NEW YORK, NY.- Before Isaiah Collier went into the studio to record his new album, the saxophonist and composer sent his fellow musicians a playlist of sorts. Instead of songs, it contained news clips chronicling racially motivated violence targeting Black men and women — including the 2020 murder of Ahmaud Arbery and the 2023 shooting of the Kansas City, Missouri, teenager Ralph Yarl — as well as the protests that followed. Collier wanted the LP to be an “observation log” of the past four years, and he was reminding the members of his band, the Chosen Few, exactly where the music had sprung from.

“It’s one thing to hear people who write their inspirations,” Collier, 26, explained on a recent video call from his hometown, Chicago. “It’s another thing for you to be in real time, and knowing that this is really coming from an actual tangible and concrete place.”

To make that context clear for listeners, Collier wove broadcast news excerpts into the finished album, “The World Is on Fire,” out Oct. 18. The aesthetic choice plays out powerfully on tracks like one named after Arbery, which opens with a CBS report blended with a somber chord progression from pianist Julian Davis Reid. Later in the piece, police sirens wail in the background as Collier’s alto solo reaches a torrential climax, backed by drummer Michael Shekwoaga Ode’s seismic rolls and cymbal crashes.

“This is why this song carries this type of weight,” Collier said. “The air that you feel around it — it’s real.”

Much of the record, which finds Collier most often playing tenor, surges ahead with an irrepressible momentum that harks back to John Coltrane’s classic 1960s quartet. Like another album Collier released this year with the Chosen Few, “The Almighty” — which juxtaposes turbulent workouts and meditative interludes in the mode of Pharoah Sanders’ late 1960s and early ’70s masterpieces — “The World Is on Fire” boasts the grit and conviction that have helped Collier stand out in an increasingly crowded field of younger artists engaging with the tradition of so-called spiritual jazz.

At the Vision Festival this summer in Brooklyn, esteemed free-jazz bassist William Parker enlisted Collier for the Ancients, an all-star group that included Dave Burrell, the veteran pianist who played with Sanders and other ’60s vanguardists. Parker, whose CV includes extensive work with powerhouse saxophonists in the Coltrane lineage like David S. Ware and Charles Gayle, was impressed by how Collier held his own.

“He wasn’t being pushed — he pushed,” Parker said in a phone interview. “A lot of times you play with people, they don’t inspire you, but that night he very much inspired me.”

To Collier — who sported a cap bearing the logo of Vision Festival presenter Arts for Art, overalls with one shoulder unbuttoned, a shell necklace and a nose stud — any resemblance to his predecessors flows out of a historical parallel.

“As much as I love Coltrane, I don’t think it’s about necessarily trying to sound like a person like that or a Pharoah, but we have to ask the question: What was going on in those times?” he said, referencing the political and social upheaval of the ’60s. “So, what’s going on now? A very radical time again.”

Collier grew up on Chicago’s South Side, with a singer and multi-instrumentalist father, a mother who worked as a choir director, and two brothers, one of whom, drummer Jeremiah, has been a regular collaborator. He started piano around age 5 and picked up the alto saxophone at 11, honing his sound by playing unamplified in church. By 12, he was gigging in local clubs. Saxophonist-composer and longtime Chicago jazz pillar Ernest Dawkins recalled seeing Collier at jam sessions and recruiting him for Young Masters, the youth-development arm of his organization Live the Spirit Residency.

“He had the ability to adjust, adapt and learn how to maneuver within certain spaces that were given to him,” Dawkins said in a phone interview, “and really say something when given that space.”

Along with his musical upbringing, Collier learned about the perils of racism early on, in part because of a family connection: a cousin who had married Emmett Till’s mother. “I remember I had to watch the documentary about him when I was like 9 years old,” Collier said. “Horrifying, graphic, terrifying. But this is the reality that we lived in.”

The fates of contemporaries such as Trayvon Martin and Yarl, an aspiring musician, further rattled him. “When I heard about Ralph Yarl, I weeped, because I remember being a senior in high school, I remember practicing and doing everything I could in my physical capability to prepare myself, and to know that he almost had that robbed,” Collier said. “When I just heard about Sonya Massey,” he added, “I’m thinking to myself, I got friends this age; I got family this age. It’s no longer that it’s about a ‘Oh, that’s unfortunate.’ That ‘unfortunate’ is so close.”

Collier’s music has taken, and will most likely continue to take, many forms: a 2023 album, “Parallel Universe,” featured exuberant, often vocal-centric tracks informed by funk and R&B, while I AM, a duo with the drummer Ode, pushes toward ecstatic, borderline-psychedelic free jazz. But for “The World Is on Fire,” he wanted something more direct. “Since the pandemic started, when have we ever had a chance to breathe?” he said. “This is about really reflecting the times.”

Collier specifically recalled being present at chaotic protests in Chicago in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. “I remember feeling the madness in the air, the rage, the anger, the hurt, all these emotions just coagulating,” he said. “It was like, damn, is this how the end of the world is supposed to look?”

Music does offer a certain escape for Collier — “When you’re there, there’s no other feeling like it,” he said, reflecting on the sensation of embarking on one of his bracingly vigorous solos — but much like his forebears, he finds himself in a position where walling off his expression from what he sees around him isn’t an option.

“If we were all partying, and everything was good, that’s exactly what the music would sound like,” he said. “But we ain’t partying, and we ain’t all good.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.