In the best way the borders feel ever more porous when it comes to contemporary jazz. Beyond the infusion of Latin American and West African rhythms or European chamber music into martial airs, piano rags and hard blues grooves – aspects of jazz which are scarcely modes but for many decades now constitutional parts of the form – it is now the norm for experimental music and even some jazz-adjacent pop music to bear the influence of Hindustani classical raga with its improvisational frames and whorling cycles, electronic beatmaking from minimalist computer loops to techno to hip hop, folk motifs from Eastern Europe or traditional courtly music from Asia and its associated instruments, like the shakuhachi or string instruments from the plucked zither family in the koto, guzheng or gayageum.
Thomas Morgan might seem like something of a traditionalist to those who have heard the rich counterpoint and subtlety of his bass. Since his emergence in the mid-to-late aughties, he has played with experimental composers like Tyshawn Sorey and Sylvie Courvoisier, beloved veterans like Charles Lloyd and Paul Motian or emerging talents like Emi Makabe and Zoh Amba, but he is probably best known for his series of collaborations on Blue Note and especially ECM Records with Jakob Bro, Giovanni Guidi and Bill Frisell. Be it the inky expressiveness of Guidi’s piano, the kind of of easy amorphousness which Bro conjures on his guitar or the evocative Americana which is Frisell’s gift and ethos, the devoted and conscientious Morgan can be a spare and enigmatic presence behind his upright, a tensile mesh who prompts his bandleaders to scale higher heights or else someone who tarries fondly after the melody.
Yet for his overdue debut as a leader Morgan largely lays down his double bass and embraces the controversy of generated music. Around You is a Forest is rooted in the constancy of his WOODS virtual instrument, which Morgan designed in the programming language SuperCollider based around the timbral qualities of West African lute harps, Asian zithers, the Eastern European cimbalom and the marimba before ceding to some of the vagaries of the algorithm.
Typically as it generates sounds based on a compendium of these instruments, WOODS becomes more harmonically and melodically abstract. For the nine pieces which make up Around You is a Forest, the musician turned programmer oversaw WOODS as it produced a series of improvisations, often adjusting their parameters in real time before eventually handing the results over to an all-star cast. Each song on Around You is a Forest is a duet as WOODS is accompanied by such jazz luminaries as Henry Threadgill, Craig Taborn, Ambrose Akinmusire, Gerald Cleaver and Frisell.
In fact in a booklet-length account attached to the album – which was first published as a guest post on the pianist Ethan Iverson’s blog Transitional Technology – the artist explains that his father was part of the first generation of computer scientists, with the young Morgan growing up in Hayward as his father worked at what is now California State University, East Bay. He describes a progression from MacPaint and BASIC plus video games like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, Myst and SimCity to the more advanced programming languages Perl and Lisp at the same time as his musical family encouraged his transition from the piano to the cello to the double bass.
The name Morgan settled on in WOODS is described as a recursive acronym which stands for WOODS Often Oscillates Droning Strings. The music produced by WOODS for Around You is a Forest was actually generated back in 2016 before Morgan returned to the project during the pandemic. He made the first WOODS piece by having his virtual instrument track a generative animation, then subsequently began to capture short or ‘seed’ phrases which mutated in WOODS over time before he ultimately opted to tighten up on the editing process, with the final three tracks proving more concise.
These pieces appear out of order on Around You is a Forest. In fact the last piece generated by WOODS appears as the first song on the album, and finds Thomas Morgan duetting with himself or his creation as the acclaimed musician responds to the spindly strings of his virtual instrument through the plangent yet judiciously patient plucks of his bass.
Morgan writes that while each track is as the nature of WOODS a blend of wooden, metallic and electronic timbres still ‘the general effect is a self-same texture’. But from piece to piece and sometimes from moment to moment, the virtual instrument does conjure specific analogues out in the real world. On the opener and title track ‘Around You is a Forest’ for instance WOODS sounds a bit like a koto while on ‘Eddies’ it is more sarod than sitar as it traces deft pools and falls like light rain around the treble and bass of Dan Weiss on the tabla drums. As his old college buddy slaps and strikes the tabla, the WOODS as directed by Morgan duly becomes more untethered on this strangely gnawing, sweetly insistent yet somehow unrooted piece which at last finds its confluence.
On a ‘Dream Sequence’ with another longtime collaborator in Craig Taborn, the bassist playing alongside the pianist and the drummer Gerald Cleaver as part of Taborn’s trio between 2007 and 2014, the WOODS virtual instrument erects swift rope ladders and other grabbing apparatus over the submerged fairground sounds of Taborn’s keys, the Farfisa organ and Fender Rhodes almost conjuring a Carnival of Souls before some bird calls emerge by way of Taborn’s field recordings, promising oxygen and levity but ultimately proving just as eerie. Yet on ‘Through the Trees’ the WOODS feels more earthy and grounded, snaking through the restrained bombast and intermittent chug of Cleaver’s tin drums. Together the duo keep on chugging and eventually find themselves in a forest thicket.
The assorted musicians improvised to the WOODS pieces alongside various engineers at Figure 8 Recording and Opus Studios across 2024, with Taborn conceiving and recording his contribution at his home studio. On the shorter ‘In the Dark’ the great Henry Threadgill adds wispy, hissing and then sweet spiralling rushes to the staggered harp-like articulations of the WOODS before the instrument takes a steelier tone up against the smeared fanfares and stretched-out sighs of Ambrose Akinmusire’s stately horn. Billed as an ‘Assembly of All Beings’ this particular congregation seems to slouch and slope into the meeting place sometimes in solitary fashion, not always two by two. As a result towards the end of the track they each receive a desultory round of applause.
Owlish hoots open the lovely, languid and nocturnal ‘Rising from the West’ as Bill Frisell manages to spark or stir embers of warmth in the virtual instrument. Winding up as a deep sojourn through desert landscapes or the old frontier, strained or striated strings up against a steady patter of pulls and plucks eventually give the piece a cosmic or even extra-terrestrial atmosphere. Both here and on the next piece ‘Murmuration’ where Immanuel Wilkins offers up the bright yet soulful chatter and throng of his alto sax, the WOODS sounds most like a donso ngoni, the West African griot medium which is intimately associated with the seventies and eighties fusions of Don Cherry and with Morgan’s fellow double bassist William Parker.
Finally as Around You is a Forest draws to a close it does so through words which helped to direct and inspire the journey, namely those drawn from the Gary Snyder poem ‘Here’ which Morgan first saw on the New York City subway while he was programming and recording WOODS back in 2016. The venerable poet and environmental activist, who remains associated with both the Beat and San Francisco Renaissance movements of the fifties and sixties, had read from ‘Here’ during an interview with NPR in 2015 and Morgan sampled that recital for a WOODS piece in-progress.
Morgan writes that he has ‘come to see WOODS, particularly in the pieces that unfold slowly over long time spans, as ‘akin to geological or cosmic processes’ with each duet then involving a correspondence between mankind and nature. On the album closer ‘Here’ against the jagged plucks of the WOODS – whose zither-like effects seem gradually stripped of their warmth, as the virtual instrument steadily elaborates drier and craggier harmonies – Snyder in slow, sighing and sometimes wonderstruck tones finds himself in the wee morning hours, still dark out as ‘some planet’ rises in the east and a jet plane flies overhead, contemplating the ineffable meaning of our existence.
His question ‘why are we here?’ strikes a note of gentle bewilderment. Describing the possibilities of computer music as ‘all but endless’, in his own account of this album – half history, half creed – Morgan ponders the artistic merit in modes of constraint and concludes that his WOODS is ‘a possible response to abundance: an exploration of one small corner in a vast timbral terrain’.
He also portrays jazz musicians as ‘hackers’ while appearing in the cherished jazz documentary Music for Black Pigeons in 2022, he emerged from a profound and dumbstruck silence to explain improvisation as a process of ‘problem solving [. . .] sometimes you feel like there is some imbalance happening and then you try to see what you can change to restore balance to the music’. Around You is a Forest may not solve one big problem but it does turn the algorithm and generative creation to keener and kinder ends, always engaging as it encourages Morgan and his group of esteemed collaborators to tug on a strange yet fertile thread.
