Vermont trumpeter and composer Tom Gershwin leads a highly sympathetic quintet on the absolutely beautiful album Wellspring. The musicians create such a rich tapestry of sound that at times they sound like a much larger ensemble.
Gershwin leads on his silver-toned horn, and is joined in melodic and harmonic adventure by Mike Bjella on saxophone and Perry Smith on guitar, with a rhythm section of David Ambrosio on bass and drummer Colin Stranahan. Gershwin’s compositions and arrangements are very much influenced by the bucolic and woodsy landscapes of his home state, he says.
“There’s an unselfconscious flow to it that eases my indecisive and grasping states of mind. The natural world has a clarifying effect. If I enter the woods with an angry trudge or aimless steps, the surroundings welcome whatever I bring; they hold space for it and let it dissolve.”
The music is not programatic in any way, though: no timpani mimicking a thunderstorm or flutes playing birdsong, just solid improvisational jazz. However, the natural world’s inspiration likely accounts for the deep sense of spirituality I get from this music, even though it’s not really what’s known as spiritual jazz.
The title track, which clocks in at a little over 8 minutes, is a perfect example. After a leisurely statement of theme, Gershwin launches on a searching solo backed chiefly by Smith’s acoustic vamping and Stranahan’s highly emotive drumming; Bjella’s solo has an even more spiritual feel to it, and in the coda when Gershwin and Bjella reprise the head melody more or less in unison, Smith’s trick of strumming the tune adds the sound of more than one instrument to the trio.
The album pivots around “Passages,” a 15-minute relaxed exploration that fills one whole side of the two-LP set. Here again the somewhat unusual combination of trumpet, sax and guitar (here an electric with a classic, clean sound) fills the room more than it ought to. There’s a snappy section right after Smith’s solo in which he plays response to the trumpet and sax calls, and which leads into a dramatically slowed rubato passage by Gershwin.
For peaceful meditative jazz look to the lovely ballad “Belong Here” and Gershwin’s salute to his collaborators, “& You.”
And for some thoroughly modern post-bop, there’s the upbeat, occasionally spiky “Counter Earth’s Turn” with some breathtaking composed passages of dramatic counterpoint involving sax, trumpet and guitar – probably my favorite track. The album is bookmarked with “Let Be,” a lovely, melodic short piece with a bass rubato intro, and the deeply meditative “Still,” a droning composition that would be minimalist but for Stranahan’s emphatic cymbal work.
Wellspring excels in composition, arrangement and execution, but more than that it’s full of heart, soul, and a sense of optimism and renewal. I can’t ask for anything more from music.
(Tom Gershwin, 2025)
