Jazz
Justin Pierce Music · 14 August 2026
The album’s idea never changes, and on “All Blues”, four fifty-seven, it comes off best: the Miles Davis tune, a blues in six-eight with all the time in the world, arrives here at a gallop with a New Orleans roll underneath. Justin Pierce takes it on tenor without reaching for any display; the whole weight of the rewrite is carried by the rhythm section. “Sway” came out on 14 August on his own label and it’s his first album.
The quintet recorded in Dallas on 5 May 2025 and it’s a conservatory story: Sean Giddings on piano, Young Heo on bass and Matt Young on drums all come from the One O’Clock Lab Band, where Pierce was lead alto, and the singer is Ashley Pierce, his wife. Pierce has craft to spare, having played with Arturo Sandoval, Bob Mintzer and Randy Brecker, and on the record he stays on tenor almost throughout. Her voice is clean and entirely unaffected, and “Honeysuckle Rose”, five twenty-three, opens on a bass-and-voice duet before anyone else comes in, which is the loveliest passage in the forty-eight minutes.
Where the formula shows too plainly is on “Meglio Stasera”, five twenty-seven, the Mancini tune turned into a samba and sung in Italian, and on “Just the Two of Us”, five fifteen, the Bill Withers song run through a soul-jazz sieve. The other two instrumentals are Horace Silver’s “The Jody Grind”, four nineteen, with the tempo shifting inside it, and Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood”, five eighteen, on a very breathy saxophone.
The project’s ceiling shows up in a single track. The album’s operation is always the same, take a standard and move it towards a Latin or a New Orleans rhythm, and there’s one case where the operation can’t be performed: “Moon River”, three fifty-nine, turns up here presented as a waltz, and Mancini wrote it in three-four to begin with. The arrangement does nothing and the track comes out as lounge. That’s the risk of building an entire debut out of Great American Songbook standards: when the rhythmic find isn’t there, nothing is left but the song, and the quintet can’t be blamed for that because it hasn’t written any. Nothing on the record tells you what they would write themselves.
Rating: 6.5/10
Text by Aina Torrents