Ishmael Reed - Every Time I Feel the Spirit
(August 2026)
"Great accomplishment, many full-time musicians don't accomplish this. Very proud of your perseverance and wit."
- David Murray
"A startling thing about both Monk’s and Ish’s music is that both musicians (pianists and composers) have a distinct, immediately recognizable touch on the instrument, unmistakably their own. In a sea of pianists who use virtuosity to disguise and legitimate the fact that they’re only quoting, reproducing music that was already there before, that they’re creating nothing new, Ish’s music, his piano playing, like Monk’s, almost makes you laugh out loud with joy and affirmation. In Ish’s, and Monk’s work, we hear new, intuitive compositions emerge from the players’ / composers’ fingers, sometimes hesitantly, in it’s own time, in it’s own swing. Ish’s, like Monk’s music, is gorgeous in it’s intuitive, intelligent and unpretentious honesty."
-Kip Hanrahan
"P.S: another wonderful thing about this music is the audible tenderness. It’s almost always present in Ish’s writing, deeply, no matter how combative or contentious or ironic or mocking, but it’s the primary voice here, and it’s one of the reasons the work, as usual with Ish, feels that transcendence, in this life, is almost possible."
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
Edition of 250 2xCDs featuring liner notes by Reed.
Composed, performed, and recorded at home by Ishmael Reed, 2021–2026.
Cover image of Marquel LeNoir courtesy of Michele LeNoir.
Published by Reading Group, RG34, in 2026. © Ishmael Reed and Reading Group.
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