Path of Enlightenment

nat birchall

March 27, 2026

Jazz

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 Xhosa 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.