| Soul Jazz |
Mercy We Need: Julian Davis Reid turns grief into grace, one patient phrase at a time
This is unhurried, deeply considered music, made by a musician who happens to also be a trained theologian, and the combination gives the record a genuinely distinctive sense of purpose: less concerned with dazzling the listener than with actually sitting with them through something difficult.
Reid’s background explains a great deal about why Mercy We Need sounds the way it does. Raised on Chicago’s Southwest Side on a steady diet of classical, gospel and jazz piano, he went on to earn a philosophy degree at Yale where he also directed music for the Black Church at Yale and led his own jazz trio before completing a Master of Divinity at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, with a thesis focused specifically on the theological implications of wordless musical improvisation. That’s not a common academic pairing, and it shows up directly in his music: Reid approaches improvisation less as technical display and more as a genuine spiritual practice, an idea he’s carried through his contemplative retreat ministry Notes of Rest and through earlier projects including the boundary-crossing group The JuJu Exchange, which he co-founded with his brother and fellow musician Nico Segal.
Circle of Trust draws explicitly on the lineage of Herbie Hancock, Ahmad Jamal, McCoy Tyner and Robert Glasper, and on Mercy We Need that lineage is audible in Reid’s warm, unhurried piano voicings throughout. He’s joined here by alto saxophonist Lenard Simpson, bassist Ethan Philion, drummer James Russell Sims, and vocalist Tramaine Parker, whose expanded presence across roughly half the record marks the clearest evolution from the group’s debut.
The album’s emotional and structural core is its title track, co-written by Reid and Parker as a tribute to Parker’s late mother, Mama Millie Parker. It’s a piece that moves through grief toward something like acceptance without rushing either stage, and it sets the tone for how the whole record handles difficult subject matter: patiently, honestly, without reaching for easy resolution.
That same patience defines “Moan,” carried over from Reid and Parker’s 2025 duo project When Souls Cry Out, where Parker’s wordless vocalizing does something conventional lyrics simply couldn’t, letting grief exist in the room before anyone tries to explain it away. Parker’s voice, warm and genuinely powerful, also anchors “Her Care A Gift” and the closing “Memory,” and she proves a lovely counterweight to Reid throughout: where his playing tends toward the reflective and searching, she brings immediacy and lived-in weight, keeping the album’s spiritual concerns grounded rather than abstract.
The instrumental tracks carry their own distinct character. Opener “Not Yet Home” is a genuine highlight, built on a piano theme Reid returns to again and again in subtly shifting forms, before an ethereal wordless choir featuring Parker and Eva Supreme arrives late in the piece and quietly transforms its scale from private introspection into something communal. “Farewell, Hello Again” moves through peaceful territory without ever settling into total stillness, always leaving itself room to explore, while “It’s Time, My Friend” leans into a folkish, pastoral warmth that gives Simpson’s alto saxophone some of its most lyrical space on the record.
The most ambitious instrumental gesture here is the closing stretch’s “What’s Going On”, which opens loose and out of tempo before gradually building real momentum, and cleverly threads in motifs from Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” along the way, an unexpected pairing that works because both songs, at their core, are asking variations on the same anxious question about the world we’ve made. It’s a genuinely inventive piece of arranging, and one of the record’s clearest demonstrations of Reid’s compositional imagination.
Mercy We Need is a sincere, carefully crafted record that trusts its listener to sit with difficult material rather than rushing them toward comfort. It’s a deeply personal project but it never asks the listener to share a specific faith to feel its emotional pull. What it does ask for is patience, and given that patience, it rewards with genuine warmth, strong melodic writing, and real chemistry between Reid’s piano and Parker’s voice throughout. A solid, thoughtfully realized addition to Reid’s growing catalogue.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, September 17th, 2026
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Musicians:
Julian Davis Reid: piano
Tramaine Parker: vocals
Lenard Simpson: alto sax
Ethan Philion: bass
James Russell Sims: drums
Tracklisting:
- Not Yet Home 6:09 (July 31)
- Her Care A Gift 5:55
- Farewell, Hello Again 8:27 (Aug 21st)
- Moan 6:13
- Mercy We Need 6:15 (Sept 11)
- It’s Time, My Friend 8:06
- What’s Going On 9:53
- Memory 4:32
Total album length: 55:30