The Alien Eye: 2025 Ambient Jazz and Spiritual Jazz Favorites (improvisation turned inward)

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
― Albert Einstein

This mix lingers at the intriguing intersection between jazz and ambient music, where improvisation turns inward. Critic Philip Sherburne once described ambient jazz as an "attempt to combine the expressive language of jazz with the atmospheric quality of ambient music,” and that dynamic animates much of what’s here. These tracks invite a kind of listening shaped by wonder and estrangement.

This is third in a series of 10 mixes of 2025 favorites. The selections reflect a personal, exploratory approach to discovery and curation, with artists and tracks that tend to fall outside typical “best of” lists.

The show is timestamped and the tracklist is in a comment.

Cover is excerpt from a 1966 sci-fi magazine illustration by Virgil Finlay.