Matt Slocum - Lion Dance (2024) [Hi-Res]

After six acclaimed recordings, “Matt Slocum has emerged as one of the great young jazz drummers in New York City, and therefore all of jazz,” (The Minneapolis Star Tribune), and “an inveterate swinger with a brisk, highly interactive touch and a penchant for melodicism . . . also a thoughtful composer who sets up his team like a savvy point guard running an offense (Bill Milkowski, JazzTimes), and with his new recording, Lion Dance (out on Sunnyside Records on November 1, 2024), Matt Slocum engages in deeply swinging dialogues with two modern-day masters, long-time collaborators and friends, Walter Smith III on tenor saxophone, and Larry Grenadier on bass. The album was produced by Jerome Sabbagh and recorded live to two-track analog tape by James Farber.

“I’ve always wanted to do a sax trio record,” Slocum says. “I feel it’s a benchmark for drummers – for saxophonists, too. I spent a lot of time in the practice shed, because Walter and Larry are so high-level, but you can prepare specifically for it only so much because you don’t know how they’ll interpret the music. You need to reach a place where you feel open creatively and can go in different directions without impediments to the flow.” About the composing process, he added, “writing for sax trio makes me explore new compositional directions. For starters, the whole notion of hearing a chord not vertically, but horizontally – spread out over time – is a complete game changer.” He elaborates, “My aim was to write and arrange bespoke music for Smith and Grenadier. To make very specific choices that would create musical frameworks full of possibility; to bring out some sides of their musical personalities that I really love . . . and also, music that we could sink our teeth into as a trio, with a high-level of interaction.”

Slocum navigates this telepathic trio (let’s hope to hear more from them in the future) through five original pieces whose subtle challenges enhance freedom of expression, and three jazz and American Songbook standards (“What Is There To Say” by Vernon Duke, “This Is All I Ask” by Gordon Jenkins and “We See” by Thelonious Monk). Slocum’s musical partnership and friendship with Smith goes back over twenty years, and this is his fourth appearance on a Slocum-led project. The composer/drummer has also known and played with Grenadier for quite some time, with the bassist appearing on Slocum’s 2019 release, Sanctuary, and on With Love and Sadness in 2022. All three of these musicians possess beautifully rich sounds (to say the very least), and wide open hearts and ears, which explains much of the album’s appeal. Slocum explains that, “this record is as much about ensemble chemistry and interaction as the music itself.”

Regarding the title track, Slocum said of the lyrical melody that transpires primarily in 9/4, “I write mixed meters to serve the music’s natural flow and not for some perceived hipness factor. Rhythms in nature aren’t always symmetrical or in groups of four. In my imagination, the primary section represents lions dancing playfully. The transition to the relative minor key during the bridge eventually signals a more solemn gathering of the lions before a new section of their dance during the coda.”

It all adds up to the latest brilliant chapter in Slocum’s career, which seems to go from strength to strength, drawing from a bottomless well of ideas and inspiration. Lion Dance is on par with, and enters the canon of, equilateral triangle oriented recordings by such 21st century avatars of the genre as Fly Trio, a long-standing unit with Grenadier, Mark Turner, and Jeff Ballard; Smith’s own “TWIO” outing with bassist Harish Raghavan and Eric Harland; the Bill Stewart Trio with Grenadier and Smith; and the Kendrick Scott Trio with Smith and Reuben Rogers.

Slocum’s first inspirations were Max Roach (on Clifford Brown’s Study In Brown, and with Buddy Rich on Rich Vs Roach), Philly Joe Jones (on Cookin’ With The Miles Davis Quintet), and Roy Haynes (on the albums Thelonious In Action, Chick Corea’s Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, and Haynes’ We Three). Through prolific sideman work over many years, and leading his own band with six must-hear albums, Slocum has distilled these, and many other, influences, into what made these artists legends to begin with; individuality. Slocum has been on his own path for years, unconcerned with anything outside of cultivating, composing and performing music which represents his own artistic esthetic; music which resonates with, and stimulates his fellow musicians; and music that finds music lovers yearning to hear master musicians in their prime. He has accomplished all of this and more with his new recording, Lion Dance.

Walter Smith III - tenor saxophone
Larry Grenadier - bass
Matt Slocum - drums