released October 4, 2014

LINER NOTES:

"Your songs, when you sing them with your two eyes closed, as you always do, are like a local road we've known every turn of in the past." From 'At the Wellhead' by Seamus Heaney—Before the lyric came the lyre with its incantatory power to lead the dance, to link all for a few measures of breathlessness and to regulate dancing, singing, and breathing itself. Reaching wordlessly across the rift separating human from human, music is the balm of Gilead, the history of Gilead, and all that's left of Gilead. During a recent Detroit Jazz Fest, I heard the octogenarian Barry Harris hold a crowd in thrall with a set of trio classics. When he finished, I heard the deep silence that undergirds music. An inner voice spoke up, saying, that's what music is, what we hope, at our very best, to be. When the time capsule is loaded into our last departing spaceship, that's the human residue we'll want to offer to sentient, and hopefully wiser, beings...Hearing Christopher Wilson's fine recording, I had a similar moment of recognition. This is what music can do and must do. Chris reaches across to an audience with a cadence that slides below language, that arrives early in our heart's dark chambers and flips on a light to guide whatever language might follow. Listen to "Polda Dots and Moonbeams" and "Stars Fell on Alabama" and hear him shape cadences as though Ella and Sarah were whispering in his ears. In light of Wilson's compassionate work for homeless teens, we hear, "Feeling Better," a song "safe-space," a minor chorded bulwark against ugly forces which objectify and violate the young and vulnerable. ..There are players who skate more, players with more driving rhythms and more 'original' versions. With drummer Harry McKenzie and bassist Blake White, Wilson has sought a qualify more nuanced and more essential. For listeners thirsty for 'notes...like hoisted water/ravelling of a bucket,' for the generous lyricism that left the planet with Hank Jones and Tommy Flanagan, Chris Wilson is a reminder that our musical well is deep and fresh, that a new generation of players can still lead us to it.

—Michael Lauclan, auth of Trumbull Ave, Wayne State University Press