Thanksgiving, Native Heritage & the Roots of Jazz

November 27, 2025

Today and tomorrow, the country marks Thanksgiving and Native American Heritage Day. We’re told this is a season of gratitude. For many of us, it’s more complicated than that.

Jazz was born on Indigenous land, in a country shaped by slavery, broken treaties, and migration. The music we love carries the fingerprints of many peoples—Native nations, descendants of the enslaved, maroon communities, and immigrants who weren’t always considered “white” when they arrived. It is a sound made from collision and connection, harm and healing.

At Hot House, we don’t ignore that history. We also don’t treat it as a reason to despair. We see it as the truth beneath the music.

In our December issue, we focus on sacred jazz and maroon lineages—the ways artists turn survival into ceremony, prayer, protest, and joy. That includes the traditions my own family carries from Powhatan and Gullah Geechee maroon communities, and the broader Black American experience that has always shaped this music.

So as we move through these days, we’re holding space for all of it: loss and resilience, memory and gratitude, the hard history and the extraordinary art that grew from it.

However you spend this time, may it include a moment to listen deeply—to the ancestors in the music, to Native and Black communities still here, and to the people around your table.

~ Hot House Jazz Guide

Inside the December Issue: Sacred Jazz & Maroon Lineages

Our December issue stays with the sacred—where jazz, ancestry, and resistance meet.

We go deep with Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, tracing how his maroon lineages and sonic “rituals” stretch jazz into a space of healing and reclamation. Feature profiles of Sullivan Fortner, Champian Fulton, and Wycliffe Gordon explore the ways devotion, testimony, and swing live side by side at the piano, the horn, and the bandstand.

A major essay on Sacred Jazz: From Mockery to Revelation follows the music from its roots in Black, Native, and maroon traditions through Billie Holiday, Coltrane, Mary Lou Williams, and into the present—where artists like Terri Lyne Carrington, Brandee Younger, Ruth Naomi Floyd, Chief Adjuah, and Antoine Roney treat sound as spiritual technology, not just entertainment.

Elsewhere in the issue, you’ll find:

  • In Focus pieces on Bending Towards the Light… A Jazz Nativity, the 37th Staten Island Jazz Festival, and Smoke’s “Countdown 2026” Coltrane Festival

  • Winning Spins year-end listening and holiday releases

  • Spotlights & Calendar for December’s key shows in New York and beyond

Hot House Verba - our words-and-ideas section focusing on spoken word, comedy and other expressive arts — this month features photographer, and vocalist-composer Ruth Naomi Floyd. As a pioneering sacred jazz artist, Floyd has spent more than twenty-five years creating original music rooted in theology, justice, and Black history. Her current major project, The Frederick Douglass Jazz Works, sets Douglass’s speeches and writings to her own compositions, using sacred jazz to carry his witness against slavery, his faith, and his insistence on human dignity into the present.

Subscribers receive roughly 20% more content in our extended digital/PREMIUM edition, including additional sacred-jazz commentary, international festival coverage, From the Vault archival reviews, Now Playing / On the Scene extras, and expanded tributes and recordings to accompany this month’s theme.