Anthony Wilson | "Collodion"

Veteran jazz guitarist and composer Anthony Wilson made his 2022 opus The Plan of Paris (“Exceptional … old-fashioned in its verbal craftsmanship…” — DownBeat) with Joe Harley as coproducer. Their engineer was Pete Min, proprietor of the musical magic shop in Highland Park, Los Angeles known as Lucy’s Meat Market. During the mixing sessions for Plan, a light bulb went off and Min floated an invitation: Would Wilson like to make an album for Min’s recently formed label Colorfield?

The Colorfield mission statement promises: “Chaos and chance are a big part of the process.” That was indeed the case with Collodion, an outlier in the substantial Wilson discography: 11 tracks brimming with sonic exploration and surprise, an electroacoustic experiment on which Wilson plays all instruments (with contributions from special guests at a later stage). The idea was to show up on a given day with nothing — no song, no charts, not even any instruments. Min would supply those.

What unfolded was a curious mix of improvisation, composition and production, all more or less simultaneously. The goal for each daylong visit was to have one piece largely completed. “Anthony is so accomplished,” says Min, “and I thought he’d be a great candidate for this. It was incredibly fruitful — he understood the concept and went with it full force. He was able to take direction and his ability to execute was incredibly fast.”

Wilson speaks similarly of Min: “He’s such a no-nonsense person to work with, and he’s very fast. The studio is set up to be creative. You’re never sitting around waiting to get sounds or whatever. He’s really good at facilitating creativity. It’s all just ready to go.” Collodion was the right term: it sounds a bit like a musical instrument, but is in fact a viscous substance used in wet plate photography as well as theatrical makeup. When applied, it helps bring an image to life.

Wilson is the son of groundbreaking big band composer Gerald Wilson (1918-2014). His catalog of acclaimed work as a leader goes back to the mid ’90s, to say nothing of his extensive credits with Diana Krall, Paul McCartney, Ron Carter, Charles Lloyd’s Ocean Trio, Leon Russell, Mose Allison, Terri Lyne Carrington, Willie Nelson, Bobby Hutcherson, Al Jarreau and many more. In 2016, he ventured beyond instrumental music with Frogtown and again two years later with Songs and Photographs: he showcased himself as a singer, interpreting his own lyrics and songs, playing plenty of guitar, yet going for something unabashedly different and every bit as virtuosic and authentically expressive. The Plan of Paris is in that wheelhouse as well.

On Collodion, however, Wilson does no singing. He allows himself the childlike fun of playing with Min’s Morfbeats Gamelan strips, for instance, gathering ideas and outdoor found sounds that would become “Keeping,” track 3 of Side A. This half of the program is nearly all Wilson, until “Arrival at Kanazawa,” an evocation of rail travel in Japan, a piece that proved amenable to a horn arrangement for tenor sax, trumpet and trombone. The tenor in that choir, Daniel Rotem, is a Colorfield artist himself (Wave Nature, 2023), appearing on the opening prelude “Star Maiden” and the Side B opener “The Daughters of Night.” Trumpeter Julien Knowles is on hand for “Muse of Joy” at the end of Side B, his sound drifting alongside Wilson’s dreamlike synth harmonies and melodic gestures.

“Keyboard exploration is an essential element of my process,” Wilson says, “though I am not a keyboardist. I also like that there’s acoustic piano on this record — it exists in a beautiful relationship to the other sounds.” The title track, “Collodion,” begins with that stark piano, but right away brings in layered strings, played and orchestrated by the sought-after multi-instrumentalist Rob Moose. “I told Rob that I didn’t want something that tracks this slow elegaic theme, but rather things that kind of dance with it, and he got that right away,” Wilson says. “We both love how featured this string orchestration is, how prominent a part of the song and the album it is.”

There’s some strikingly guembri-like soloing in the latter part of “Planetary Glide” — this is Wilson playing a rubber bridge guitar, one of Reuben Cox’s creations out of the Old Style Guitar Shop in LA (a sound that has emerged in the music of Madison Cunningham, Blake Mills, Harrison Whitford and others). There is the deep and centered bass of Anna Butterss, also on the Colorfield roster (Activities, 2022), on two tracks of Side B, as well as drummer extraordinaire Mark Guiliana — also on Colorfield (Music for Doing, 2022) — laying it down with consummate soul and subtlety. “Heart Whispering,” an entity unto itself, is Wilson top to bottom, with ambient textures, enigmatic pulse and crisp, incisive guitar work that never dominates, but functions as part of the whole.

“I never brought in a guitar of my own the whole time,” Wilson says. “The thought of doing things with instruments that I knew well, I just felt that wasn’t where I wanted to go. Pete has a couple great [Gibson] 335’s, beautiful old Martins in incredible condition, he’s got a gorgeous [Fender] Jaguar, all kinds of stuff. If it was there, let’s plug it in. We just tried things. But it couldn’t be a traditional tone. We’d ask ourselves, ‘What does it need that will take it out of the realm of me just playing a guitar part?’ I tried to play in a way that wasn’t out of my hand habits, that wasn’t coming from the vocabulary I always play when I sit down to play. Automatically you go into the stuff you know. I was trying to be a little more uncoordinated, and intuit ways of playing that could add to this other sonic thing that we were doing. The whole experience brought out something very natural to me in terms of the way I hear music. But I don’t know that I ever would have come up with this way of doing it on my own. It’s opened up something else for me.”

-David Adler