| Jazz |
When an Album Opens with a Bewitching Drum Solo…
How does a jazz trio catch the ear of a critic who receives hundreds of albums a year? Perhaps by opening with a provocation. If a drummer can irritate you in less than thirty seconds, Marcus Gilmore, invariably elegant in his touch and endlessly inventive, chooses instead to disarm. He launches this record with a solo that is both exhilarating and poetic, an incantation of rhythm that is at once muscular and featherlight. His crisp, tensile beats usher in guitar and bass with the assurance of an architect laying the foundation for a cathedral. From the start, it is clear: this is not an album for purists. Rather, it is for the adventurous listener, the kind of ear attuned to contemporary propositions that thrive on hybridity, pulling threads from a sprawling tapestry of musical languages.
The very name Trio of Bloom suggests both genesis and flourishing, three musicians blossoming into something larger than themselves. Keyboardist Craig Taborn, guitarist Nels Cline, and drummer Marcus Gilmore: three singular voices, each omnivorous in his pursuits, each allergic to categorization, and each unafraid of the unknown. For their debut, released September 26, 2025 on Pyroclastic Records, the three meet for the first time in a studio setting. What emerges is not just a recording but a living organism, lush, radiant, and sensuous, much like the flowers gracing the album cover.
The seed for this collaboration was planted by producer and poet David Breskin, a longtime conspirator with all three musicians and a figure whose knack for orchestration often extends beyond the purely musical. “I’m always looking to grow and to build bridges,” Breskin says. “I love bringing together people who admire one another from afar but who have never crossed paths. I never know what the chemistry will be, and that’s what excites me.”
Listening to the record is like entering an unfamiliar city mapped by dream logic. The music recalls the fantastical landscapes of François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters in Les Cités Obscures—parallel worlds where architecture itself seems alive and where wonder coexists with menace. This trio’s music carries a similar otherworldly charge: urban, intellectual, tinged with surrealism, and designed for restless minds eager to absorb the foreign in order to reinvent the familiar.
Conceptually, Trio of Bloom also draws a line back nearly four decades to Strange Meeting (1987), the lone recording by Power Tools, the short-lived but influential project uniting guitarist Bill Frisell, bassist Melvin Gibbs, and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson, also produced by Breskin. That alchemical session became a touchstone for generations of genre-hybridizers, Cline and Taborn among them. The kinship between the two projects is not one of imitation but of spirit: a shared ferocity, a kaleidoscopic vitality. “That precedent, unorthodox, open, even a little rock-inflected, was liberating for me,” Cline reflects.
Of course, such a venture demands more than technical brilliance; it requires a vast cultural appetite and an unflinching commitment to freedom. For Taborn, Cline, and Gilmore, that freedom is not a pose but a necessity. “My first reaction was equal parts excitement and fear,” Cline admits. “These guys are geniuses. I didn’t know what the modus operandi would be, but we found so many points of connection, so many affinities.”
One could speak for hours about the layers and inspirations of this project. But the better course is simply to listen. The album is a journey of seduction and surprise, a work that rewards immersion and promises even greater intensity in performance. Trio of Bloom is not just a meeting of three musicians; it is an opening into a new sound-world, one that feels both rooted in history and utterly uncharted.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, August 28th 2025
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Musicians:
Craig Taborn – keyboards
Marcus Gilmore – drums and percussion
Nels Cline – 6-string and 12-string guitars, lap steel guitar, bass on tracks 4 and 10
Track Listing:
Nightwhistlers
Unreal Light
Breath
Queen King
Diana
Bloomers
Why Canada
Forge
Bend It
Gone Bust
Produced by David Breskin
Recorded and mixed by Ben Greenberg
Tracking: November 24-26, 2024 at The Bunker, Brooklyn
Mixing: April 1-3, 2025 at Circular Ruin Studio, Brooklyn
Mastering: Scott Hull, Masterdisk, Peekskill, NY
Musician photography and videography: Frank Heath
Album design: Spottswood Erving and July Creek for Janky Defense
Flower paintings © Sharon Core from her project Facsimile: Irving Penn, Flowers, 2025. Courtesy Yancey Richardson.
Thanks to Yancey Richardson and Archie Caride, and to Sharon Core for the generous use of her paintings.
Thanks also to Isabel Breskin, Barbara Ruhman, Elizabeth Penta, Ben Greenberg, Brandon Seabrook, Scott Hull, Dianne McKeever, and Kris Davis.