“Hearing Morgan deploy his strange machine, featuring a stacked guest roster that includes Bill Frisell, Ambrose Akinmusire, Henry Threadgill, Gerald Cleaver, and others, runs amok, updating and evolving the algorithm as the mood dictates—it’s a glorious mind-melt.”
A fixture of New York City’s jazz and free improv circles for over 25 years, Thomas Morgan is an upright bass player and composer by trade, but a hacker at heart. He stated as such in a guest essay published on the Substack newsletter Transitional Technology, contextualizing his debut album Around You Is A Forest, likening jazz to a kind of “musical hacking”; same principle, different medium: “Whatever is shared, discovered, or invented has the potential to be applied in the very same moment or soon after,” he said. This album’s feedback loop is driven not by the traditional jazz bass playing Morgan is known for, but rather WOODS: a self-made virtual string instrument that produces sounds that are melodically lean, yet texturally tantalizing; West African lute-harp, Central/Eastern European cimbalom, zither, and marimba re-scrambled into proto-ambient ASMR.
Originally published by Bandcamp Daily.Read the full review on Bandcamp Daily