Ishmael Reed - Every Time I Feel the Spirit (2CD)

Ishmael Reed
Every Time I Feel the Spirit
Reading Group
USA, 2026
Double Compact Disc

Beautiful sketches, elegies, and meditations expanding the writer Ishmael Reed's growing body of work as a composer and pianist. A beautiful, generous, fully inhabitable companion piece to The Hands of Grace (recently reissued on vinyl by All Night Flight).

FROM THE LABEL: 

"Great accomplishment, many full-time musicians don't accomplish this. Very proud of your perseverance and wit."
- David Murray

Every Time I Feel the Spirit is a collection of piano studies, epistles, sketches, improvisations, and meditations composed, performed, and recorded by the legendary writer Ishmael Reed at his home in Oakland, California, over the past five years. After 2022's The Hands of Grace (recently re-released on vinyl by All Night Flight), we are thrilled to collaborate with Reed again to bring this extraordinarily precious music to light. Two and a half hours of music spanning two discs, Every Time I Feel the Spirit is, in Ishmael's words, "a hidden spiritual landscape, and had I not lived this long life, this region would have remained undiscovered."

Like The Hands of Grace, these pieces range from citational irony to arresting sincerity, but here we have the sense of looking through the composer's sketchbook, developing the ideas as they are being traced out of the piano by the "spirit" that compels Ishmael to play. Despite its seeming solitude as a self-recorded solo piano set, this music is full of other people, from the other luminaries of American literature to whom many of the pieces are dedicated, to the intimate connections of Reed's family, including his wife Carla, his children, and his niece Marquel, whose image graces the cover.

No other album so gracefully articulates the spirit of Reading Group. It reminds me why I love music.
- Derek / RG