Thomas Morgan: Around You Is A Forest
Loveland Music

For years, Thomas Morgan has contributed stellar bass playing to the music of Bill Frisell, Jakob Bro, Steve Coleman, Paul Motian, John Abercrombie, and others. Given that, when the time came for him to fashion his debut album, one might have expected him to recruit many of those with whom he's played and devise a set-list comprising originals and covers. Yet while he did enlist the services of many a sought-after jazz artist, Around You Is A Forest is as far removed from standard jazz practice as could possibly be imagined. Those within Morgan's inner circle won't be taken aback, but those coming to it from the outside will be surprised to discover how fundamentally grounded it is in his lifelong engagement with computer interfaces, programming, and electronics.

Issued on the progressive Copenhagen-based label Loveland Music, Around You Is A Forest is a collection of nine duets, but duets of an inordinately unusual kind. In place of Morgan interacting with a jazz artist on each piece, each (but one) features a musician partnering with WOODS, a virtual instrument Morgan created using the open-source software SuperCollider. WOODS evokes the sound of an acoustic string instrument without identifying itself too much with one only; instead, it suggests some freakish amalgam of a Japanese koto, zither, West African donsó ngoni, and Hungarian cimbalom.

The interactions between the musician and WOODS aren't static in the way they would be if the electronic track were nothing more than pre-programmed repetition. As Morgan created the software to operate generatively, it functions as an ever-mutating partner to the musician and thus something he can respond to as he would a fellow player. Frisell takes part, as do Dan Weiss (tabla), Craig Taborn (keyboards), Gerald Cleaver (drums), Henry Threadgill (flutes), Ambrose Akinmusire (trumpet), Immanuel Wilkins (alto saxophone), and, on the title track, Morgan on double bass. The album concludes with poet Gary Snyder reciting his own text in the setting “Here.”

In-depth liner notes by Morgan provide an account of his early exposure to computers and programming and the musical family that nurtured him during formative years in Hayward, California. Time spent with games such as Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? and Myst eventually led to writing code and and grappling with Unix systems during high school. At the same time, he was discovering jazz bassists such as Ray Brown and Charlie Haden and beginning to see parallels between jazz musicians and computer hackers. His immersion in programming continued during his time at the Manhattan School of Music and eventually led to the creation of WOODS. Indicative of his debut album's long evolution, the WOODS tracks ultimately used for the album were created as far back as 2016 but were set aside as his performance obligations grew and ultimately were revisited when the pandemic happened.

Despite the software's pivotal presence on the recording, the title track opens with the beautiful sound of Morgan's unaccompanied double bass. Soon enough, however, the bright thrum of WOODS enters to provide a chattering counterpoint to his assertive bass statements. On “Eddies,” Weiss's tabla acts as a terrific partner to the software, the rhythmically charged performance clearly revealing how closely Weiss attended to and responded to WOODS's generative patterns. Taborn's “Dream Sequence” is aptly titled for conjuring a mysterious rainforest-styled setting replete with Balinese field recordings of rain, wind, crickets, and birds. While the thrum of WOODS remains audible, much of the listener's attention can't help but go to the voluptuous textures Taborn produced using synthesizers and other keyboards.

Cleaver contributes a remarkable performance to “Through the Trees,” the impression intensified by the flurry of drum invention coursing through the track's sixteen minutes. “In The Dark" is so titled because Threadgill recorded a layer on bass flute first before adding the second on regular flute without listening to the first—how amazing that the parts fit together so well and create the illusion of two flutists interacting. The bleats, smears, shrieks, and moans of Akinmusire's trumpets on “Assembly of All Beings” suggests a landscape filled with wild creatures, be they elephants, coyotes, or jackals. Frisell likewise packs the airspace in “Rising From the West” with textural detail when he spreads acoustic, eclectic guitars, and effects across the fluttering backdrop. The album's last instrumentalist is alto saxophonist Wilkins, who's layered no less than eight times on “Murmuration,” the result a swinging free-for-all that calls to mind the communal wail of the World Saxophone Quartet.

January 2026