There's a particular light in the music of Los Angeles's spiritual jazz community of the late 1970s - something warm, searching, unpretentious. Adele Sebastian's sole album as a leader catches that light perfectly. Recorded in 1981 and released on the legendary Nimbus West imprint, Desert Fairy Princess stands among the finest documents of West Coast creative music from the period.

Sebastian was born in Riverside, California in 1956 into a musical family - her mother played piano with the Albert McNeil Jubilee Singers, her father was a saxophonist, both brothers sang. The flute became her voice. She studied Theatre Arts and Pan-Afrikan Studies at Cal State LA, and through that milieu found her way into Horace Tapscott's Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra and the UGMAA collective. The community that nurtured her - those Sunday rehearsals at the Immanuel United Church of Christ, the potlucks, the sense of music as spiritual practice - you can hear all of it in these grooves.

The ensemble gathered here is exceptional. Billy Higgins on drums and gembreh (that North African stringed instrument adding an unmistakable texture to the proceedings); Roberto Miranda on bass, rock-solid and singing; Bobby West at the piano; Rickey Kelly on marimba; Daa'oud Woods on percussion. Together they create an acoustic sound that feels somehow both ancient and fresh - modal, unhurried, deeply felt. Sebastian's flute playing has a quality that's hard to describe: liquid, floating, tender without being soft. Her voice on "Prayer For The People" is intimate in a way that startles - she sounds as if she's singing directly to you, alone in the room, sharing something private. The version of McCoy Tyner's "Man From Tanganyika" stretches and breathes, the polyrhythmic percussion building toward genuine transcendence. The title track opens with an "Allahu akbar" chant before unfolding into pure devotional beauty.

Sebastian died of kidney failure in 1983, at twenty-seven. Guitarist Nels Cline, who played with her briefly in a group called ONE, remembered her as "incredibly amazing and beautiful in every way... so charismatic, so gentle." This is her only statement as a leader, and it's ESSENTIAL - one of those records that rewards every return visit, revealing new depths each time. For anyone who loves Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, or the Strata-East catalogue, this belongs in your collection.