Jazz
Self-released · 9 October 2026
“Bésame Mucho” runs five forty-six and is the longest of the eight. Isaiah Spencer lays down a rumba that never gives up the pulse, Alex Austin takes the double bass off towards the tune’s Latin root, and Christopher Lucas Wilson sits in the middle without playing a note more than he needs. The album came out on 9 October, self-released, recorded at Transient Sound in Chicago.
It is Wilson’s fourth album and the first by this trio, which until now had only played the city’s bandstands. He comes from metropolitan Detroit: he studied with Bess Bonnier and Marcus Belgrave, went through the Civic Jazz Program run by bassist Rodney Whitaker and spent years hosting the weekly jam at Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, before a decade in Los Angeles — “Feelin’ Better” (2014) and “Leaving Los Angeles” (2019) — and settling in Chicago in 2019, where he released “Solemn Moments” in 2023. Spencer, a drummer in the AACM, has played with William Parker, Fred Anderson and Clark Terry.
Five of the eight tracks are Wilson’s. “Hallowed Be” (four twenty-four) is built around a Spencer drum solo and came out as a single on 21 August; “Stillness” (five thirty) did the same on 18 September and is the quietest of the five. “Night Notes” (four forty-seven) starts with thick bluesy refrains that sound like nothing else on the record and then opens onto a wide theme, with Austin taking the lyrical line before the return.
The record never raises its voice once in thirty-eight minutes. The two standards are read faithfully: the Cole Porter of “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To” (four fifty-seven) puts its whole trust in the melody, and none of the eight tracks breaks the climate of the other seven.
The album closes with the only track without the trio: “Tu Recuerdo y Yo” (three forty-one), the José Alfredo Jiménez ranchera, which Wilson plays on solo piano. Thirty-eight minutes of a trio that never raises its voice, and at the end one man alone with a song that isn’t jazz and doesn’t need to be.
Rating: 7.0/10
Text by Aina Torrents