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Path of Enlightenment
Artist Nat Birchall Quartet
Format:Vinyl / 12" Album
Label:Ancient Archive of Sound
Catalogue No:AAOS261
Barcode:7141043768618
Genre:Jazz
No of Discs:1
Release Date:24 Apr 2026
Track Listings
Disc 1
1Red, Gold & Green
2Amenhotep
3Path of Enlightenment
4Menat
5Visitation of the Spirits
6Sphesihle

Featuring the long-time core group

(Adam Fairhall – piano, Michael Bardon – bass and Paul Hession – drums.)

Recorded in one session at Manchester’s Low Four Studio, engineered by Brendan

Williams who also mixed and mastered the album.

Some words from Nat about the music – “For this recording I composed some songs using more “exotic” (for want of a better word) modes,

which I have always meant to explore in more depth but never really got around to very much. The  first song for instance, Red, Gold & Green, uses an Ethiopian scale.

The title comes from the colours of the Ethiopian flag, which is also symbolic in Rastafari so has a kind of double meaning, like a lot of my songs.The title track, Path of Enlightenment, uses several modes,

starting in a major key then moving to the Phrygian mode, then to a minor key. The piano solo is in a 28 bar minor blues form. Menat is based on a mode of the Byzantine scale,

I’m not sure if it has a particular name or not. Amenhotep was the name of several Egyptian pharaohs,

Amenhotep IV being the original given name of Akhenaten.When I was writing this song it put me in mind of my song, Akhenaten, simply because they are both in 5/4 time,

so I decided to give this one a pharaonic name too. Spheshile is a Zulu word (and sometimes name) that means “beautiful gift”, the title was suggested by a friend from South Africa.

All this means nothing of course if the music doesn’t tell a story, I think the unfamiliar modes allowed us to speak of interesting things that may not have come to us otherwise.

Finally, I chose to use the quartet format for this recording because it occurred to me that it tends to make for a more cohesive group sound, and it had been a while since we recorded this way.”