On Kaleidoscope, trumpeter, vocalist, composer Sarah Wilson offers up an album of gratitude, dedicated to the people who have supported her. We, too, should be grateful for the support that helped shape this artist, whose post-bop jazz chops are shaded with influences from avant pop, Afro-Latin grooves, and indie rock.

Sarah Wilson
Kaleidoscope (Brass Tonic Records)
A review
There is something disarming in Sarah Wilson’s voice—both her trumpet voice and her vocals. Her complete lack of pretension, combined with an unforced emotional directness, encourages you to lay down your arms and soak up the music in her beautifully off-kilter tunes. Case in point, on her new album, Kaleidoscope, is her tune “Young Woman,” an autobiographical account of a difficult time in her life when she found comfort, strength, and hope hearing pianist Myra Melford in concert. Accompanied by her friend and mentor Melford and by herself on trumpet, Wilson sings her gratitude in a plangent, halting rhythm:

Later in the night heard you on the stage under amber glowing light
Your music warmed my cold soul
Felt myself calm down
Maybe someday I will fill the room with melody all my own

There’s no maybe about it: her new album, Kaleidoscope, which introduced Wilson to me, does just that, and you can find it on Bandcamp. On 11 originals and one cover (9 instrumentals and three vocals), she’s assisted by a premier collection of colleagues that includes, in addition to Melford, violinist Charles Burnham, guitarist John Schott, bassist Jerome Harris, and drummer Matt Wilson.

Highlights include the opener, “Aspiration,” a deep blessing with the trumpet backed by a diaphanous comping (dedicated to Renee Baldocchi, formerly director of public programs at San Francisco’s de Young Museum, where Wilson held a fellowship). “Presence,” written for Carla Bley, offers an upbeat Calypso rhythm, with the joyful Matt Wilson floating it on air. There’s the fractured light of the title track, and the lovely tension between the trumpet and the groove in “Felta Road,” which features Burnham. On “Night Still,” a bass line and a trumpet line fit together like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

With an undergraduate background in anthropology (University of California, Berkeley), a two-year stint doing music for the Bread and Puppet theater, and a position as musical director and composer of Lincoln Center’s Out of Doors Festival’s annual puppet program for six years, Wilson took a circuitous route to her musical calling. In New York, infused with the energy of the Downtown scene, she studied with trumpeters John McNeil and Laurie Frink and Schoenberg scholar, Paul Caputo. She returned to the West Coast in 2005, where she has been making her singular music ever since, working with such luminaries as Melford, Ben Goldberg, and Scott Amendola.

Queried about the theme of Kaleidoscope for the press release, she answered: “The theme of this music is that it makes me happy.” It will likely do the same for you.

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© 2021 Mel Minter