The Youth Movement Has Arrived: The Micah Thomas Trio

In the 100+ year history of the music we’ve come to call ‘jazz’, there has been almost constant handwringing over its future. The fraught, defeatist refrain: “Is jazz dead?”, and its more optimistic corollary: “keeping jazz alive”, has accompanied every style-change and aesthetic pivot throughout its evolution. I’m here to tell you, jazz - in its broadest meaning  - is as alive as it’s ever been. Exhibit A: the Micah Thomas Trio.

Pianist Micah Thomas, bassist Dean Torrey and drummer Kayvon Gordon, who performed for 55 active listeners at Hawks & Reed on December 12, are all in their late 20s-early 30s. To judge from Thursday’s results in Greenfield, the future of the music is in good hands. These three emerging artists, along with peers like Elena Pinderhughes, Immanuel Wilkins, Nubya Garcia, Mali Obamsawin, Nick Dunston, Savanah Harris, Joel Ross, Lesley Mok, Jazzmeia Horn, and many others, make it clear the jazz pipeline is flowing fine. The problem is not a lack of talent, but a dearth of opportunities to get the music before the public, especially in live performance.

Thomas has been getting his music before the public. Days before his first visit to western Mass, the 27-year old pianist was headlining Kuumbwa Jazz (Santa Cruz) and the Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society (Half Moon Bay), two venerable California jazz institutions. His extensive work with his former Juilliard classmate, saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, has certainly raised his profile. Adam Shatz’ glowing article in the New York Review in 2020, plus extensive coverage in the New York Times, a 2024 feature in the New York City Jazz Record, and his inclusion in Downbeat’s recent piece, “25 For the Future”, have helped create a well-deserved buzz around Thomas. Here’s Nate Chinen’s 2020 profile of him for NPR. Thomas has toured with the fire breathing  saxophonist Zoh Amba (he told me his fingers would bleed after playing with her); my friend Cliff Peterson said he recently saw him at The Falcon (Marlboro, NY) with drummer Joe Farnsworth’s band. He has the chops and the range to be comfortable anywhere in the music’s ever expanding tent.

The Trio began with a free, open-ended, three-way conversation. The musicians were listening deeply and each had something to say. I heard the intense, telepathic interplay and elastic sense of time that defines all great improvising ensembles. About half way through their 80-minute set, Thomas introduced a stride figure that catapulted the band in a dramatic new direction. Locked in and swinging, the band launched in a language we all understood. Soon enough, of course, the trio loosened the reins; liberties were again taken.

That was prelude to an even more unexpected, if timely, romp through a medley of popular Christmas melodies, including “Jingle Bells”. It was obvious from the get-go that Torrey, Gordon and Thomas could play their instruments. But playing at impossible tempos, the torrent of fresh ideas on this all-too-familiar material was impressive, to say the least. This seasonal offering pleased the crowd.

It’s always exciting to hear musicians for the first time, and my introduction to bassist Dean Torrey was a thrill. He was hyper-responsive to his surroundings, accenting his bandmate’s phrases while continuing to suggest his own. He never had to play loudly to be heard in the mix, and his supple time stretching resulted in uncertainty, drama and an element of danger. He was a perfect foil for Thomas.

Kayvon Gordon came up in jazz-rich Detroit under the tutelage of Motor City icon, Marcus Belgrave. Now living in New Jersey, Gordon works with pianist Sullivan Fortner and talented newcomers like saxophonists Kevin Sun and Nicole Glover. He can be found on recent recordings by Sun, Glover and Micah Thomas. Like his rhythm-mates, he never overplayed and was continually intent on creating a group sound.

Home base for the Micah Thomas Trio has been Smalls in New York’s Greenwich Village, where they’ve spent lots of time performing and hanging out. The night after their Jazz Shares date, the Trio worked at Mezzrow, Smalls’ sister club next door on West 10th  Street. The camaraderie and sense of shared purpose they’ve built is clear on Reveal, their 2023 Artwork Records release, and their easy rapport was apparent during dinner and their hang at my house.

Thomas told me I reminded him of Frank Kimbrough, one of his mentors at Julliard. Knowing how universally loved and respected the late pianist was, I took that as a major compliment. In fact, Thomas and his band mates seemed eager to absorb the jazz past, and humble about their own achievements thus far. But they also exuded a quiet confidence that they too are contributing to the ongoing evolution of the music. I took comfort from that.

Guitar Advances in Holyoke: Brandon Seabrook

Over the years, I’ve been honored to present solo concerts by some of the world’s most outstanding jazz guitarists, including Marc Ribot, Fred Frith, James ‘Blood’ Ulmer and Elliott Sharp. But the November 20 concert at Holyoke Media featuring Brandon Seabrook now occupies a special place in my pantheon.

The technical display was dazzling, breathtaking even. Moments of astoundment, sometimes grounded in provocation, sometimes bathed in beauty, flowed into one another, as Seabrook danced across his fretboard at impossible speeds. But it wasn’t only the prodigious proficiency that wowed us, as impressive as that was. It was his playful approach and fearless attitude that made the concert so memorable.

Peter Margasak nailed it in 2017 when he wrote of Seabrook’s, “complex, idea-packed instrumentals with wildly shifting time signatures, rapid-fire chord changes, sinister riffing, and characteristically spastic solo explosions”. Wednesday’s 60-minute recital was as exhausting as it was exhilarating.

This was the 13th concert Seabrook has played since his new solo recording, Object of Unknown Function (Pyroclastic Records) dropped last month. For each of these solo concerts, he told me, he covers the same material in the same order, with lots of room for improvising, of course. In fact, he does the same thing for all his bands: every concert in a particular tour has the identical set list. The better to fully explore the possibilities within each composition, I suppose.

He played material from the new record, which is full of overdubbed guitar and banjo parts. On Wednesday he stuck exclusively to his 1998 Jerry Jones Neptune 12-string guitar. But nothing felt missing. With the help of various pedals and effects, Seabrook coaxed a universe full of sounds and textures from his instrument. Without resorting to loops, he created the illusion of multiple performers.

He told the 30 of us smart enough to show up, that the music he composed and performed was inspired by this particular 12-string guitar. He joked that the next time he was invited he’d just play banjo. (I might just take him up on that.)

Seabrook grew up near Gillette Stadium in Foxbrough, MA, about 20 miles south of Boston. Some of his older musician friends went to UMass, so while still in high school he’d come out to western Mass on weekends to play house parties and other assorted gigs. So even though the last time Seabrook performed in the area was in 2019 with Tomas Fujiwara’s Triple-Double, he has spent time in the Valley and knew his way around. One of those UMass friends, Kevin Delano, made the trip from Attleboro with his wife and son. For Kevin and his cohort, Seabrook is like the sandlot teammate who made it to the pros. He was demonstrably proud and marveled at Seabrook’s intrepid instincts and mind-boggling dexterity.

Seabrook has a well-developed sense of humor. At his insistence, his vocal mic had lots of reverb on it. He mused what it would be like to have that be his voice at home. “No” he bellowed into the microphone, followed by a much meeker “yes”. The titles of his pieces: “Historical Importance of Eccentricity”, “Perverted by Perseverance”, “Gawk Fodder”, “Some Recanted Evening”, reflect his whimsical nature. Here is his piece “Gondola Freak”. When he played it in Holyoke, he dedicated his performance to Jazz Shares Vice President Priscilla Page and yours truly.

Seabrook, now 40, is becoming an essential member of a generation of forward-thinking wunderkinds; he’s already collaborated with many of them. His trio with Cooper-Moore and Gerald Cleaver has produced two fantastic releases on Astral Spirits. His 2023 Pyroclastic release, brutalovechamp, written for octet, “demonstrates Seabrook’s remarkable abilities as a composer and conveys the breadth and imagination of his palette,” writes Stuart Broomer.

Seabrook’s virtuosity as a string player is firmly established, and his composing and bandleading skills are fast catching up. Like half of the artists we present these days, Seabrook now lives in Brooklyn, not so far from us here in western Massachusetts. We look forward to seeing his development up close in the years ahead.

New Friends Appear: Arun Ramamurthy Trio at The Blue Room

The confluence of Indian music and jazz has a rich history that extends in many directions. Back in the day, artists like Yusef Lateef, John and Alice Coltrane were interested in Indian music, while composer John Mayer was seriously exploring the melding of these two immense musical worlds. In the recent past, Badal Roy, John McLaughlin’s Shakti, L Subramaniam, Trilok Gurtu and Zakir Hussain have all contributed to the integration of Indian music and jazz.  Today, musicians like Rudresh Mahanthappa, Debashish Bhattacharya, Arun Ghosh and Sunny Jain continue to move the needle in all quadrants. Add violinist Arun Ramamurthy’s name to this list.

Ramamurthy’s Trio, featuring electric bassist Damon Banks and drummer Sameer Gupta, performed a Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares concert on November 9 before a full house at the Blue Room at CitySpace in Easthampton, MA. Touring in support of their recent Greenleaf recording, New Moon, the Trio supplied a much needed respite from recent unsettling election news.

The “New Moon Suite”, which formed the backbone of both the concert and the recording, was composed by Ramamurthy with support from a Chamber Music America New Jazz Works grant. Like Jason Robinson’s compositions for his “Ancestral Numbers” project which Jazz Shares produced last month, the inspiration for “New Moon Suite” comes from a beloved maternal grandmother.

Ramamurthy’s music brought us many places. There is a mournful, blues-like thread that weaves its way through much Indian music. There were parts of “Aaji”, named for his grandmother, and “Sri Valli”, which concluded the evening, where plaintive melodies were bent in sorrow song. “Amavasya” had a powerful backbeat and a funky refrain, perhaps not surprising from a composer raised on A Tribe Called Quest and Radiohead. The music had open sections filled with indeterminate rhythms and harmonies, but in the main had well-defined contours, anchored by the brilliant efforts of Banks and Gupta.

The Arun Ramamurthy Trio is a real band; they inhabited the material as if they had each wrote it. That cohesion is the result of long shared history and a number of live concerts since this music debuted in 2022. Ramamurthy and Gupta go back to 2006 and are co-founders of Brooklyn Raga Massive,  a progressive genre-bending collective of musicians rooted-in and inspired-by the classical music of India. Ramamurthy and Banks have shared history in Adam Rudolph’s GO: Organic Orchestra. Brooklyn Raga Massive is featured with GO: Organic on the outstanding 2019 release, Ragmala: A Garland of Ragas. This 30-piece juggernaut performed the last Magic Triangle Jazz Series concert at UMass in April, 2022. Ramamurthy, however, had COVID at the time and missed the date.

After living in New York for over 15 years, Gupta moved his family back to his hometown in the SF Bay area a few years ago to care for parents. Ramamurthy is reluctant to use other drummers in the Trio, which means they have to be strategic about scheduling work. Gupta, who is also an accomplished tabla player, told me about his relationship with pianist Marc Cary, whom he called “family”. When Cary recruited him to be a member of his Focus Trio almost 20 years ago, he went to the Gupta home to assure his parents that allowing Sameer to move to New York would advance his musical career. Gupta, who has also worked with Grachan Moncur III, Sonny Simmons and the poet Sekou Sundiata, was masterful, precisely tossing off double and triple time figures with ease. His unaccompanied solo towards the end of the concert elicited a rousing response from the throng of 100.  

Like his bandmates, Damon Banks is engaging and kind. His role was as essential to the sound of the Trio as Aston Barrett’s was with the Wailers. He provided ballast for Ramamurthy’s sailing violin, and with judicious use of pedals and effects, created drone-like sound beds for the band’s soaring discourse. Born and raised in the Bronx and educated at the High School of Music & Art and Fisk University, Banks has provided services for artists ranging from George Benson and Arto Lindsay, to Hassan Hakmoun and Angelique Kidjo. He will be back in the area on March 8 performing with Aaron Shragge’s Whispering World, and will be tagging along on January 4 when his wife, the violinist Gwen Laster, brings her New Muse4tet to Springfield.

The New Moon Suite is a meditation on multiculturalism. Studying South Indian Carnatic music while growing up in New Jersey, Ramamurthy had one foot in two very different musical cultures. “It was Aaji who reminded me that there was only ONE me,” Ramamurthy writes in the liner notes. “That there actually are no lines.” That oneness permeated the music we heard on Thursday. Ragas, spiritual jazz, the vast openness of the avant-garde, the funk of urban America, were all clearly present, happily co-existing in one organic form.

The Arum Ramamurthy Trio was at Next Stage Arts in Putney, VT on October 18, and performed at the Iron Horse in late September, as part of the Northampton Jazz Festival. I was glad Festival organizers Ruth Griggs, Paul Arslanian and Carol Abbe Smith, who were so busy running around that day they didn’t get to hear the Trio, were in the house and able to sit with the music. For all of us, it was a balm for battered souls.