Markus Rutz – Many Moons

Third Coast Sound – Street date : August 4th, 2025
Jazz
Markus Rutz - Many Moons

Markus Rutz’s “Many Moons”, A Cinematic Jazz Journey Through Time and Tone.

A year after the release of his acclaimed album Storybook, composer and trumpeter Markus Rutz returns with a new project that delves even deeper into the personal, the poetic, and the powerfully expressive. Many Moons, his ninth album overall and the first release on the fledgling Third Coast Sounds label, is not merely a continuation of his musical evolution, it is a bold restatement of his artistic identity, cast in a more intimate, more refined, and more cinematic light.

Where Storybook offered glimpses of a jazz storyteller with a classicist’s reverence for the idiom, Many Moons feels like the director’s cut, richly layered, daringly scored, and paced with the confidence of an artist unafraid to challenge the ear and stretch the form. Rutz exhibits a rare ability: the capacity to modernize jazz history without distorting its essence, dressing its enduring narratives in a sleek robe of contemporary textures. His music never forgets where it came from, even as it ventures boldly outward.

Throughout the album, Rutz draws from a palette that blurs boundaries, between composition and improvisation, between structure and spontaneity, between jazz’s golden era and its unfolding future. At times, one half expects Lauren Bacall herself to appear, casting a smoldering glance from across a smoky club; at others, a guitar line emerges with the warm polish and technical fluency of vintage George Benson, inviting listeners into the heart of Rutz’s sonic imagination. This is not pastiche. It is reverent reinvention.

The album’s title, Many Moons, serves as a thematic anchor: a poetic nod to the way time shapes music, as a marker of experience, as a sculptor of memory, and as a companion to creativity. Each track reflects a phase in that continuum, with the music unfolding like journal entries written under different skies, across different seasons. In Rutz’s own words, the process of composing, performing, and recording stretched across months, becoming a form of living research into the present moment, a study in artistic mindfulness. This isn’t just a collection of tunes; it’s a chronicle.

Listeners are encouraged, indeed, invited, to unplug, slow down, and allow the music to unfold in real time. Many Moons is not background music. It demands, and rewards, your attention. It’s an album that listens back.

There is a cinematic quality to the project that is hard to miss. Each piece feels storyboarded, as if sketched in the margins of a film script. It’s easy to imagine Rutz scribbling down musical ideas after a night on stage, in a downtown club or at a summer festival, translating moods into motifs, scenes into solos. There’s a deceptive simplicity to his melodies that belies their underlying complexity. The more you listen, the more you discover. This is jazz not only as performance, but as exploration, perhaps even as fundamental research in the language of the form.

That intellectual depth is matched by a vast musical vocabulary. Rutz’s cultural reach is as broad as his technical one, and he draws from a wide-ranging repertoire that reflects both curiosity and craftsmanship. Alongside his original compositions, Many Moons includes astute interpretations of works by Richard Rodgers, Van Morrison, Joe Sample, Irving Berlin, and Brice Wilson. The reimagining of Rodgers’ Blue Moon is particularly striking, an elegantly subversive arrangement that both honors and reinvents the standard, making it feel not like a cover, but a conversation across generations.

There is also a playful spirit running through the album, a knowing wink from Rutz, who seems to take pleasure in surprising his audience. These moments of levity never undermine the work’s seriousness, but rather underscore its human warmth. In a sense, Many Moons is an album about the joy of making music, the kind of joy that, when shared generously, can feel like a private gift to the listener.

And that title track, Many Moons, already feels like it could become a signature. There’s a haunting persistence to its melody, a subtle magnetism that burrows deep into the mind. Long after the music has stopped, it continues to echo in the memory, as though the composition itself refuses to leave the room. That is not a coincidence. That is craftsmanship.

With Many Moons, Markus Rutz has not only reaffirmed his place among today’s most thoughtful jazz artists, he has offered a record that asks to be heard with care, with openness, and above all, with time. And in return, it offers something rare: music that lingers.

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, July 30th 2025

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Musicians :
trumpet – Markus Rutz
tenor saxophone – Brice Winston
alto saxophone – Sharel Cassity
alto saxophone – Greg Ward
piano – Adrian Ruiz
guitar – Matt Gold
bass – Christian Dillingham
bass – Samuel Peters
percussion – Gregory Artry

original compositions – Markus Rutz

Tracklist:
Penumbra
By And By
Moondance
Before We Met
Asso-Kam
Many Moons
Blue Moon
Denouement
On The Bosrand
Blue Skies
Time To Spare

sound recording by Brian Fox of Electrical Audio Chicago
sound engineering by David Stoller Samurai Recording Astoria Queens, New York
producer – Greg Ward
photography & album design by Tuan Huynh of VietFive Chicago