Pianist Jason Moran, sound sculpture BlankFor.Ms, and drummer Marcus Gilmore reunite for their second album of boundary pushing live and electronically processed music with 2026’s Shards. The follow-up to 2023’s Refract, the album once again finds the trio crafting textural soundscapes that straddle the line between modal post-bop and spacey experimental electronic music. While blending jazz improvisation with electronic production is by no means a novel idea, with a tradition going at least as far back as Miles Davis’ 1969 album In a Silent Way, Moran and company bring a live, in-the-moment approach to their work that stands out. Rather than reworking Moran and Gilmore’s playing in post-production, Tyler Gilmore (aka BlankFor.Ms) instead…
Tag Archive: Marcus Gilmore
A powerful intergenerational trio emerges on Murasaki, featuring Wadada Leo Smith on trumpet, Marcus Gilmore on drums, and Jakob Bro on guitar.
Recorded at Power Station (formerly Avatar Studios) in New York, this exploratory session unfolded spontaneously-no retakes, no discussions, just a shared musical language rooted in intuition and trust. “It felt as though this music already existed before we started playing,” Bro reflects. Murasaki captures the creative summit of three visionary artists, each pushing beyond the boundaries of form and genre. This marks Wadada Leo Smith’s final European tour appearance, with select live dates in Berlin, Antwerp, Reykjavik and Copenhagen in November.
“…the material is spacious, devoid of any…
Trio of Bloom is the first studio meeting between pianist/keyboardist Craig Taborn, guitarist Nels Cline, and drummer Marcus Gilmore. It was facilitated by producer David Breskin, who, in the mid-’80s, brought together guitarist Bill Frisell, bassist Melvin Gibbs, and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson. All admired one another despite different approaches to jazz. That idea yielded the 1987 one-off Strange Meeting by Power Tools. Breskin has produced Decoding Society dates, several Frisell recordings, and has worked with Cline since 2010.
Set opener “Nightwhistler” was composed by Jackson, and it appropriately begins with an intensely lyrical and poetic drum solo from Gilmore. A minute in, Cline starts delivering…