| Jazz moderne |
Summary : Jacob Wick’s I’ll Make You Coffee While You Still Sleep is an intimate, unconventional jazz album shaped by memory, desire, improvisation and “queer time,” moving between experimental music, personal stories and cinematic soundscapes.
Jacob Wick: Finding Light in the Darkness of I’ll Make You Coffee While You Still Sleep
To approach Jacob Wick’s highly conceptual album, I’ll Make You Coffee While You Still Sleep, you first have to understand that Jacob Wick, an American trumpeter, composer, vocalist and improviser, has been based in Mexico City since 2014. This is not an album that tells one story from beginning to end. It is more like a succession of slices of life, fragments of moments, memories, desires and situations that appear, disappear and sometimes return in another form. From the very first notes, it brought me almost immediately back to the punk years, with a voice deliberately out of step with the music, a voice that refuses to follow the traditional rules of interpretation. It is categorical. You take it or you leave it. The first track, Every Day I Stand on the Balcony and Hope You Walk By, was a complete discovery for me, an immediate immersion into something I was trying to understand while listening. Yes, this is a world very far from mine, with its own codes, its own parameters, its own emotional language. And why not? I let myself be guided, amused by the proposition, because beneath all the conceptual thinking there is something musically quite fascinating.
Rather than telling a single story, the album unfolds through a series of intimate moments: preparing breakfast for a partner, driving at night after visiting a lover, walking hand in hand through the streets of Mexico City, and discovering what it means to remain open to love. Written while moving in and out of a relationship that profoundly shaped the music, the album embraces what Wick calls “queer time,” a sentimental and nonlinear way of thinking about composition and improvisation in which memory, longing and the present exist side by side. I find this idea particularly interesting because it explains much of what I hear in the record. The music does not move like a conventional story. It moves more like memory. One moment brings back another. A place becomes a person. A person becomes a memory. And suddenly something that happened a long time ago feels as though it is happening again.
Jacob Wick’s vocal expression often sounds like despair, or perhaps like a particular form of nostalgia for moments that have passed, places that have been crossed, people encountered here and there and then lost somewhere along the way. There is something almost fragile in this voice, but it is never simply fragile. It seems to be searching for something, and sometimes I am not sure whether that something is another person, a memory or simply a way of remaining open. The approach is inevitably intellectual, and it becomes unmistakable with the second track, New Jersey Turnpike 3am Cold Coffee Stale Milk. Suddenly, Wick’s universe becomes much larger. He knows how to take control after that first track, which sounds almost like a hangover, the morning after a party, when you are still trying to remember exactly what happened. The music pulls us into his thoughts, into moments that refuse to remain fixed. The places express themselves through his trumpet. There is something David Lynch-like in the way these stories develop, as if familiar landscapes had been slightly altered overnight and we were being asked to find our way through them without a map.
There is also something very interesting in the fact that Wick came to singing relatively late. His voice does not sound like an ornamental addition to the trumpet. It becomes another instrument, another way of entering the emotional space of the compositions. His work exists somewhere between jazz, American song and experimental composition, and perhaps this is why the album refuses to settle comfortably inside a single category. Wick is an improviser, a writer and an artist, and his work is deeply informed by queer feelings and queer politics. But what interests me is that these ideas do not remain outside the music as a theoretical explanation. They become part of the way the music moves.
Now established in Mexico City, Wick performs regularly with a quartet that has developed these compositions through an ongoing collaborative process. Gibrán Andrade on drums, Alonso López Valdés on bass and Federico Sánchez on guitar give the music a collective dimension that is essential. The writing is carefully constructed, but the improvisation remains open. The quartet moves between lyrical melodies, shifting rhythmic frameworks and collective interplay, and this gives the compositions room to change without losing their emotional center. Nothing feels entirely predetermined, yet nothing feels accidental either. That balance is one of the things I like most about the record. The musicians are not simply accompanying an idea. They are inside it.
It is through improvisation that Wick’s literary expression ultimately finds its most convincing form. Certainly, this is not the easiest album to approach. It questions, it speaks, it plays with us. Nostalgia, when it gets hold of you, can be a dangerous companion. But what kind of nostalgia are we actually hearing here? That is where the album becomes more intriguing for me, because the music may say considerably more than the words. The sounds are cinematic, timeless, sometimes brilliant in the way they suggest places and situations without explaining them. Wick seems less interested in telling us what to see than in opening a door and letting us decide what lies behind it.
Then comes My Way, and again I have the feeling of the morning after a long night, perhaps after too many drinks on the terrace of a café, when the world is still moving but your perception of it has changed. There is a kind of playful deconstruction here, completely controlled despite its apparent disorder. It seems almost to arrive simply to tell us, “Look, I am alive.” But in reality, we can imagine whatever we want. And this, for me, is precisely where the album succeeds. It does not lock us into one image. It gives us the possibility of creating our own images from propositions that are constantly surprising. The album is not telling us what to feel. It is giving us enough material to feel something ourselves.
Here, I think, you have to stop trying to understand everything. You simply have to accept the musical and artistic propositions for what they are. That is also a purely artistic approach. Sometimes an artist does not give you the key to the door. Sometimes the door itself is the work. And this is where I began thinking about Pierre Soulages.
The comparison may seem strange at first, but it makes sense to me. Soulages spent much of his career exploring black, but his black was never simply black. His work was about the relationship between darkness and light, between surface and reflection, between what is visible and what suddenly appears because the light changes. At Conques, his work with the stained glass went even further. Between 1987 and 1994, he developed 104 windows using uncolored, translucent glass designed to respond to variations in natural light. The glass does not impose a color on the building. It allows light itself to become part of the work. The result is constantly changing, dependent on time, weather and the movement of the light.
This is what brings me back to Jacob Wick. It seems to me that he is also working with something that is never completely fixed. His music changes according to memory, according to the moment, according to the musicians, according to what the listener brings into it. Like Soulages, he seems less interested in giving us an image than in creating the conditions for an image to appear.
Perhaps this is why I hear something deeper beneath the apparent bitterness of the album. Wick brings a little light into a world that is not always easy. Not a comfortable light, not some easy form of consolation, but a light that appears precisely because there is darkness around it. His music is fragmented, sometimes strange, sometimes deliberately difficult, but it remains open. And openness is probably one of the most important words for understanding this record. Open to memory. Open to desire. Open to uncertainty. Open to love.
That is also why I do not think this album should be approached as a puzzle that needs to be solved. It should simply be experienced. Some listeners will probably find it difficult, perhaps even irritating. I understand that. It does not give you many conventional points of reference. But that refusal is also its strength. Wick is not trying to reproduce something we already know. He is trying to create a space in which different memories, emotions and musical languages can coexist.
And perhaps that is what stayed with me. I began listening to this album trying to understand its concept, because that is what we often do with music that appears intellectual. Then I realized that I did not necessarily need to understand it. I could simply follow it. From the balcony to the New Jersey Turnpike, from cold coffee and stale milk to the streets of Mexico City, from the morning after a party to the possibility of walking hand in hand again, the album creates a strange geography of memory.
There are bodies here, lovers, departures, places, cigarettes, cold coffee, late-night roads, conversations and things that remain unsaid. There is also the feeling that life continues even when something inside us has not yet caught up with it. And this is perhaps where Jacob Wick reaches me most directly. Not because I belong to the world he describes, but because I recognize the feeling of looking at something that has already passed and wondering when, exactly, it became the past.
Maybe this is the real achievement of I’ll Make You Coffee While You Still Sleep. It does not ask us to enter Jacob Wick’s world and simply accept his rules. It gives us fragments and allows us to build our own world from them. That is a very demanding form of artistic freedom, both for the musician and for the listener.
I started by trying to understand the concept. I ended up with images. Somewhere between the balcony, the New Jersey Turnpike, the streets of Mexico City and the strange light after a long night, Jacob Wick creates a music that exists somewhere between memory and imagination. And perhaps, like Soulages at Conques, he understands something very simple and very difficult: sometimes you have to go through the darkness to see the light.
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, September 7th, 2026
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Musicians :
Gibrán Andrade, drums
Alonso López Valdés, bass
Federico Sánchez, guitar
Jacob Wick, trumpet & voice
Track Listing :
Every day I stand on the balcony and hope you walk by
New Jersey Turnpike 3am cold coffee stale milk
Fate should have made you a gentleman’s
Sentado en la barra con un nazi y Ramón
Ya
My Way
Paso y vamos caminando de la mano
Un día nos vamos a morir
Every time we say goodbye
Recorded March 22-23 & July 16 2025 at Pedro y el Lobo in Mexico City by Santiago Parra. Mixed by Santiago Parra. Mastered by Jonathan Kaspy.
Cover photo by César Torres
Design by Kit Schluter