Joel Ross – Gospel Music

1. Wisdom Is Eternal (For Barry Harris) 4:33
2. Trinity (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) 7:20
3. Protoevangelium (The First Gospel) 8:14
4. Hostile 7:23
5. The Shadowlands 5:14
6. Nevertheless 3:23
7. Word for Word 5:00
8. Repentance 6:56
9. The Sacred Place 3:03
10. A Little Love Goes A Long Way 1:25

11 Praise To You, Lord Jesus Christ 3:20

12. Calvary 5:55
13. The Giver 2:58
14. To The Throne (The Mercy Seat) 4:24
15. Be Patient 3:46
16. The New Man 2:25
17. Now & Forevermore 2:57

All Tracks written by Joel Ross except

Praise To You, Lord Jesus Christ (Frank Schoen)

Calvary (Betty King Jackson)

Joel Ross: Vibraphone, Celeste, Mellotron, Glockenspiel, Drums / Josh Johnson: Alto Saxophone Maria Grand: Tenor Saxophone / Jeremy Corren: Piano, Drums / Kanoa Mendenhall: Bass

Guest appearances: Brandee Younger: Harp / Laura Bibbs: Flugelhorn, Vocals

Austin White: Electronics / Ekep Nkwelle: Vocals / Geoff Gallante: Piano

Biblische Motive macht Vibrafonist Joel Ross zum Thema seines fünften Blue-Note-Albums, mit einem erweiterten Set-Up seiner Band Good Vibes, feat. Josh Johnson (Alto-Sax), Maria Grand (Tenor-Sax), Jeremy Corren (Piano), Kanoa Mendenhall (Bass) und Jeremy Dutton (Drums). Die Botschaft von Liebe und Hoffnung vermitteln sie mit spirituellem, groovendem Jazz.

„Gospel Music“ folgt dem großen Bogen der biblischen Geschichte. Jede Komposition trägt das emotionale Gewicht der Schöpfungs-, Sündenfall- und Heilsgeschichte in sich und korrespondiert mit biblischen Texten, die Ross in den Liner Notes seines Albums aufführt. Das Album vereint die Komplexität früherer Alben des Vibraphonisten mit der Direktheit und Zugänglichkeit seiner späteren Werke und kreiert so einen neuen, unverkennbaren „Joel-Ross-Sound“. Es erscheint, nachdem er sich in den letzten Jahren intensiv mit den theologischen und historischen Dimensionen seines Glaubens auseinandergesetzt hat. Indem er einige seiner älteren, unveröffentlichten Kompositionen neu interpretiert und im Lichte neuer Erfahrungen betrachtet, schuf er ein Album, das mehr denn je von seiner Persönlichkeit offenbart. „Dies ist wohl das bisher mutigste Beispiel dafür, wie ich versuche, die biblische Botschaft zu verkünden und gleichzeitig meinen Wurzeln Tribut zu zollen“, erklärt er.

Konzerte:

7. Mai 2026 Berlin Zig Zag Club
8. Mai 2026 Hamburg JazzHall

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In describing the Black music tradition, Pharoah Sanders once remarked to Bernice Johnson Reagon “to me, it’s all spiritual music.” The musical journey from blues to gospel and “jazz” and back is more natural than these categorical separations can ever be. Like the great practitioners of the blues and gospel, Joel Ross is interested in the story, in the way that it can reveal the divine promise that life need not forever be what it has been. His chosen medium is a sextet. His message is love others and sacrifice the self. Service to others is the best way to live love and to be Christlike. Gospel Music is service music. Service is what we call worship. “Playing an instrument is a form of worship, and I’ve been worshipping all my life,” said Dizzy Gillepsie. And like Diz, Ross is committed to worship, represented in and through his music.

In this practice of living, “there must be space for everyone,” Ross explains. “If there’s anything I do talk to the band about, it’s about that, making sure we’re making space for everyone and supporting everyone. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do.” An homage to an array of influences that includes Fred Hammond, Yolanda Adams, Kirk Franklin, and the duo Mary Mary, who declared that it was „the God in me,” Gospel Music points to the historic good news foretold and revealed in scripture, now available to all if we could simply figure out how to move past our destructive tendencies and into renewed, supporting relations with each other. For Ross, “if we treat each other in this way, then this is the best result for humanity.”

His fifth outing as leader for Blue Note, Gospel Music is both a departure and not. Ross wants us to listen for the ways that the band practices what some of our best minds have preached. He wants us to achieve the kind of clarity he has achieved in his sound, where the music remains “technically difficult.” But with the lessons of The Parable of the Poet and nublues in tow, Good Vibes has moved into a place where the complex can be offered more clearly. The complex can offer sound as meditative space for us to reconsider ourselves as we relate to others. And it can relay the story of faith. Ross’s message is reflected in the way he leads a band and creates space for them sonically: “life is what is lived in Christ to benefit others that causes our living to not be in vain.”.

Gospel Music revisits the intricacy of the earlier records and the directness and accessibility of the later, producing a sound that is unmistakably Joel Ross while reintroducing himself and the good news simultaneously. It is released in a moment where he has been deepening his study and exploration into the theological and historical depths of his faith over the last several years. Returning to some of his older unreleased compositions and seeing them in light of new experiences, he has created an album which reveals more of his person. “This is probably the boldest example of trying to share what I believe is the good news as well as in homage to where I’m coming from,” he explains.

This identity is equally grounded in the world of jazz pedagogy as it is in the sounds of the Black church in Chicago. While he gravitated toward the former, Chicago gospel was an inescapable element of the sonic community that shaped him. “I’m coming from the Black church in Chicago, playing gospel music,” Ross reminds us. At home, Ross’s father, a teacher and counselor in the church, repeated to him every time a James Cleveland composition played, “Now, that’s your cousin.” That familial and familiar invocation was on display during a recent Jazz Gallery residency, where while openly improvising on the Hammond B3 alongside a coterie of friends, Ross would find himself “playing worship or reverent music” in those unplanned moments where something akin to spirit took over. Similarly, the task on Gospel Music was to trouble the distinction between written and spontaneous composition (improvisation): “I want the lines to be blurred.”

In troubling those waters, Gospel Music adds another saxophone voice to the crew of Good Vibes in the form of Josh Johnson on alto. The two-saxophone format—with Johnson joining Parables veteran and tenor saxophonist Maria Grand—allowed Ross to “float over here and do this thing, maybe play some of the bassline, or maybe color with some chords. They hold down the melody which allows me to be free.” Rounding out the ensemble are mainstays Jeremy Corren on piano, Kanoa Mendenhall on bass, and Jeremy Dutton on drums, a group whose chemistry subtends Ross’s freedom to explore, but to also be buoyed in that exploration. “I’m constantly making music with the same people over and over again,” he explains. “I naturally gravitate towards a feeling of familiarity, feeling like a family.”

Ross describes his worldview as a “Christ-centered love of others.” This is the message in the making of the music even when it is not explicitly detailed. Gospel Music follows the arc of the grand biblical story. Each composition carries the emotional weight of the story of creation, the fall, and salvation, corresponding to biblical texts that Ross includes in the liner notes. At the center of it is the desire that we meditate on the meaning of the ultimate sacrifice that defines a faith in Christ that calls on its practitioners to love God and others. Playing in this band mirrors that very attitude.

The newfound conceptual clarity accentuates the first half of the proceedings before a break of sorts occurs with the tune, “A Little Love Goes a Long Way,” which was used to close sets in the live shows. Here it serves as an opening to the only compositions that Ross did not pen. “Praise To You, Lord Jesus Christ” arrives first. It is a gospel acclamation deployed during Lent that features and was introduced to him by his wife, trumpeter Laura Bibbs on vocals. That tune opens the way for “Calvary,” a traditional spiritual, performed with Ekep Nkwelle, one of the music’s freshest voices. With this sequence, Ross takes us to the moment and act that is foundational to the faith: the execution and resurrection of Jesus.

From here, “The Giver” explores what it means to give oneself over to a purpose with lyrics drawn from the James Baldwin poem “The Giver (for Berdis)” sung by Andy Louis. Giving becomes another premise through which the album works and through which the band works together to produce this sound. In putting together this variation of Good Vibes and recording this music, Ross was convicted. “What’s our purpose here?” he asked. “This isn’t just your traditional, we gonna play our heads and take our solos. No, what are we doing? What is the purpose of this song, this piece? What are we doing together? How are we supporting whatever this piece calls for?” The album closes with a disquisition on the newness made possible by faith, but that newness is a return to the eternal with which the album began.

Ross follows Sanders, Reagon, Baldwin, and so many others who might have all agreed that the point of it all was to live the lives we sing about in our songs. Gospel Music is about that life and it is calling us into these more sound practices of and for living.

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