| Jazz |
Summary : Matt Wilson’s Love Is the Whole Thing, We Are Only Pieces brings Good Trouble back with a deeper, more intimate sound, featuring Dawn Clement, Tia Fuller and Jeff Lederer in a powerful celebration of jazz, love, community and musical connection.
Matt Wilson’s Good Trouble Finds a Deeper Meaning in Love
The last time I wrote about Matt Wilson’s Good Trouble was in 2024, when I was genuinely and pleasantly surprised by the strength of the group’s debut album. Good Trouble immediately revealed a band with a clear personality, a strong sense of history and, above all, a remarkable ability to make serious ideas sound joyful without ever making them feel simplistic. Now, with Love Is the Whole Thing, We Are Only Pieces, Matt Wilson and his musical companions return with an album that is just as surprising as its predecessor, but for different reasons. The group has matured, the relationships between the musicians have become deeper and the music seems less interested in making a statement than in creating a space where people can listen to one another, share something meaningful and, perhaps for a little while, forget the noise of the world outside.
The title itself gives us the key to understanding what Wilson is attempting. The phrase comes from the great Sufi poet Rumi, who wrote more than 750 years ago that love is the whole thing and that we are only pieces. Wilson takes those words as the starting point for an album that is joyful, generous and emotionally direct, but never naïve. There is no suggestion that the difficult realities of contemporary life have disappeared. Instead, Wilson seems to be asking what can still be created in the middle of all that uncertainty. His answer is music, community and the simple but increasingly meaningful act of bringing people together.
That approach makes perfect sense for a musician who has spent roughly three decades building an extraordinarily broad musical family. Wilson is a drummer and composer, but his work as a bandleader has always been about much more than drums and compositions. He has a particular talent for bringing musicians with different personalities and backgrounds into the same musical environment and allowing their individuality to remain intact while creating something larger than any one of them. His music does not erase differences. It makes those differences useful.
That quality is particularly evident in the continuing presence of Dawn Clement, whose contribution to Good Trouble is central to the group’s identity. Clement is not simply another outstanding instrumentalist placed inside an already impressive ensemble. Her piano playing and vocal presence give the music an emotional warmth that changes the way the compositions are heard. There is a human quality in her approach that prevents the album from becoming an exercise in sophisticated jazz arranging. She can be subtle without becoming distant, expressive without becoming theatrical, and her voice adds a dimension that makes the group feel less like a conventional jazz quintet and more like a musical community.
Jeff Lederer and Tia Fuller are equally important to that identity. Lederer has been one of Wilson’s most trusted collaborators, and his playing brings an unusual combination of intelligence, warmth and unpredictability to the ensemble. Fuller brings a different kind of energy, with an alto saxophone sound capable of moving from lyrical passages to moments of extraordinary intensity without disrupting the overall balance of the music. When the two musicians play together, they create a front line that can be conversational, energetic and deeply melodic, while Wilson and Clement provide an equally responsive foundation underneath them.
Ben Allison remains an important part of the ensemble’s musical architecture, while the expanding personnel surrounding Wilson reinforces the idea that Good Trouble is not a fixed formula. The group is a community in the truest sense of the word, one that can grow without losing its identity. That may be one of the most interesting developments between the 2024 album and the new record. The musicians have had time to learn one another’s instincts, and that familiarity can be heard in the way they leave space for each other. There is a confidence here that does not come from playing louder or faster but from knowing when another musician needs room to speak.
The original Good Trouble, released in 2024, was inspired in large part by the legacy of civil rights leader John Lewis and his famous call to get into “good trouble.” Wilson transformed that idea into a musical response to an increasingly divided society, using positivity as an alternative to cynicism and separation. The album carried a clear social dimension, but it never allowed its message to overwhelm the music. Instead, the political and the musical existed together, with the band using jazz history as a foundation while creating something that felt unmistakably contemporary.
Love Is the Whole Thing, We Are Only Pieces takes the next step. If the first album was concerned with resistance, this one is more concerned with connection. The change is subtle but significant. Wilson is no longer asking primarily how music can respond to conflict. He is exploring how music can help people remain connected when conflict has become part of everyday life.
That makes the album particularly relevant to the current moment. Over the past several years, musicians, writers, filmmakers and visual artists have increasingly felt the need to respond to political division and social anxiety. Jazz has always had a complicated relationship with those questions because the music itself carries such a long history of cultural and political expression. Some artists respond through confrontation, others through satire, anger or direct protest. Terri Lyne Carrington, for example, has explored resistance through a powerful combination of jazz, funk and movement. Wilson chooses a different path. He does not deny the turmoil around him, but he refuses to allow it to become the only subject available to an artist. Instead, he chooses love.
That choice could easily have produced an album that felt sentimental or overly optimistic, but Wilson is too experienced a musician to fall into that trap. His idea of love is not a romantic cliché. It is a form of attention. It is the recognition that musicians need one another, that communities are built through relationships and that music has the ability to create a temporary space where people can experience something other than anxiety.
Wilson has spoken about wanting to make an album centered on love because he feels fortunate to have a musical community, a successful professional journey and a wonderful family. He also speaks about the possibility of using music to celebrate what remains possible in the world and to give listeners a brief moment in which they can forget their problems, both sonically and spiritually. There is something remarkably direct about that ambition. Wilson is not claiming that music can solve political problems. He is suggesting that it can help people remember what it feels like to be together.
That distinction gives the album much of its emotional strength. There is joy throughout the record, sometimes almost excessive joy, but the happiness never feels artificial because it exists alongside an awareness of everything that makes such happiness difficult. The music is tender, generous and occasionally exuberant, but it is also carefully written and arranged. Wilson allows the compositions to breathe, giving the musicians enough freedom to make the performances feel alive rather than merely executed.
This is where Wilson’s drumming becomes particularly fascinating. He has always been capable of using the drums as something more than a timekeeping device, and on this album that quality is especially apparent. He often functions as much like a percussionist as a conventional drummer, shaping texture, space and movement rather than simply marking the pulse. A small accent can change the direction of a phrase, while a moment of restraint can create more tension than a barrage of sound. His playing has an almost spatial quality, as though he is constantly arranging the musicians around him while simultaneously responding to them.
That was one of the qualities I admired when I reviewed Good Trouble in 2024. I wrote that listeners could expect an exceptionally well constructed album, with beautiful poetic passages and compositions and arrangements that made generous room for jazz history while bringing older influences into contemporary writing. I also noted that Wilson seemed at times more like a percussionist than a drummer, working with remarkable finesse and an almost magical sense of space while influencing the musicians around him. Having now heard the new album, I would not take a word of that assessment back. If anything, the new record makes it even clearer that Wilson’s greatest strength may be his ability to make everyone else sound more fully themselves.
The repertoire also reveals just how open Wilson’s musical imagination remains. The album includes material connected to some of the most adventurous chapters of jazz history, including Andrew Hill’s “Black Fire,” while also making room for a very different kind of American musical reference in Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.” That combination says a great deal about Wilson’s approach. He does not treat jazz history as a museum in which certain composers and styles must remain in carefully separated rooms. He treats it as living material, something that can continue to change when musicians bring their own experiences to it.
That is why the presence of a Tom Petty song does not feel like a novelty. Wilson is interested in the emotional meaning of the composition, not in whether it fits neatly into a particular genre. The same openness allows music associated with Jack DeJohnette and compositions by Wilson himself to coexist naturally within the album’s larger world. What connects these pieces is not a rigid stylistic formula but the way the musicians interpret them.
This is also where the maturation of Good Trouble becomes most obvious. The group does not sound as though it is attempting to recreate the surprise of its first album. Instead, it sounds comfortable enough to take risks. That comfort is not complacency. It is the confidence that comes from musicians who know one another well enough to anticipate a reaction without knowing exactly what that reaction will be.
Dawn Clement is particularly effective in creating that sense of trust. Her voice can transform a passage simply by changing its emotional temperature, while her piano playing gives Wilson’s compositions a sense of harmonic depth and intimacy. Tia Fuller brings a more expansive and sometimes more forceful presence, while Jeff Lederer provides an equally important sense of conversation and contrast. Ben Allison anchors the ensemble without becoming merely functional, and Wilson moves through the center of it all, shaping the music without ever making himself the sole focus.
That may be the central lesson of Good Trouble. The leader does not have to be the loudest person in the room. Wilson understands that a band becomes more interesting when every musician has enough freedom to reveal a distinct personality. His role is not to suppress those personalities but to create the environment in which they can coexist.
The result is an album that feels generous in every sense of the word. There is generosity in the arrangements, generosity in the amount of space given to the musicians and generosity in the emotional intention behind the project. Even when the music becomes sophisticated, it never feels exclusionary. Wilson seems to understand that complexity and accessibility do not have to be enemies.
That is increasingly important in contemporary jazz. There is no shortage of technically brilliant musicians, and there is certainly no shortage of ambitious projects. What is much harder to find is music that makes the listener feel that the people creating it genuinely care about the experience of being together. Good Trouble has that quality. You can hear it in the way the musicians respond to one another, in the moments when Wilson deliberately steps back and in the way Clement, Fuller and Lederer can change the direction of a piece without making the ensemble lose its balance.
The album therefore works on two levels. On the surface, it is simply an enjoyable and beautifully performed jazz record. Beneath that surface, however, it is an argument about how people might live together. Wilson does not preach that argument. He lets the music make it.
That is perhaps why the Rumi quotation works so well. We are all pieces, Wilson suggests, and the mistake is to believe that a piece must be complete on its own. The musicians become meaningful through their relationships with one another. The compositions become meaningful through interpretation. The band becomes meaningful through its relationship with its audience. The entire project depends on the idea that something larger can emerge when individual parts are willing to listen.
In that sense, Love Is the Whole Thing, We Are Only Pieces is not an escape from the world. It is a response to it. Wilson is not pretending that political divisions, social tensions or personal anxieties have disappeared. He is simply choosing not to give them the final word.
That choice gives the album a quiet strength. It would have been easy to make a record about anger, especially given the cultural climate of the past several years. It would also have been easy to make a record about nostalgia, using jazz history as a safe place to hide from the present. Wilson does neither. He acknowledges the past, recognizes the present and chooses to concentrate on what people can still build together.
The result is joyful without being frivolous, serious without being heavy handed and political without becoming a political lecture. It is also deeply musical, which may sound obvious but should never be taken for granted. Wilson’s ideas work because the compositions and arrangements are strong enough to stand on their own. The message would mean very little if the music did not invite us to stay. Fortunately, it does.
I would therefore suggest listening to this album more than once and resisting the temptation to treat it simply as a continuation of Good Trouble. The first record introduced a band with a strong identity and a clear sense of purpose. The new record reveals what happens when that identity has had time to mature. Listen particularly to the interaction between Clement and Wilson, to the contrasting personalities of Fuller and Lederer, and to the way the rhythm section creates room rather than simply filling it. The more attention you give the record, the more apparent its internal architecture becomes.
There is also value in listening to the album in different circumstances. It can work as an immediate, enjoyable jazz record, but it rewards quieter listening when you can focus on the arrangements and the conversations taking place inside them. The record does not reveal everything at once, and that is one of its strengths. Its warmth is immediate, while its deeper musical details become clearer with repeated listening.
When I first wrote about Matt Wilson’s Good Trouble in 2024, I was very pleasantly surprised. I would not remove a word from what I wrote then. The group has now matured, that much is certain, but the most encouraging thing is that maturity has not diminished its curiosity or its generosity. Instead, the musicians sound more confident, more connected and more willing to trust one another.
That makes Love Is the Whole Thing, We Are Only Pieces more than a successful follow up to an impressive first album. It is evidence that Good Trouble has become a genuine musical community, one capable of evolving without losing the qualities that made it compelling in the first place.
Matt Wilson has spent decades bringing pieces of his musical world together. On this album, that philosophy becomes almost impossible to miss. Jazz history, contemporary composition, personal experience, friendship and social awareness all become parts of the same larger conversation. Nothing needs to dominate because everything contributes.
And that is ultimately what makes the album so convincing. Wilson does not offer music as a solution to the world’s problems, and he does not pretend that a beautiful performance can erase suffering. What he offers is more modest and, perhaps because of that, more believable. He offers a place where people can meet, listen, breathe and remember that they are not isolated pieces but parts of something larger.
In a musical landscape that can sometimes seem obsessed with virtuosity, novelty and positioning, there is something quietly radical about making an album whose deepest ambition is simply to bring people together. Matt Wilson and Good Trouble have done exactly that, and they have done it with intelligence, humor, extraordinary musicianship and a genuine sense of affection for the music and for the people who make it possible. I was impressed by Good Trouble in 2024, but after hearing Love Is the Whole Thing, We Are Only Pieces, I am convinced that the group has moved beyond being an interesting new ensemble. It has become a mature, distinctive and deeply human musical community, and that may be the most important thing it could have become.
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 25th, 2026
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Musicians :
Tia Fuller, alto saxophone (2.4.7.10)
Anisha Rush, alto saxophone (1.2.3.7.10)
Dawn Clement, piano, voice Synthetiser
Jeff Lederer, tenor saxophone
Ben Allison, acoustic and Hofner electric bass
Matt Wilson, drums
Track Listing :
Wind Spirit
Fuller Love (In Case You Missed It)
I Won’t Back Down
Black Fire
Joonam
Anyone Who Had A Heart
Welcome Table
Green Al
Festival
Love Is The Whole Thing, We Are Only Pieces
Palmetto Records – PM22013 – Recorded January 3-4 and May 2, 2026