Jason Moran/Marcus Gilmore – Shards

Jazz moderne

Very Short Summary: An ambitious, genre-blurring album where acoustic mastery meets electronics, Shards fascinates as much as it divides.

Shards Finds Jason Moran’s Trio Balancing Brilliance and Friction

We are firmly in the realm of improvised music here, which is another way of saying that this album will not meet every listener halfway. It is fractured, intricate, and at times deliberately elusive, moving between electronic textures, jazz vocabulary, and other musical forms that feel less like finished statements than like sketches caught in motion. For newcomers, it may prove disorienting. For more seasoned listeners, the experience will hinge on personal tolerance for ambiguity and abstraction. There is also the lingering sense that music of this kind finds its truest expression on stage rather than on record. In a live setting, one can imagine the physicality of the performance taking hold: the sharp attack of piano keys, the vibration of drum skins in the room, the shifting presence of electronic sound moving through space. What feels elusive on record might, in concert, become immediate and almost tactile, shaped in real time before an audience that participates, however quietly, in its unfolding.

On Shards, the second album by Jason Moran, BlankFor.ms, and Marcus Gilmore, performance and transformation become inseparable. Where their earlier project, Refract, examined the meeting point between analog and digital worlds, Shards presents a group that has reached a kind of sonic maturity. The trio allows ideas to breathe, stretching musical events across longer forms and resisting the urge to resolve too quickly.

As Moran and Gilmore play, BlankFor.ms captures fragments of their sound in real time, reshaping them through acceleration, deceleration, reversal, and granular processing before sending them back into the music. In the opening stretches, this can feel revelatory: a single piano figure is caught, echoed, and returned as a shimmering halo, while a brushed cymbal pattern reappears seconds later as a ghostly, time-shifted pulse. Later on, however, particularly in the denser passages of the album’s longer pieces, the accumulation of processed sound begins to crowd the acoustic interplay, blurring gestures that might otherwise breathe more freely. The effect is akin to a hall of mirrors, where each gesture returns altered, refracted, and multiplied. The trio responds to echoes of its own immediate past, and sometimes to something that feels more distant still, assembling these temporal shards into improvisations that carry the organic unity of a painting while functioning as layered sonic collages.

The interplay between acoustic instruments and electronics produces a series of fascinating ambiguities. BlankFor.ms moves between extremes, at times generating abrasive, densely textured noise, at others unfolding lush, almost cinematic soundscapes. Moran shifts from lyrical, rhapsodic passages into sharper, more angular terrain, while Gilmore anchors and disrupts in equal measure, offering grooves that briefly coalesce before dissolving into open space. The blending of timbres often obscures their origins, creating an immersive environment in which piano, drums, and processed sound lose their distinct edges and merge into something more fluid and multidimensional.

Yet the electronic element may not convince everyone. Its presence can grow quietly insistent, even intrusive, revealing over time what feels like a tension between two parallel approaches. It is a bit like sunlight breaking through after a storm: one admires the clarity it brings, but also becomes newly aware of the turbulence that preceded it. There is little question about the depth and sensitivity of Moran and Gilmore’s interplay. Their dialogue, on its own, often feels complete, even self-sufficient. In several moments, especially when the electronics recede, the piano and drums achieve a clarity and balance that suggest an entire musical world contained within their exchange. In that light, the addition of electronics may strike some listeners as an expansion, others as a complication.

After encountering similar experiments by other artists, one may come away increasingly divided on this particular balance. When musicians of Moran and Gilmore’s caliber interact, their acoustic conversation can already suggest a fully realized world. Introducing electronics into that space is a bold choice, but not one that will resonate equally with everyone.

In the end, Shards resists definitive judgment, but it does not evade critical perspective. It is an album of striking ideas and undeniable ambition, one that occasionally undermines its own strengths even as it expands its sonic palette. Listeners willing to engage with its shifting logic will find moments of genuine beauty and invention, alongside passages that test their patience. What remains most compelling is not its perfection, but its risk: a refusal to settle, and a commitment to exploration that, whether fully convincing or not, commands attention.

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, May 3rd, 2026

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