At the end of 1972, after recording on and composing most of vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson’s nu-jazz Blue Note classic Head On, pianist-composer Todd Cochran set off on his own solo journey with the Prestige label. First on Worlds Around the Sun (as Bayeté), then with Seeking Other Beauty (as Bayeté Umbra Zindko) in 1973, the San Francisco native brought an otherworldly funk, an impossibly beautiful vastness and a poetic lyrical charge (and chanting) to psychedelicized free jazz and the activist-consciousness screeds familiar to the Bay Area and organizers such as the Black Panthers.
The always literate, warmly humorous and incessantly devising Cochran (who I last spoke with for a 2021 Overdue Ovation) is reliving the moment of artful impact that was Seeking Other Beauty, reissued this February by Craft Recordings.
The period between 1972 and 1974 was particularly fruitful for the younger you, as you went from playing with Bobby Hutcherson and Hadley Caliman to signing a deal with Prestige, changing your name to Bayeté, recording with differently sized ensembles. After that, you recorded as a second keyboardist for Herbie Hancock’s The Spook Who Sat by the Door and contributed “Free Angela” to Santana’s Lotus. Can you tell me a little bit about your headspace at that moment, this three-year-period?
It really was an exhilarating, all-encompassing time of apprenticeship, learning and collaboration. Everything was music-centric. The relationships that began during this time were golden, as the artists I was creating alongside had long lived in my inner world and dream space before we ever crossed paths.
What I quickly absorbed is that the greats are enigmas. Their virtuosity isn’t just in what they make, but in how they move through space, how they communicate, how they leave meaning half-said, implied. Existing in that current rewired my sense of what’s possible and taught me to follow instinct over expectation.
What was jazz to you coming into Seeking Other Beauty?
Jazz, for me at that crossing, was more than a language or style or a roadmap, or a cosmos of expression. Devoting myself to the art form became my rite of passage. I was immersed in becoming, yet not fully conscious of what that meant. I’d landed at the entry point so many of us are searching for, in one form or another — something that gives meaning to our observations, our feelings, and nurtures the restless quest for understanding.
Bobby Hutcherson was a force. Working with Bobby on Head On was pivotal, and not only did he later play on my album Worlds Around the Sun, he wrote the liner notes. The boundless depth of his musical imagination, combined with his singular approach to his instrument, opened a gateway for me to the importance of individualism. In a very real sense, my pursuit of tributaries within the tradition — seeking other beauty — is an homage to the insights I gained from those for whom art is everything.
Were you still living in San Francisco full-time then?
Yes, I was. I often say I learned my art in San Francisco — in what felt like a city within a city. It’s where I began thinking about perception itself. I found myself preoccupied with small shifts in meaning: daylight versus the light of day. The difference isn’t visual; it’s conceptual. That realization stayed with me. I began observing how context changes what we think we’re seeing, hearing, or feeling.
Certainly, Seeking Other Beauty had a sense of cinematic psychedelia about it. And its words/vocals done in tandem with several members of your band spoke to the activist, poetic you. Can you discuss the sonic palette that you had/wanted to use before you went into the studio? What you hoped to experiment with, for what possible outcome?
I was thinking about creating an immersive experience — something engaging and, ideally, optimistically compelling. The sonic palette grew out of that impulse: saxophone and trumpet, sometimes paired; electric keyboards; fretless bass; piano; and the human voice all intermingling. What unified those elements was rhythm — particularly the rhythm of the words and the melodic phrasing of the lyrics.
I’m drawn to the way a group of elements can become sensory and organic. Authors do this with language: Individual ideas interact on the page — one, then another, then another — until they begin to enlarge and transform each other in the mind of the reader.
For me, that’s where psychedelia enters music. It exists inside the spectrum of a soundscape, where multiple memories and emotional information are accessed at the same time. Not a combination of single colors, but the emergence of a new one. The intention was to extend an invitation into another world — one temporarily free of everyday triggers and routines. And once you cross that threshold, freed from the ordinary, the storytelling can begin.
The science of consciousness — Black consciousness in particular — had been part and parcel of the Bay Area for some time. Can you say how you took its best intentions as a means for poetic lyricizing and chants, and how you made it all fit compositionally?
I love your phrase “the science of consciousness” and will remember it. It really resonates with me, because it speaks to spirit and to the charged atmosphere of the Bay Area at that moment. Black consciousness — rooted in positive self-definition — had landed and was alive in everyday rhetoric, speech and thought. Chant, poetry, and song were all part of the same atmosphere. Lyrics felt like a natural extension of that energy: a shorthand language of rhythm and emphasis that reflected how people actually communicated. In Seeking Other Beauty, I wasn’t translating ideas into songs so much as allowing those ideas to find their musical form.
I know Augusta Lee Collins, but Hoza Phillips, Mguanda and Mulobo? They don’t have that many credits other than your work. Where did you find them? Why did they fit into Seeking Other Beauty?
My comrades Agusta, Hoza, Mguanda and Mulobo were right there with me — through every phase of bringing this recording to life. Free of conformist attitudes, they embodied San Francisco’s open-minded, boundary-free psyche. Augusta was an inventive, rhythmically exciting drummer. An imaginative cross-genre musician, he performed with Woody Shaw, Abbey Lincoln, Sun Ra, Frankie Beverly and Maze, the Pointer Sisters and blues legend Lightnin’ Hopkins, among others.
Bassist Hoza Phillips oozed soulfulness and had a phenomenal ear for the abstract. He approached music as a laboratory for sonic exploration — routing his fretless bass through a battery of effects. Soprano saxophonist Mguanda (Dave Johnson) was a stylist, colorful, understated, endlessly lyrical. He was a protégé of saxophonist John Handy, who introduced us. We shared a natural creative chemistry. A key member of my live band, we also worked on multiple recordings together. He joined me on the Julian Priester album Love, Love (ECM), which I composed for and played on.
Trumpeter Mulobo (Fred Berry) is a master musician and music theorist whom I also deeply respect for his artistic viewpoint and inspiring teaching as a Stanford University professor. Originally from Chicago, he was a member of the AACM and worked closely with its founder, Muhal Richard Abrams.
I assembled the musicians on this recording at an interesting bend in time. Each moved with a separate sonic cipher, yet all rotated around the same unseen center. Sound was not performed — it was remembered, projected, decoded. An African mystical current pulsed beneath it all. At the source, the music we created together dissolved its own shape and reassembled as motion. My intention with this group was to provide an open architecture and to compose musical sequences based on what I knew of their musical personalities.
Was there a song on Seeking Other Beauty that served as a catalyst for everything else that would eventually happen on this record?
While you were asking, I immediately flashed on a memory from Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. I can feel the vibe more than detail — more impressionistic than photographic. What stands out most is the musicians’ readiness to play… The song was “Let It Take Your Mind.” That track was the flower that bloomed first, releasing the seeds for everything else that would become the recording. From there, the work was to enlarge the concept, build on the bits and pieces of our ideas, and hope to be transported through a [an interdimensional] portal to somewhere entirely new.
Did you have the opportunity to play the material live, with or without the studio team? How would you say it breathed deeply and differently than on its recorded versions?
Yes, I had the chance to play this music live with the same band. We performed it with an electric setup — keyboards and bass, big drums and winds augmented with pedals and effects — which gave the music a more experimental edge than the recording… The crowd’s energy would intensify everything; there were times when listeners and the band would morph into a feedback loop, pushing the performance into unexpected places. Altogether, it was a beautiful time of multicultural, multiracial fun and mind-expanding growth.
The life and strife within this album feels applicable to what we’re living now. Can you tell me about wanting to refocus this album for the present day, hearing it all again with present-day ears and contemporary thought as your guide?
When I made this recording, what was heavily on my mind was the ongoing spiral of colonialism and its psychological and material impact on Black people. Liberation, as I understood it then — and still do — begins internally: freeing oneself from a diminished self-image imposed by social constraints. But you can’t deconstruct something without first studying the architecture of your entrapment.
In that period, I saw powerful writers, painters, poets and musicians — Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Richie Havens, among them — taking up the mantle. They were testing the political weight of their art, creating work that confronted inequality and insisted on self-definition. The music was real.
What’s striking to me now in 2026, with this reissue, is how little the central tensions have shifted. The language evolves, the faces change, but the struggle around visibility, autonomy and liberation — particularly for Black, Brown and LGBTQIA communities — remains pressing. The album wasn’t made to be timeless; it was made to be honest. If it feels current now, that says as much about the moment that we’re in as it does about the record.
When I floated the idea that I’d love to revisit and remix the album, it’s me musing about reimagining its raw elements through the instincts of today’s sonic innovators, not “fixing” it. The tropes of jazz and its DNA run straight through hip-hop — thriving on riffs, beats, sounds and the persona shaped by lyrical imagination. I’m thinking about the intergenerational conversation and the possibilities of this communal art form, where everyone learns from one another.
[Listening back to the album] felt like therapy where you write letters to your former self and tell your life backward. I grasped a glimpse of my temperament: I’ve always preferred sitting on a sea cliff overlooking rocks and waves, rather than sitting on a crowded beach. That aloneness in nature, that space between thoughts — that’s where I reconnect with source. JT