Joe Morris

Symbolic Gesture is the trio of guitarist Joe Morris with bassist Nate McBride and drummer Curt Newton, recorded near Boston in June 1993 and released by Soul Note the following year. Morris's earlier trio records, Wraparound (1983), Human Rites (1987) and Flip And Spike (1992), had come out on the small Riti label. Over the years the trio's bassists and drummers had included Sebastian Steinberg, Jerome Deupree, Thurman Barker and Laurence Cook. This was its first album for another label. The next trio record, Antennae, came out on AUM Fidelity in 1997, with McBride again on bass and Jerome Deupree on drums.

The session was taped on June 12, 1993 at The Outpost in Stoughton, Massachusetts, with Morris producing and Giovanni Bonandrini as executive producer. McBride plays acoustic bass throughout. The five pieces are long and give the trio room to build: Lowell's House runs for fourteen minutes and the title track for over thirteen. Invisible opens the set at nine minutes and The Lookman closes it. Finite/Margin comes in between, at about nine and a half minutes, and the whole set runs to almost 54 minutes.

This is the original Soul Note CD, catalogue number 121204-2, released in 1994.