Return Trip marks a happy recurrence for the Matt Moran Trio after their first recording, Play Ball. This trio’s harmonic and rhythmic elasticity, and ability to expand (sound like a much larger group) and compress (play intimately) their sound is remarkable. So for bandleader Moran, this new album brought up many new questions: what will be different now? Why is it important to make this music? For Moran, this was an exciting prospect, because, “frankly I had made the first record from a place of uncertainty, and through making, releasing, and performing it with two of my favorite improvisers in the world – Gary Versace and Tom Rainey – and feeling the depth of their support, I arrived at a new place of confidence and joy. It’s been many years since I released a jazz-based album as a vibraphonist, but I’ve been increasingly returning to jazz in my listening over the past decade, after decades of being uncertain of my place in that tradition. I feel more confidence now in bringing myself fully and respectfully to what I hear in this music, and that’s what this return trip is about. In a way there’s no such thing as return, whether you’re talking about the same river twice, or physicists’ spacetime. So a return is never the same as the first time; this is much deeper and subtler music than I would have made years ago with the same trio,” explains Moran.
It’s an unusual trio, but the members, Moran on vibes, Gary Versace on Hammond B3 and Tom Rainey on drums, relish in the blend that they posses. Moran elaborates, “when I formed the trio, I really wanted a small group (I also lead a nine-piece band by the name of Slavic Soul Party! and this trio is a much-needed complement to that energy). Organ is an amazing instrument that can cover melody, bass, texture, and orchestrational effects, especially in the hands of Gary Versace, one of the most amazing musicians I’ve worked with. He’s also a kind and supportive person who I knew I’d feel comfortable being vulnerable with as I tried to make this real. A call to another musical hero, Tom Rainey, cinched the deal. Tom told me that one of the very first gigs he played was as a teenager on the west coast was drums, organ and vibes, and he always wondered why that instrumentation didn’t get explored more. Our first album was more open and explorative, and I feel that we’re able to use what we unearthed to serve the arc of the music on Return Trip.”
The music on Return Trip explores subtle polytonality, in terms of superimposition, but also in ambiguity. Moran explains, “Gary and I found that we have both separately been pushing ourselves into how to organically integrate being in different places simultaneously in our harmonic context. It was a wonderfully confirming moment of arrival for me, since Gary is one of my musical heroes. I have been looking for ways to express the richness and ambiguity of polytonality without the ‘this on that’ sound; I’m looking for more of a gently revealing coexistence. That search is underpinning most of the compositions. I also have a rule for this trio, so that our music-making can focus on the joy of improvising: no composition can be more than one page long!”
Ripples was written after the Trio's CD release performance for Play Ball, full of excitement for a new era of this trio and a re-examination of what jazz forms mean to Moran. The piece started from the harmonic progressions, which are of unusual lengths and subvert typical harmonic motion; the melody came after, imagining how to radiate out from typical jazz phrasing (and on subverting the hardness of the minor 9th interval, which can almost make your mouth water). The title wasn’t obvious, but Moran asked his 9-year-old daughter to name it, and she nailed it. Spring is a short meditation on polytonality, and those elements got reverse-engineered into a polyrhythmic intro for Tom Rainey to expound on. Chord Conversation considers different ways to structure a song, and, “I can’t hear it without a thinking of John Hollenbeck and our years spent reflecting on composition – he has so much to say,” states Moran. Lush is a meditation on being wrong, dissonance, and polytonality, and embraces the sweet joy in the depth of the African-American tradition that is jazz. Moran elaborates, “it is amazing to me how Gary and I can make ‘wrong’ sounds – major melodies over minor chords – sound good, but that’s the beauty of this instrumentation and these musicians.”
Sometimes That’s Ok is a composition that was written as part of a lesson for incarcerated adults learning music. “I was asked to share something about my roots, and I thought of the first time I ever played a vibraphone; I couldn’t believe how beautiful the instrument sounded, no matter what notes I rang out. In this piece I tried to show that a simple gesture can be beautiful and deep and easy, and that the act of composition is simply making choices, something we all do all the time,” says Moran. Effish is a romp through two keys at once (Db and E) that somehow comes out sounding, well, F-ish. Rainey suggested a solo section based on part of the melody, leading to a short, polytonal bluesy solo in seven. Peace and Integration ends the record gently and is an appreciation for Horace Silver and his beautiful ballad Peace. Moran explains, “my melody is built on his chord progression, but this piece is written so that you hear different parts of the form simultaneously, which brings a beautiful calm richness that I find inspiring. It’s a fitting way to end an album in the summer of 2020, in hopes that soon African-Americans, who have created so much of the greatness of this music and this country, will be able to integrate peace and justice into the fullness of their lives.”
