Max Kochetov
Altered Feelings

If today we were to establish the coordinates of the most up-to-date music of the moment, the so called "cosmic groove" (or spiritual jazz if you prefer) we would have to retrace a period - the one between the second half of the sixties and the first mid-seventies - in which the sprouts of a mixture of psychedelia, spirituality, jazz, rock, soul, funk and so on and so forth, were planted within a breeding ground where major social upheavals were brewing and cultural. The cosmic groove has its reason for being in a melting pot of Latin, African, Brazilian, Asian and Indian influences and is a music that seeks connections, one between body, mind and soul. Try listening to any of Pharoah Sanders' records in those years, titles like "Izipho Zam", "Karma", "Jewels of Thought", "Summun, Bukmun, Umyun", "Thembi", "Black Unity", " Elevation ”, you will find religiousness, musical experimentation, interweaving of modal jazz, blues, gospel, Indian tradition, African polyrhythm, bebop. You will find there an engaging and fascinating world. This is the world to which the Ukrainian (by birth, but Serbian by adoption) Max Kochetov refers. A capable saxophonist, profound connoisseur of the African-American language, but above all an open-minded musician and skilled composer, in this work Kochetov presents a 40-minute suite conceived as a continuous flow of alternating current emotions. There is Coltrane and his vertical gaze in this flow, there is the immersion in a world today by the most forgotten (but fortunately returned to claim victims among the lovers of what we continue to call jazz) , above all there is the desire to deal with music strongly linked to the very hard times we are experiencing, a sort of inner escape from the reality that we are all going through, something more than a simple musical trend. We decided - forgive us - as a matter of commercial opportunity, to divide this suite into eight distinct pieces which however - you will notice - work as a whole in their sequentiality. Max Kochetov and his fellow adventurers, with "Altered Feelings", (the third episode of his record production) is an advantage for us, in terms of musical intensity, and, above all, it is yet another important release that enhances the A.MA Records catalogue.