. Shepp would go on to make another album inspired by riots – “Attica Blues” (1972) was a searing commentary on the infamous New York State prison riot that left 33 inmates and 10 employees dead.

Albert Ayler – Love Cry (1968)

“The spiritual is a search for meaning and the political is what governs our lives.  Back then with what was going on, it was all wrapped up together,” Shabaka told me in 2018. The most spiritually charged of all the free jazz players, Albert Ayler discussed his music in terms of “truth”– linking spiritual powers to the Black experience. Opening with the title track he performed at John Coltrane’s funeral on 21 July 1967, the saxophonist’s Impulse! debut, produced by Bob Thiele, merged free jazz and the music of marching bands (powered by Milton Graves percussion and the Ayler brothers horns) to devastating effect on numbers like “Universal Indians”. 

Alice Coltrane: Journey In Satchidananda (1971)

As Franya J Berkman wrote in her 2010 book Monument Eternal: The Music of Alice Coltrane: “Though Black Power is typically associated with the political concerns of African American economic development, education and even armed self defence, it was also concerned with defining and asserting blackness as a cultural ideal. This in turn required a new spiritual foundation.” Like other Alice Coltrane recordings, produced by Bob Thiele’s replacement Ed Michel, “Journey In Satchidananda” can be heard as a cry of spiritual and cultural resistance rather than direct political protest, but the results are just as powerful. 

Sun Ra: Space is the Place (1973)

In a scene from the film Space is the Place, we are taken into a Black youth centre festooned with images of  Angela Davis and Black Panther Party leaders Eldridge Cleaver, H. Rap Brown, and Huey P. Newton. There, Ra tells the hip kids that he is not real, but like them a myth that does not exist in the global ordering of race and citizenship. The album of the same name is the perfect entry point to Ra who chose “Astro-Black mythology” rather than direct political activism as his route to liberation. 

Sons Of Kemet: Your Queen Is A Reptile (2018)

After two highly acclaimed albums for the Naim label, in 2018 Sons of Kemet signed to Impulse! for the first in a series of politically charged albums from bandleader Shabaka Hutchings. Through a furious barrage of avant garde jazz, dub reggae, afrobeat, and soca, Hutchings, with drummer Seb Roachford, tuba player Theon Cross and guest vocalists Joshua Idehen and Congo Natty launched: “a searing investigation into white patriarchy embodied in British Royal and political institutions, and the rampant, systemic racism they represent”.

The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis: Deface The Currency (2026)

Washington DC’s jazz punk trio (bassist Joe Lally of Fugazi, guitarist Anthony Pirog and drummer Brendan Canty) joined forces with the seriously prolific New York tenor saxophone firebrand James Brandon Lewis for their first album for Impulse! in 2024. Two years later they are back, fuelled by over 150 shows with an explosive jazz punk attack against the system, at its most incendiary on the title track and the darkly entitled “Serpent’s Tongue”. 

Irreversible Entanglements: Protect Your Light (2023)

Chicago’s “liberation-oriented free jazz collective” was born when saxophonist Keir Neuringer, poet Camae Ayewa (a.k.a. Moor Mother) and bassist Luke Stewart, performed at a Musicians Against Police Brutality event. Trumpeter Aquiles Navarro and drummer Tcheser Holmes completed the line up for their breathtaking self titled 2017 debut for International Anthem. Two further studio albums of militant free jazz and spoken word followed on the Chicago label before they were signed by Impulse!. Recorded at Van Gelder Studio, their 2023 debut for the label lost none of the anger of their earlier work. Raw protest songs like “Our Land Back” and “Degrees of Freedom” were joined by the celebratory ‘Free Love’ and mournful ‘Celestial Pathways’ to create powerful message music for our times.

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Andy Thomas is a London based writer who has contributed regularly to Straight No Chaser, Wax Poetics, We Jazz, Red Bull Music Academy, and Bandcamp Daily. He has also written liner notes for Strut, Soul Jazz and Brownswood Recordings.

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