By the seventh minute of ‘Voltaire’, the opening track from the drummer Marcus Gilmore’s album Journey to the New which was captured live over successive nights in the summer of 2024 at the Village Vanguard, the ensemble has established such a slow-moving and thoroughly beguiling air that almost anything else would feel like a jolt or a rupture. Through the small but sinuous strums and blooming harmonics of Emmanuel Michael on the guitar and Burniss Travis on the electric bass, they have been busy shaping spectres and tracing phantoms or effecting ripples in pools with the vaporous limpidity of a Loren Connors.
Then suddenly those harmonics start to hum and we hear the first dull thud of percussion, a prelude to an outpouring from the full ensemble as Gilmore’s cascading and crashing cymbals gush out both over and under Morgan Guerin’s electronic wind instrument and the rumbles of Rashaan Carter’s double bass.
Given the instrumental palette and the prior half of the composition, it’s a more brassy and propulsive sound than one might expect as Guerin – the 27-year-old multi-instrumentalist who has contributed winds, bass and electronics to albums by Esperanza Spalding, Terri Lyne Carrington and Tyshawn Sorey – ribbons a solo with arpeggios then cedes to the piano of David Virelles, which emerges from beneath, slender and gleaming, before the guitar and a more loping double bass lead us out of ‘Voltaire’ more in the manner of an ellipsis than a witty riposte.
‘Interlude One’ is just as enchanting, again opening with a duet on the guitar and bass, finding a nexus between ‘Greensleeves’ and the jazz and blues of swampy Louisiana or Chicago with its noodling post-rock scene. Carter and Gilmore map out a more angular rhythm on the double bass and drums, while ‘Cape Stride’ is built around the bandleader’s reverberating kit as his percussion rolls right through the centre of the composition, then diffuses amid some fine runs and vamps from the wind and keys on a kind of fantasia which maintains a lively character and a brisk pace.
On the other hand ‘Hindsight’ is more muted, a duet between Guerin’s electronic wind which peals and spirals into the aether and Virelles who treads tentatively and delicately from behind the piano. That mood continues into ‘Open Handed Reach’, a midsummer night’s dream which bears more than a few restful or plaintive moments, before ‘Interlude Two’ abounds in more guitar harmonics, those deft pulls and limpid pools soon encompassed by a tumbling double bass, which trips headlong as the guitar continues to wander in the background of the piece while Gilmore’s brushes play a slack accompaniment.
At the tender age of 38 years old, the drummer Gilmore is a jazz veteran who in his own words is just getting started. A member of Vijay Iyer’s celebrated trio for roughly a decade alongside the pianist and the bassist Stephan Crump, he has also collaborated with Steve Coleman and Chick Corea and has featured on standout albums like Lathe of Heaven as part of a Mark Turner quartet, Origami Harvest by the acclaimed trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and In Common under the auspices of Walter Smith III and Matthew Stevens, on a record of effortless grooves and restless creativity which also starred the flourishing talents of Harish Raghaven and Joel Ross.
Earlier this year he appeared on Southern Nights by Sullivan Fortner and Downhill From Here which reunited him with Gilad Hekselman, now as part of a trio with the bassist Larry Grenadier. Yet for all of that Journey to the New is billed as Gilmore’s first full release as a leader, the product of six nights at a cherished space at the tail end of last July.
At the Village Vanguard the drummer’s ensemble grew to include not only the Cuban pianist Virelles – a bandleader in his own right as well as a Chris Potter, Tomasz StaÅko and Henry Threadgill collaborator – and the versatile bassist Carter but the poignant and billowing guitar and winds of Michael and Guerin plus the beefier but still somehow elusive and shapeshifting low end of Travis.
In fact it is the bassist Travis – who has worked with Robert Glasper and Common as well as Meshell Ndegeocello, Sasha Berliner and CĆ©cile McLorin Salvant – who is responsible for that long and languishing opener ‘Voltaire’ while Guerin added ‘Hindsight’ and Michael contributed the two interludes, with ‘Open Handed Reach’ a cover of a Geri Allen composition which appeared on the heralded 2023 album A Lovesome Thing with the guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, a live set captured at the Jazz Ć la Villette festival in Paris in the late summer of 2012.
‘Cape Stride’ then and the album closer are Gilmore originals, with the title tune one of two longer pieces which serve to bookend Journey to the New. It echoes the form of ‘Voltaire’, swapping out that long and moody guitar and electric bass prelude for the bandleader’s own rebounding percussion, replete with a few shakers and cries and a climactic exchange between the kick drum and the cymbals on what is effectively a three-minute solo, before giving way to a smooth runoff from the wind and the bass.
Virelles again plays a chordal accompaniment as the bassists and Gilmore lay down a rhythm, with Guerin on his electronic wind instrument then Virelles and the guitarist Michael taking fine solos in turn as the ensemble draw the curtain amid one last puff of smoke. This is an odyssey with few knots or entanglements as Journey to the New goes down easy, like imbibing one’s favourite drink in a novel yet inviting bar, a smooth and gently intoxicating blend with an even temperament.
