Marcus Gilmore · 2025Journey to the New: Live at the Village Vanguard
The arrival of Marcus Gilmore’s Journey to the New is something like a spiritual renewal.
It seems right that Marcus Gilmore’s first release as solo leader would come at the iconic Village Vanguard. It also doesn’t feel like a stretch to say that Gilmore is universally beloved on the scene, which makes this record not only welcome because of some sense of finally having it, but because it reflects back to us a bit of what that camaraderie and affection feels like when it’s translated sonically.
If, as the album’s title suggests, this is a record of the new, then it defines it as structured around a renewed belief in human connection, where knowing one another is not abstracted through the kinds of knowledges that come from our reliance on distance, through screens and the like.
If you are at the Vanguard, there is not much else there, save the closeness and intimacy of these vibrations. Across a program of mostly his and other band members’ originals and Geri Allen’s “Open Handed Reach,” which she first recorded with Kurt Rosenwinkel, Gilmore’s debut offers this expression of a loving gesture, having felt it in real time and over a life’s time.
We experience this as new because ashe, the force that makes us, exists inside the drum. It is no trifling matter.