If you want to grow something, you probably should start from the bottom. And the first sound on this debut recording from drummer Otis Brown III is Ben Williams’ potent acoustic bass putting down roots deep in blues soil. The pattern Williams plays is both ingrained with familiarity — like a home-cooked meal, greasy but nutritious at once — and rhythmically complex. Your own bottom moves to it, even as it’s hard to count it out. In comes Brown, rolling and accenting, yet connecting to the bass in cycles. Robert Glasper’s piano rolls and entwines as well. Then: the crackling tenor sax/trumpet sound you’ve heard on so many jazz records, laying out a blues melody.
It’s old music in some ways — that horn sound, the classic “jazz quintet” instrumentation, a vocabulary of improvising that mostly goes back to the ‘40s, the ‘50s, the ‘60s. But there’s something new growing too. Otis Brown III is part of the generation of jazz musicians schooled by the greats of a prior era (in his case, mentored by Donald Byrd, then taught by Carl Allen and Lewis Nash) but raised equally on hip hop and modern soul. Nearly every musician on Brown’s The Thought of You was a classmate at The New School and is part of the group staking a claim to making jazz relevant again.
And so the second track, the title track, on this Blue Note release, a song by singer Bilal Oliver, is built on a nervous groove for Glasper’s piano and the rhythm section in a 4/4 backbeat that quickly turns into flexing and shifting series of time changes and stop-times as Bilal croons the melody in a soulful purr that is more Prince than it is Billy Eckstine. That trumpeter Keyon Harrold takes off on a solo over free-swinging bass and drums a moment later just reinforces what is already clear: that for Brown and his comrades, jazz incorporates other forms without compromise.
Hip hop elements enter the picture when “The Thought of You, Part I” ends on the sound of “tape” slowing and stopping, the music fading and deepening to be completed later in the album, leading to an interlude track that samples a voice (“We need the truth . . . You can have your truth, I can have my truth . . .”) as Brown, Glasper, and Williams play a shifting, polyrhythmic groove. This interlude (and a second that ends the album) functions like one of the little “skits” that used to appear on albums like Three Feet Tall and Rising back in the 1980s. “The Two Become One (for Paula)” is a gorgeous ballad in a loping 3/4 time that might have appeared on a much more traditional record — though an interesting one, as it pairs a dark bass clarinet sound from John Ellis with Ellis’s own tenor — but it also layers sampled voices recorded at Brown’s wedding.
But if you plan to pin these musicians down to merely jazz and hip hop influences, that’s much too narrow. Singer Gretchen Parlato guests on the song that sits at the album’s midpoint, a mischievously sly and funky version of Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One”, a huge hit on country music radio about 16 years ago. Like Bilal, Parlato uses her voice to coo and whisper, bending tones subtly, fitting in with a Robert Glasper arrangement that has Brown playing insinuating rat-a-tat patterns on snare and rim that slowing develop into a luxurious groove. It is gorgeous, something that ought to find its way onto the radio yet again, frankly. Here, as on “Paula”, the musicians don’t take long “jazz solos” because that wouldn’t necessarily serve the song.
The other influence that is prominent on The Thought of You is gospel music. Singer Nikki Ross is featured on a marvelous medley of spiritual songs that begins with voice over organ and slowly morphs into a sanctified R&B groove that lets Brown and Glasper play around the singing. She returns for “I Am Your Song” by Baltimore gospel singer Jonathon Nelson in an arrangement by producer (and Glasper bassist) Derrick Hodge.
That these two songs come toward the end of this collection underlines the way in which Brown has very consciously created a true album, a carefully-planned sequence of songs meant to outline Brown’s vision, musically and otherwise. That first track, so crackling with both jazz and other influences in a single, well-integrated piece, is a calling card, a statement of purpose, and the title is “The Way (Truth & Life)”. The title track is broken into three chunks that appear sprinkled through the disc, a refrain that we return to (theme and trumpet, then a tenor solo by Ellis, then Glasper’s statement returning to the vocal theme). Brown introduces the theme of romantic love and marriage, but then he ends with the theme of faith.
Can I have gotten this far into reviewing this record without writing that Brown is a wondrous drummer, both stone-solid and light on his feet? He plays with the fleet subtlety of jazz player, yet he seems to understand the power of a groove. But The Thought of You never feels like an exercise in showing off, even for the leader — a sign of skill and maturity.
It is an impressive first outing, and one that hangs together with increasing power on repeated listenings. The “Interlude II – Life” that ends the record shares the same Glasper piano lick with the first interlude (“Truth”), and it’s only fair to note that the crackling opening track — which contains the words “truth” and “life” — uses a set of Glasper chords that descend with a similar harmonic content. More than a set of tunes, The Thought of You is a work of art that provides a through-line of musical ideas and personal vision, a sense of integration that pulls disparate ideas and influences together into a musical language that feels fresh, accessible, solid.
It’s worth noting that The Thought of You is a joint production between Blue Note and Revive Music. Revive is a production company based in New York run by Meghan Stabile, who is energetically championing a group of creative young musicians who are making this music more accessible again — but doing it without abandoning any ideas. Otis Brown III does that mission proud with this astonishing debut, a disc that will sound just as good in 30 years just as it probably could not have been made 30 years ago.
What a wonderful sign it is that jazz is where such music lives, that Revive is a blossoming institution in New York, and that Blue Note is wise enough to get on board.