Someone with a longer attention span than me might be interested in plotting people’s interest in nature writing to see if it increases in inverse proportion to the amount of time people spend outdoors. It’s a facile oversimplification, but as someone who loves to read John McPhee, Annie Dillard, Aldo Leopold, Robert Macfarlane, and the like, it’s a question that shakes me. The reason any of this is even halfway relevant, however, is due to the tidily evocative title of the album under review today: Trio of Bloom. Across its 70-minute sprawl, Trio of Bloom can feel like watching a time-lapse video of a wild garden stretching and grasping its way from root to stem to sky.
To start with, I suppose we ought to say that Trio of Bloom is the first recorded meeting of a trio of avant-jazz luminaries: Craig Taborn (on keyboards of all sorts), Nels Cline (on guitars of all sorts), and Marcus Gilmore (on percussion of all sorts). On this invitingly dense album, they dig into everything from jazz, blues, dub, ambient, fusion, and beyond, honing a sound that is never about any one particular thing so much as it seems to be about the process of cultivating each thing as it grows. Trio of Bloom is the kind of album that contains such intricate, gregarious spaces that it invites questions larger than itself.
Aldo Leopold, for example, wrote in A Sand County Almanac that “[t]here are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery… To avoid [this], one should plant a garden…”1 If you’ll tolerate the parallel thinking, it’s interesting to think about the danger of supposing that music comes from… well, from where? A few decades back, I might have called it the danger of supposing that music comes from the radio. These days, I guess it’s the danger of supposing that music comes from a meticulously curated influencer playlist. But regardless of the anachronistic face of the false idol, if we follow Leopold’s cantankerous thought, we’d have to say that the only way to avoid this danger is to go to the studio or the concert hall or the practice space and watch the garden being planted.
Gilmore opens “Nightwhistlers” with a steady hi-hat shimmer and a roiling patter across the rest of his drumkit. He keeps up the same meter for essentially the entire eight-minute tune, but you could truly get lost following the way his drums bristle and needle, as if they’re itching to throw off the taut boundaries of each bar. It’s not until about halfway through the song that Cline pulls in the melody of Ronald Shannon Jackson’s original, but once it flits up from the ether, you’ll wonder if you hadn’t been hearing it all along. The song, like so many others on this riveting album, manages the dual trick of feeling like a ghostly, sedated suspension at the same time as the players are poking, prodding, jockeying and jabbing around each other. Taborn throws electric arpeggio runs at Cline, and Cline will sometimes answer and echo, twisting around the opposite end of Taborn’s rhythm, but other times Cline will spring off into pure scratch and squiggle before falling back into choppy, jutting edges that Taborn cloaks in a seasick, lurching two-step.
“Unreal Light” opens softly, with sparse, echoing chimes from Cline’s lap steel and pillowy ambient tones from Taborn that might have floated out of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois’s Apollo. Midway through, however, Taborn introduces a halting, arpeggiated keyboard motif that drives the rest of the song. The album is littered with moments of metamorphosis like this, which only reinforces the visual sense of watching the hidden gestation of plant life suddenly bursting intemperately into view. The song’s first half is a plat of soil, sun-washed and aching, and then Taborn’s keyboard - its halting cadence nevertheless insistent - becomes the first green shoot, arcing up blindly in gravity-agnostic coils. The second half of “Eye Shadow Eye” sports a similar half-wise structure, turning from a classicist piano solo into a hugely satisfying, unhurried blues/fusion excursion, with Cline in particular reveling in hanging waaaay behind the beat.
The easiest thing to latch onto here is the thrilling interplay between Cline and Taborn, but Marcus Gilmore’s drumming is the real key to making this wildly diverse, genre-hopping album feel all of a piece. Late in the album, “Forge” is built on a shifting series of slow, deliberate three-note chords from Cline’s guitar, but Gilmore whisks the whole thing along, shadowing and chastening the song’s pensive lilt with increasingly busy cross-talk that culminates in a nervy, frantic crescendo. On “Bloomers,” the album’s ten-minute centerpiece, Gilmore pulsates and jitters his way through a devilish, mutant dub abstraction that sounds a little bit like Miles’s On the Corner in a knife-fight with Cabaret Voltaire.
“Queen King” is a joyous, strutting Afrobeat tune anchored by Gilmore’s dancing, snare roll-heavy drum line and Cline’s funky bass line. Taborn’s keyboard soloing throughout feels animated as much by Afrobeat as by Sextant-era Herbie Hancock, but the final third of the song comes to a head when Cline starts running down blazing solo licks that goad Taborn into delirious counterpoint. Across the album, the band makes liberal use of effects and studio overdubs to create the illusion of a much larger chorus. Add to that Cline’s avant-garde vocabulary and Taborn’s arsenal of keyboards, and it sometimes feels like the band is daring you to parse out exactly who is doing what. Even on the trio’s rendition of Terje Rypdal’s “Bend It,” which finds them in perhaps their purest In a Silent Way mode, the chill haze of Gilmore’s understated current is fractured by a constant wash of tonal curiosities from guitars and keys flitting between bleep and moan, stab and swoon.
The album closes with the short, spiky “Gone Bust,” which sees Cline launch himself at a single chord as if it owed him money. Oddly enough, something about his tone - and Gilmore’s toms-only hammering - reminds me of “Ripe (With Decay),” the closing tune from Nine Inch Nails’s The Fragile. The questing, open-minded richness of this excellent album continues to feel, the more I visit it, like a once-tended garden in the process of wilding itself. Even as the shape of the album settles in for the listener, it’s not easy work to trace the loping tendrils and shrill, surprising fragments back to their root.
One of the most remarkable passages in Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (the section entitled “Good Oak”) is an extended meditation on history, prompted by Leopold cutting down an oak tree on his property. He imagines that each pull and bite of the saw through the tree’s rings is a step back through the years, but the endpoint is not some revelation held in the tree’s center, because as soon as the saw meets the middle, it heaves its way back to the present. It can be that way with music, too: the songs we encounter on Trio of Bloom are each the tendered flower of an unknowable gestation, but they recirculate and offer new growth to each listener. In a way, Leopold is after the same idea: “...the good oak burns to red coals on white ashes. Those ashes, come spring, I will return to the orchard at the foot of the sandhill. They will come back to me again, perhaps as red apples, or perhaps as a spirit of enterprise in some fat October squirrel, who, for reasons unknown to himself, is bent on planting acorns.”2 The joy and openness of this album is something that will come back to you again, even if for reasons unknown to its creators.
Trio of Bloom will be released on 9/26 on Pyroclastic Records. Order your copy on Bandcamp here.
Leopold 1987, p. 6
Leopold 1987, pp. 17-18