Review: Thomas Morgan’s ‘Around You is a Forest’

As evidenced by two recent collaborations with Wadada Leo Smith, Jakob Bro’s Loveland Music, is releasing some of the most interesting improvised music recently. Yet, also on the label comes Thomas Morgan’s Around You is a Forest (Loveland, 2025), which may well be the most unique album made in a long time. Morgan long ago established his skills as a bassist, playing often with Bro, Bill Frisell, Craig Taborn, and many others. But the new revelation on Around You is that Morgan is a computer geek, advanced coder, and programmer. These skills enabled him to build a virtual instrument that he named WOODS. The booklet that accompanies the CD and vinyl does a deep dive into such without getting too technical. You can also find in-depth details in Ethan Iverson’s Substack piece, found here, if you lack access to the liner notes.

WOODS combines qualities of West African lute-harps, Asian zithers, cimbalom, and marimba. It’s a SuperCollider-based system that Morgan designed to generate timbres and patterns that sound natural despite their algorithmic origin. The first language is the pentatonic scale. As a mutational process transforms the melodic patterns, the harmonies become more abstract. Each track has its own mix of the wooden, metallic, and electronic timbres that follow from WOOD’s parameters, but the general effect is a self-same texture, as if WOODS were an acoustic instrument. It sounds real on every track; there is nothing ‘virtual’-sounding about the instrument, which is remarkable. Morgan plays solo double bass with WOODS on the opening title track. But, from there, he pairs it with artists who share his creative spirit. They include Dan Weiss (tabla), Craig Taborn (keyboards and field recordings), Gerald Cleaver (drums), Henry Threadgill (flutes), Ambrose Akinmusire (trumpet), Bill Frisell (guitars), Immanuel Wilkins (alto saxophone), poet Gary Snyder (voice). Interestingly, Bro is not one of the musical collaborators, despite his helping produce the record in conjunction with Morgan and David Breskin. The album’s title comes from a classic text adventure game, Adventure, and becomes a metaphor for the artistic community. As Morgan comments, “A forest is a place where nutrients and information are shared through root systems. In that sense, the musicians on this album are some of the trees that teach and nourish me.’’

Picture yourself in a forest. The bass could be your own footsteps, while WOODS generates all the animal and inexplicable sounds you hear while venturing into that deep cluster of trees on the title track. For “Eddies” with Weiss, Morgan envisions a creek that runs through Portola Redwood State Park, a space he used to explore with a friend as a child. The shifting rhythms may represent the stream crossing back and forth on logs or rocks. “Dream Sequence” with Taborn is more “out there. “In his home studio, the keyboardist collaborator devised five distinct scenes, adding electric and electronic keyboards along with field recordings of rain, wind, crickets, and birds captured in a Balinese town surrounded by a rainforest. “Through the Trees” with Cleaver was built over a long period of time by accumulating tiny mutations and adjusting them in real time, a process used throughout the album.

With “In the Dark,” Threadgill recorded his first layer on bass flute and the second on flute without listening to the first. Thus, the title. Musically, it is probably something only the NEA Jazz Master could pull off in its placing the listener deep inside a vibrant rainforest. “Assembly of All Beings” features Akinmusire creating blurry textures on the trumpet that eventually come into focus, as in a movie. Morgan says the trumpet sound summons dinosaurs, elephants, and horses, or whatever animals one wants to imagine. Another important aspect of the overall sound that only the most discerning ears may detect its repeating patterns. Morgan refers to them as seeds and saved any new point in the development as a new seed then switched between the seeds in real time. He likens this to a tree-like structure, stretching out in different directions and hopping from branch to branch.

“Rising from the West” features Frisell on acoustic and eclectic guitars. Both Morgan and Frisell grew up in the West but now reside in Brooklyn. The idea of the track was to reverse the dawn-to-dusk order in which light moves, mirroring the guitarist’s famed loop pedal effect, where time often moves backward. “Murmuration” with Wilkins layers the saxophonist eight times. WOODS serves as ngoni here, providing propulsion for Morgan’s envisioned “flock of birds soaring, swirling, dispersing, clustering, and quickly changing direction.” Finally, comes Snyder reciting verses from his poem, “Here,” that Morgan felt appropriate for the project. The bassist poses the question, “Do we need to question why were are here, or is it enough just to be here?” The concept of “here” underlies in-the-moment improvisation, at which these gifted musicians excel.

Around You is a Forest is beyond brilliant. It’s staggering in so many ways that you may encounter new sounds each time that you listen.

‘Around You is a Forest’ is out now on Loveland Music. It can be purchased on Bandcamp.