Outer Worlds Jazz Ensemble feat. Chip Wickham — The Karman Line
The Karman Line · 2026
Label: ATA Records · Genre: Jazz / Spiritual Jazz · Country: United Kingdom · From: Leeds, Europe
The Kármán Line — the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space — sits 100 kilometres above ground. This album began in a very earthly place: a Japanese jazz kissa in Tokyo, where woodwind maestro Chip Wickham and ATA Records’ bassist Neil Innes fell into conversation about Alice Coltrane, Yusef Lateef, and David Axelrod. Those shared obsessions became seven tracks of deep, gravity-defying spiritual jazz. Wickham’s flute is the album’s primary voice — patient, unhurried, floating above harp and piano. The harp functions less as decoration than as architecture, its glissandi defining the music’s interior space. Low Orbit shifts the weight with brass arrangements channelling Quincy Jones and late Coltrane.
Did you know: The Kármán Line concept came from the recording sessions themselves, not the other way around. The music felt like it was reaching upward toward something undefined — and the name of the boundary between atmosphere and space arrived after the tracks were laid down.
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