Winston C.W. - Good Guess (2020)

There’s nowhere to hide in a trio. Playing live in such a small ensemble pushes you onto the knife’s edge of the present moment. No walls of sound for sitting behind and daydreaming, no overdubbed epiphanies; only the silence, and what you and your partners choose to fill it with until the music stops. That’s the way Winston Cook-Wilson made 'Good Guess.' The pianist-songwriter and his collaborators, upright bassist Carmen Rothwell and electric guitarist Ryan Beckley (of the experimental band Scree), recorded these eight songs across two days in Brooklyn, where all three reside. What you hear on the album is what they played that weekend, with no additional tracks or edited-together takes. The spacious compositions left the players plenty of room to improvise, and at times, 'Good Guess' seems to document an invention in progress: a snapshot of three musicians in a room, listening, trusting, walking the knife’s edge together.

But spontaneous creation is only half the story of 'Good Guess.' The other half lies in the songs themselves, which Cook-Wilson wrote during a period of personal turmoil in 2019, after the recording of 'A Life of Crime,' the acclaimed second album of literary soft rock by his band Office Culture. Like that project, 'Good Guess' addresses the strains of loving yourself and others in a society that reduces people to columns on a spreadsheet of revenues and expenses. There’s always a new boss in town, bringing “new goals for the quarter” he expects you to meet; never a moment to stop, rest, and remember the person staring back from the other side of the mirror, or the other side of the bed. But while 'A Life of Crime' unfolded across wide shots of misty cityscapes, 'Good Guess' brings the camera closer to its main character’s face, not flinching from the frenzy. Its jazzy songs tumble through fragmented chords and relationships, arriving frequently at moments of startling beauty. If there is deliverance from the alienation of modern life, it may come in the trio’s approach to the music itself: a commitment to the present moment, and to supporting each other as we work through it.

-Andy Cush