| Jazz |
Gary Brunton Lands a Trio Masterclass at the Legendary Van Gelder Studio.
For several years now, bassist and composer Gary Brunton has been building his discography around the idea of a journey, with each album marking a different mode of travel. He took us by coach on Night Bus and Second Trip, by train on Trên Dỵdd and Gwawr, and even into orbit on Spacecraft. With Flying Over New York, he boards a plane, and the destination matters as much as the trip itself. This is Brunton’s return to the city where his own musical journey properly began, and the album plays like both a homecoming and a tribute, to the city, to the musicians who shaped him, and to the people he has lost along the way.
The story behind this album stretches back to 1992, when Brunton, then living in Paris, travelled to New York and met pianist Jeremy Manasia. Thirty-three years later, in April of this year, the two old friends found each other again in New York and built this record together, joined by drummer Charles Goold. It’s a trio of genuine chemistry rather than convenience, and that long, slow-built familiarity is audible throughout: this is unhurried, deeply listening music, the kind that only comes from musicians who have nothing left to prove to one another.
To capture it, the trio made a bold choice: they recorded at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, the hallowed room where John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock and so many giants of jazz cut some of the music’s most important records. Engineer Maureen Sickler, the studio’s true heir to the Van Gelder sound, and mixing/mastering engineer Katsuhiko Naito, gave the album a clarity and acoustic depth that feels organic rather than polished, you can hear the room as much as the instruments. Recording in that space wasn’t a gimmick for Brunton – as the album’s story makes clear, several of these compositions are direct, loving references to the records made there decades ago.
What makes Flying Over New York so rewarding is how much history is folded into each track, never worn heavily, but always present once you know the stories.
The album opens with “Retrouvailles in Central Park”, a piece originally composed in 2021 and recorded on the album Second Trip with Bojan Z and Simon Goubert. Brunton and Manasia revisited it in a metre of 7/4, specially adapted for this reunion thirty-three years after their first meeting in New York, making it a fitting, circular way to open the record. The Trio has the rare ability to make intricate decisions sound completely natural. An accent lands with astonishing precision, a break appears almost casually. The Trio shifts, finds its balance again and moves on before the listener has had time to analyze what just happened. There is considerable experience behind that ease.
“Diggin Dolphy” springs from a childhood memory: around 1984, young Gary discovered Eric Dolphy’s alto saxophone on a BBC jazz broadcast watched with his father. Initially unsettled by the atonal improvisations, he grew to love their audacity and energy over the years. Knowing that several of Dolphy’s own classic albums, including Out to Lucy, were recorded in this very New Jersey studio, Brunton built the melody by singing it and improvising freely, setting it over a blues in D-flat while leaving the bass solo entirely unbound by harmonic restriction. “Diggin Dolphy” is not a proclamation about virtuosity. It is closer to a suggestion that virtuosity can be interrupted, redirected and made more interesting by allowing the music to breathe.
“Rising Damp”, first heard on the previous quintet album Spacecraft, is dedicated to bassist Steve Swallow, and traces back to a 2003 Carla Bley Big Band concert in Paris, where Brunton handed Swallow a copy of his very first album, French Cricket, and received a warm, encouraging reply a month later. The piece draws on Brunton’s own musical world and, in particular, on Steve Swallow’s celebrated composition “Falling Grace”, over which Brunton has laid an entirely new melody.
“Did He Eckers Like” takes its title from a Northern English expression meaning, roughly “did he heck”. Brunton set himself the challenge of writing a piece in B-flat major at a brisk tempo, asking Charles Goold to improvise a free introduction to establish the pace, before the theme unfolds across the classic AABA form over Anatole changes. The result is lively, generous, occasionally mischievous and often surprising, but above all deeply musical.
There is also a lightness running through the record that feels particularly revealing. “My Piano Joy” has a sweeter origin story: after a run of concerts in Paris with a cabaret singer in 1990, Brunton bought his first upright piano, an instrument that followed him through five house moves and witnessed the birth of a hundred compositions. In early 2026, he finally upgraded to a higher-grade instrument, and it was while playing it for the very first time that he composed this simple, beautifully unadorned melody.
“Million Dollar Ears” has roots in a 2011 commission for the large ensemble Pee Bee, for which Brunton wrote a suite dedicated to Charles Mingus; a trio version, recorded as “Mingus’ House” with Bojan Z and Simon Goubert, appeared in 2021. The story is also tied to singer Sheila Jordan, with whom Brunton shared the stage in 2004 and 2017. Jordan, a close friend of both Mingus and Charlie Parker, was famously told by Parker himself, “Ah, you’re the one whose ears are worth a million dollars”, the phrase that gives the piece its title. Brunton had hoped to invite her to take part in this very recording, but she passed away in August 2025 at the age of 96. In tribute to her and to celebrate her remarkable life, the piece, originally a ballad, was transformed into a festive samba.
“Tommy and George” references pianist Tommy Flanagan and bassist George Mraz. As a student in Wales in 1986, Brunton heard a cassette of Mraz’s playing on the album Eclypso and was struck by it. He would go on to see him live in Paris in 1989 and again in 1992 at New York’s Sweet Basil, performing in Flanagan’s trio. Since Flanagan’s own Jazz Poet was recorded in this same Van Gelder studio in 1989, Brunton set out here, with Manasia and Goold, to recapture something of the rare rapport that united those two now-departed musicians.
The album also offers a personal rereading of the standard “Autumn in New York” by Vernon Duke, given new dimension by the trio’s distinctive approach. “Good Shalt Prevail” is a waltz composed in 2022, previously heard on the album Trên Dỵdd with French saxophonist François Jeanneau. Through this melody, Brunton reaches for something quietly hopeful: in the face of the world’s wars, injustices, destruction and suffering, the piece carries his conviction that peace will eventually be found again, and that goodness will ultimately prevail.
“Henry Grimes” salutes another towering bassist who recorded repeatedly at this same studio during the 1960s, including sessions with McCoy Tyner and Roy Haynes. After a brief free double bass introduction and a rubato theme, the trio moves into a blues in E-flat, a direct historical nod, since it was in this very room that Coltrane recorded his own famous E-flat blues, “Bessie’s Blues”, on the 1964 album Crescent. Brunton wanted to honour here all the qualities of a complete musician: a powerful sound, steel-like time, and total mastery of the bow. There is a quality in that album that deserves attention: restraint. At a time when virtuosity is often confused with density, when every second seems expected to be filled, the trio knows how to let a phrase breathe. The bass is no longer merely a harmonic foundation, and the drums do not simply mark the beat. Both participate in a shifting conversation in which the piano can move forward, step back, suspend an idea or return to it from another direction.
The album closes with “Wednesday Night Bebop in Accrington,” a fast, intense theme steeped in the spirit of hard bop and torrid swing, offering Manasia an ideal modal canvas to stretch out on. The title has a very English, very funny backstory, drawn from Herbie Hancock’s world and in particular his album Speak Like a Child, recorded at this studio on March 9, 1968, Brunton’s own birthday. It tells the ironic tale of a bassist from Burnley who boasted everywhere about playing demanding bebop every Wednesday night, only to prove incapable of swinging a tune in a club in the neighbouring town of Accrington.
Brunton’s long path, from a working-class household in Burnley steeped in blues and trad jazz, through classical training at the Paris Conservatory, private study with giants like Dave Holland, Gary Peacock and Ray Brown, and three decades of restless creative projects across France, South Korea, China and beyond, has clearly been building toward a record like this one. Flying Over New York feels like both a culmination and a renewal: a trio record of exceptional narrative maturity, guided with real subtlety by Clovis Nicolas’s artistic direction, that manages to be virtuosic, lived-in and deeply human all at once.
Jeremy Manasia and Charles Goold match Brunton’s generosity of spirit note for note, and the Van Gelder recording gives the whole album a presence and warmth that suits this very personal material perfectly. This is a trio record built on history, friendship and genuine storytelling, and it stands as a major, warmly affecting milestone in Gary Brunton’s discography.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, October 4th, 2026
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Musicians:
Gary Brunton – doble bass
Jeremy Manasia – piano
Charles Goold – drums
Tracklisting :
Retrouvailles in Central Park
Diggin Dolphy
Rising Damp
Did He Eckers Like
My Piano Joy
Million Dollar Ears
Tommy and George
Autumn in New York
Good Shalt Prevail
Henry Grimes
Wednesday Night Bebop in Accrington
All the compositions are by Gary Brunton (Éditions Amoc), with the exception of ‘Autumn in New York’ by Vernon Duke (Warner Chappell Music Corp)